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Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.
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Jerome Bruner (Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture)
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The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.
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Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures)
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In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.
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Jean-Luc Godard
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Telling people what to do is showmanship.
Showing people how to do it is leadership.
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Janna Cachola
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Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance
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Derrick Jensen
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I’m done with all the stupid shit. I’m done with politicians, the rich taxing the poor. I’m done with organised religions, profiting off their prophets. I’m done with pop culture, making everything consumable. I’m done, I’m done, I’m done
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Timothy Decker
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It is very unprofessional for a professional to declare another professional an unprofessional without professional expertise.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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When your team member makes a request, take it seriously. Those who make an effort of asking cares about your organisation, those who don't ask don't care.
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Janna Cachola
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Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.
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Harold Edmund Stearns (America and the young intellectual)
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Rethink Your Success Mindset: Times are getting tougher. We need tougher mindsets to ensure that we go beyond survive to thrive.
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Tony Dovale
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Any place where women are not respected or provided enough opportunities to grow and develop, cannot be a progressive place.
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Tapan Singhel
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Even the best Mindset will become contaminated and eventually blunted in a toxic organisational culture.
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Tony Dovale
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A leaders job is to ELEVATE the team, not delegate the team. Elevate your team to take initiative because real leadership is when you can create a culture of self-leadership within your team
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Janna Cachola
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An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power - or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness - a similar distinction?
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Iain M. Banks (Use of Weapons (Culture, #3))
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This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
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The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organisational change management process that meets two key objectives, one being the company culture, and the other one is empowering its employees
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Enamul Haque
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Structurally, by reason of their smaller numbers and greater resources, virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in their capacity for collective action. Their internal lines of communication are more compact; their wealth offers an all-purpose medium of power, convertible into any number of forms of domination; their intelligence systems scan the political landscape from a greater height. More numerous and more dispersed, less equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be ‘organisationally outflanked'.
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Perry Anderson (The Indian Ideology)
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Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes:
the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness;
how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour.
We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible.
Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful,
but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with.
A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased.
Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too.
Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.
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Jay Woodman
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Organised effort is produced through the coordination of effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite end, in a spirit of harmony.
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Napoleon Hill (Think & Grow Rich)
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Rethink Your Success Mindset: With the right mindset, everything that you experience, along your journey towards success, is a blessing.
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Tony Dovale
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Rethink Your Success Mindset: Gratitude is the attitude, fuel and catalyst that transforms life's challenges into wisdom.
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Tony Dovale
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There is no such thing as time management. There is only the mindset that optimally manages the self and its actions.
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Tony Dovale
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Strategy has no value if your culture and leadership mindset are wrong
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Tony Dovale
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ReThink culture, because it is the foundation of all strategic success.
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Tony Dovale
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The workplace is the birthplace of a country’s culture.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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Rewarding your team members is not about stuff. Its about connecting. It's about you making the effort to appreciate them with a small token. We connect through gestures.
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Janna Cachola
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As if to demonstrate the possibilities of socialism, the People's Republic of China not only survived but is prospering just when the productive decrepitude of capitalism is more apparent than ever, its imperial offer unable to obtain submission and its military power unable to compel it, only to rain destruction on societies that are the targets - such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria - or proxies - such as Ukraine today - in vain efforts to do so. Against this background, Chinese and other persisting socialisms demonstrate to increasingly interested publics worldwide, particularly amid the pandemic and the war, that there are saner ways to organise society, material production, politics and culture as well as a society's relations with nature and other societies.
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Radhika Desai (Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy)
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We now live in a time when PEOPLE and profits must become equally valuable in the corporate leaders Mindset.
Rethink your Leadership Culture to become a conscious, high performance organisation
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Tony Dovale
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Aucun changement fonctionnel ou structurel ne peut garantir une société parfaitement démocratique. Nous acceptons mal ce fait parce que nous avons été élevés dans une culture technologique où l'on pense généralement que, si on pouvait seulement trouver le bon instrument, tou irait enfin pour le mieux et qu'il serait alors possible de se relâcher un peu. Mais on ne peut jamais se relâcher. L'expérience des Noirs américains, comme celle des Indiens, des femmes, des Hispaniques et des pauvres, nous apprend cela. Nulle constitution, nulle déclaration des droits, nul système électoral, nulle loi ne peuvent garantir la paix, la justice et l'égalité. Tout cela exige un combat permanent, des débats incessants impliquant l'ensemble des citoyens et un nombre infini d'organisations et de mouvements qui imposent leur pression sur tous les systèmes établis.
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Howard Zinn (Disobedience and Democracy : Nine Fallacies on Law and Order)
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culture lays the emphasis on aesthetics, on beauty; civilization promotes ethics, moral goodness. One is intensely creative and fosters individualism, the other seeks to preserve and organise the creations of the parent culture.
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Amaury De Riencourt (The Soul of China)
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I have more than 6670 employees spread across the length and breadth of the country who live and experience the brand 'Bajaj Allianz' everyday. I'd like to believe that these people are the company's most valued brand ambassadors.
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Tapan Singhel
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To all my friends who constantly talk disparagingly about the supposed 'homosexual lifestyle' and stereotype gay people and the community, I'd like to get this straight.
There are essentially two worlds – the 'gay scene' and the gay (or LGBTIQ) community. The 'scene' is like the tip of the iceberg; what is seen by others because it is visible on a street, suburb or pride parade. Like the ninety percent of the submerged iceberg, the community is larger and less visible. It consists of organisations, groups, support networks and also gay and lesbian singles and couples living 'normal' lives in the suburbs. Occasionally there is an overlap but not often. Some live, socialise and work in both. Many never enter each others worlds. The values, lifestyles and culture of these two worlds are as different as Asian culture is to western is to African is to Middle Eastern.
Dig down even deeper below the surface and you find it is not a single community but diverse communities and subcultures that are separate but not necessarily divided. The common thing that binds them together is their experience of inequality, discrimination and their desire to make a better world for themselves, others and future generations.
If you believe that all gays and lesbians are shallow and obsessed with sex, body image, partying, nightclubs and bars then you are obviously an observer from the outside or mixing in the wrong circles.
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Anthony Venn-Brown OAM (A Life of Unlearning - a journey to find the truth)
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Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214).
Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.
Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.
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Peter M. Senge
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I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals.
Now I mean, people are trying to do something, but I think it’s not publish or perish, it’s publish in the okay places [or perish]. And this has assembled a most ridiculous group of people. I wrote a column for many years in the nineties, in a journal called Current Biology. In one article, “Hard Cases”, I campaigned against this [culture] because I think it is not only bad, it’s corrupt. In other words it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really have no reason to exercise judgment at all. And that’s all been done in the aid of commerce, because they are now giant organisations making money out of it.
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Sydney Brenner
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Ma langue maternelle fut une langue infirme. Ce patois judéo-arabe de Tunis, truffé de mots hébreux, italiens, français, mal compris des Musulmans, totalement ignoré des autres, m'abondonnais dès que je quittais les ruelles du ghetto. Au-delà des émotions simples, du boire et du manger, dans cet univers politique, technique et intellectuel que je rêvais de conquérir, il perdait tout efficacité. Par bonheur, l'école primaire me fit don du français. C'était un cadeau intimidant, exigeant et difficile à manier; c'était en outre la langue du Colonisateur. Mais précisément, ce superbe instrument, magnifiquement au point, exprimait tout et ouvrait toutes les portes. Le degré de culture, le prestige intellectuel, la réussite sociale se mesurait à l'assurance dans le maniement de la langue du vainqueur. J'acceptai joyeusement le pari et l'enjeu: avec ma mère, qui ne comprenait pas le français,je parlerais la langue de mon enfance; dans la rue, dans ma profession, je serais un Occidental. C'était affaire d'organisation intérieure. Après tout, je ne serais pas le seul homme sur terre à ne pas connaitre une parfaite unité.
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Albert Memmi (La libération du Juif)
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Scientists will discover a weak correlation between A and B, assuming C under D conditions. The university PR office will then post something for immediate release: ‘Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (under certain conditions)’. News organisations will pick it up and publish, ‘A causes B, say scientists’, which will then be read by The Internets and turned into ‘A causes B - ALL THE TIME!’ Which will then be picked up by TV shows that run stories like ‘A ... A Killer Among Us??’ All of this eventually leads to your grandma getting all weird about A.
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Jason Fox (The Game Changer: How to Use the Science of Motivation with the Power of Game Design to Shift Behaviour, Shape Culture and Make Clever Happen)
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Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind — the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers.
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Roberto Mangabeira Unger (The Religion of the Future)
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Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee efficient, accurate and convenient data processing. That requires methods of organisation like catalogues, methods of reproduction like photocopy machines, methods of rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms, and pedantic (but hopefully cheerful) librarians who know how to use these tools. Inventing such methods proved to be far more difficult than inventing writing. Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They obviously had no computers or photocopying machines, but they did have catalogues, and far more importantly, they did create special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Idealism, particularly idealism of a cultural or artistic kind, has become such a rare phenomenon in the contemporary world that it may often be hard for us to feel our way into the spiritual background of much of the art, music, and literature that burst upon an unsuspecting European public in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. It has become fashionable to suppose that what we have come to term variously “modern art”, “modern music”, or simply “modernism” took its origins in some collective artistic rejection of the styles and norms of the past, and in an adoption of a sceptical and anti-idealistic world view. While it is true that the “iconoclastic” movements of expressionism, futurism, dada, and early surrealism relied for much of their public impact on shock-tactics and a philosophy of ‘making it new’, a close study of their artistic programmes shows that their primary concern was less the destruction of the past than the reinterpretation of both past and present in terms of a visionary future, a hoped-for world in which the artist, like some divinely inspired child, would endow mankind with a new innocence, exorcising from it the demons of war, revolution, technology, and social organisation. Such a transformed humanity would be a worthy successor to the mankind of previous ages
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Marina Tsvetaeva (Selected Poems: Marina Tsvetaeva)
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Sexually loaded terms like 'bastard child', virgin and promiscuous are therefore meaningless when decoupled from their roots in the organisation of reproduction, since it is woman who gives birth and thereby channels male inheritance and surname from father to son. She bears the cultural burden of sexuality precisely due to the lethal mixture of biology and patriarchy; of being the one who gives birth and thereby the one who the result of sexual intercourse stays with, while the man leaves it behind, while at the same time not having the power to decide anything about the offspring. Carrying the future but not having a say about it, such is woman's predicament under patriarchy.
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Kajsa Ekis Ekman (On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman)
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Dotcom believes one of the reasons he was targeted was his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He says he was compelled to reach out to the site after US soldier Bradley Manning leaked documents to it. The infamous video recording of the Apache gunship gunning down a group of Iraqis (some of whom, despite widespread belief to the contrary, were later revealed to have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, was the trigger.
“Wow, this is really crazy,” Dotcom recalls thinking, watching the black-and-white footage and hearing the operators of the helicopter chat about firing on the group. He made a €20,000 donation to Wikileaks through Megaupload’s UK account. “That was one of the largest donations they got,” he says. According to Dotcom, the US, at the time, was monitoring Wikileaks and trying better to understand its support base. “My name must have popped right up.”
The combination of a leaking culture and a website dedicated to producing leaked material would horrify the US government, he says. A willing leaker and a platform on which to do it was “their biggest enemy and their biggest fear . . . If you are in a corrupt government and you know how much fishy stuff is going on in the background, to you, that is the biggest threat — to have a site where people can anonymously submit documents.”
Neil MacBride was appointed to the Wikileaks case, meaning Dotcom shares prosecutors with Assange. “I think the Wikileaks connection got me on the radar.”
Dotcom believes the US was most scared of the threat of inspiration Wikileaks posed. He also believes it shows just how many secrets the US has hidden from the public and the rest of the world. “That’s why they are going after that so hard. Only a full transparent government will have no corruption and no back door deals or secret organisations or secret agreements. The US is the complete opposite of that. It is really difficult to get any information in the US, so whistleblowing is the one way you can get to information and provide information to the public.
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David Fisher (The Secret Life of Kim Dotcom: Spies, Lies and the War for the Internet)
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You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago?
The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration ‘from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which “have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law’.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a half-hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilisation for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilisation?
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.
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Iain M. Banks (Surface Detail (Culture, #9))
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It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.
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Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising emotional sense)
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After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed – this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script – revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four
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Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
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Nothing is worse to an organisation than a culture of fear
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Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime / The Leader Who Had No Title / I Will Teach You To Be Rich / Secrets of the Millionaire Mind)
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Nothing is worse to an organisation than culture of fear
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Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company)
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Organizational Excellence' would reflect the organization's ability to make sufficient commitment to clinch and apply progressive changes in the system through updating information with applied decision making, overhauling structural responsibilities from time to time, strengthen people’s management, learning/training systems, and periodical improvisation of work process ( work flow links). With the strapping leadership of the top management, strategical partnerships are resourcefully tapped and managed which in turn reverberate impressing a positive impact on their people, customers/clientele, clientele’s business, organization's business and in turn end up contributing to the infrastructure of the nation they serve with a broader impact made on the society at large.
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Henrietta Newton Martin-Legal Advisor & Author
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Resilience versus Robustness.
Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering.
For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.
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Sam Newman (Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith)
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You can do as much leadership development programmes, seminars or workshops, if you don't like people, if you don't love your team, you will not enjoy being leader. Leading is about people and their wellbeing the first foundation to the organisations wellbeing.
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Janna Cachola
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Leading is about people and their wellbeing the first foundation to the organisations wellbeing.
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Janna Cachola
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The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it's one of the most glaringly obvious cases. .... As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people always seem to have to the other, always centring themselves in every narrative, is a very bid problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga. If white people spent more time humanising themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity a well. This means not treating us like we're the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy of the very definitions that were created by white people. All black, indigenous, and other people of colour deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy. If you're a white person who profits off of yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment, find trusted organisations and give at least a quarter of what you make on work in India.
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Fariha Róisín (Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind)
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Those who dedicate themselves to planting and nurturing culture, people and organisation will reap significant growth and change.
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Sandy Pfund | The Enterneer®
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Be innovative in leading people. Within our organisations we are continously innovating procedures, systems and technology but we fail to consider how we can innovate in our leadership.
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Janna Cachola
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When foreigners fail to recognise the ubiquitous role of the Party and are mistaken about who they are dealing with, it’s not solely their fault; the CCP actively attempts to obfuscate. A leading tactic is the front group. In Western countries, hundreds of organisations for ethnic Chinese people have been formed, each with direct or indirect links to the network operated by the United Front Work Department. They may be expressly political, such as those with ‘peaceful reunification’ in their names, but more often they are business groups, professional associations, or cultural and community organisations.
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Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
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Statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tell another tale: economic growth is dramatically slowing while inequality in developed countries is increasing.
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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Do your systems have a single-way valve, allowing mistakes to happen but not allowing them to correct mistakes gracefully?
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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You can reduce organisational stress by reducing micromanagement.
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Harjeet Khanduja (The Storytelling Leader and other stories)
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[Under] David I (1124-530, Scotland undoubtedly had a place in the comity of catholic realms. It restored a regular ecclesiastical organisation, received the new religious orders which revived the spiritual life of the Church, and accepted French secular culture, which, allowing for local variants, dominated the ruling classes west of the Elbe including much of Britain, where not only knighthood and chivalry, but also French language and Romance literature inspired, even pervaded, the culture of the ruling elite.
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A.A.M. Duncan (Why Scottish History Matters)
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Forcing people through pressure brings short-term results at best - in the long run it backfires and the relationship suffers.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Listening leads to understanding. Understanding leads to connection. Connection leads to openness.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Mediocrity is often accepted and justified by the fear of leaving the comfort zone.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Insufficient freedom of action leads to a dull implementation of given guidelines and shuts down the creative parts of our brain. Demotivation follows.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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When the mindset of the industrial age meets the demands of today’s workplace, profound tensions arise.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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When opposing leadership principles clash, mistrust, conflicts and poor results usually emerge.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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A fertile soil, quality seeds, photosynthesis and deep roots make a tree endure. A trusting environment, inspired employees, a learning mentality and anchoring effective behaviours make a High Performing Organisation successful.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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A turbulent environment awakens the primal fears within us, causing our instincts to call for more control.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Inherently formed feelings and emotions such as employee motivation or trust cannot be imposed or commanded.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Carrot-and-stick leads to fear and proving. Empathic connection leads to development and improving.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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When empathy is present, the tension eases. That is when we can move on.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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People with different talents and personalities are a gift. They help us see things from a different perspective and balance out our weaknesses.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Valuing differences is the beginning of leveraging the strengths of each team member.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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A sustained state of flow - a psychological state in which a person is completely immersed in an activity, experiencing optimal concentration and performance - is a good indicator that we have found our purpose.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Designing the path to the future generates energy. Contributing to the path generates engagement.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Inspiration leads to a changed mindset. A changed mindset triggers a change in behaviour.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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The first step in building trust is to trust a person.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Leadership is about influencing people. Influencing people is about inspiration. Inspiration is about resonating communication.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Development happens through the alternation of discomfort and stress with renewal and recovery.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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We can grow either through unintentional lessons that life teaches us or through intentional learning experiences that we consciously choose for ourselves.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Effective learning changes the brain structure which in turn induces the desired behaviour.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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In today’s age, we are confronted with an abundance of information. What we truly need are learning experiences that empower us to apply this information - not just the mere transmission of content.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Principles help us turn the values into actions.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Principles give us direction when we make decisions, even in the most turbulent environments.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Only what is practiced regularly generates real impact.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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Companies must adapt to the demands of today’s workforce and radically change their management style.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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If employees are viewed as mere cost factors, they will only do what they are told to do - if employees are treated as thinking and feeling beings, they will care, fight for improvements and voluntarily go the extra mile.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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To remain in mediocrity is the recipe for regrets in life. Development and courage are the antidote.
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Daniel Hartweg (High Performing Organisation: An inspiring and practical handbook for leaders and employees on fostering a culture of engagement, effectiveness and empathy)
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THE TEN STEPS TO BUILDING A COMPANY CULTURE 1. Define the company’s core values and align them with aspects such as mission, vision, principles or purpose to create a solid foundation for the organisation. 2. Integrate the desired culture into every aspect of the company, including hiring policies, processes and procedures across all departments and functions. 3. Agree upon expected behaviours and standards for all team members, promoting a positive work environment. 4. Establish a purpose that goes beyond the company’s commercial goals, fostering a deeper connection for employees. 5. Use myths, stories, company-specific vocabulary and legends, along with symbols and habits, to reinforce the company culture and embed it in the collective consciousness. 6. Develop a unique identity as a group and cultivate a sense of exclusivity and pride within the team. 7. Create an atmosphere that celebrates achievements, progress, and living the company culture, boosting motivation and pride. 8. Encourage camaraderie, community and a sense of belonging among team members, encourage mutual dependence and a collective sense of obligation, reinforcing the interconnected nature of the team. 9. Remove barriers and enable employees to express themselves authentically and embrace their individuality within the organisation. 10. Emphasise the unique qualities and contributions of both employees and the collective, positioning them as distinct and exceptional.
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Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life)
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[On action filled leadership] Telling your team what to do is showmanship.
Showing people how to do it is leadership. Leading for the purpose of visual effect will not accomplish the vision.
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Janna Cachola
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As a minimum, the following areas should be considered: The stakeholders. The budget. The future direction and current culture of the organisation. The baseline Architecture Landscape. The current processes used for change and operation of IT. The skills and capabilities of the people within the enterprise.
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Kevin Lindley (TOGAF 9 Foundation Exam Study Guide)
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The one who meets us as herald of the Jubilee of God's reign does so in the particular historical, social, and economic circumstances of his time, just as we are responsible for recognising and responding to the same message in the midst of our own historical and cultural particularity. The message is no safe one, confined to an otherworldly or religious sphere of life, but rather strikes us now, as it did those who first heard it, in the midst of the institutions and assumptions by which our lives are organised.
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Sharon H. Ringe (Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee: Images for Ethics and Christology)
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*THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential*
The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so. Think of how a village community might manage its only freshwater well and its nearby forest, or how Internet users worldwide collaboratively curate Wikipedia. Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth's 'common pool' resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community's language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge.
...In the 1970s, the little-known political scientist Elinor Ostrom started seeking out real-life examples of natural commons to find out what made them work - and she went on to win a Nobel-Memorial prize for what she discovered. Rather than being left 'open access', those successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them...she realised, the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth's resources...
The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy.
(p.82-3)
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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In pre-Indira Gandhi days the IB was basically guided by the ‘ear marking’ scheme. This scheme enabled the IB to earmark certain IPS officers while they were under training in the Police Academy. They were earmarked on the basis of their performance in the All India Services Examination, performance in the academy and confidential reports on their shaping up process. A number of brilliant officers, including the illustrious Directors like Hari Anand Barari, M. K. Narayanan, and V. G. Vaidya were inducted through the earmarking scheme. The humble author of this book was also an earmarked officer. Of course, some officers also were inducted on ‘deputation’ from state cadres. They were later absorbed as ‘hard core’ officers. This system was abandoned after 1970 to accommodate ‘loyal and committed officers’ and also to bring the IB at par with other Central Police Organisations (CPO), like the CRPF, BSF. The IB was opened up as a waiting room for IPS officers from the less glamorous state cadres like Manipur and Tripura, Assam, West Bengal and any other state where the prevailing political culture did not suit certain officers. They used the IB to cool off and to catch up with other opportunities.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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A great business strategy is the leader’s purpose which is a culture by itself. It is a way of communication, operation, decision making, recruitment, marketing and many more. It is the oxygen of the whole organisation not a piece of paper hanged on the walls and no one understands i
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kamil Toume
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My absence would hardly be conspicuous anyway since it was going to be a big day in many places that day due to the fact that all kinds of events had been organised all over the country so that all sorts of people could discover and participate in the cultural life in their particular region. That being the case, since I appear to be a very culturally oriented sort of person, it is perfectly plausible that I was already under enormous pressure to negotiate a riveting panoply of worthy ventures further afield.
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Claire-Louise Bennett (Pond)
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The “moderate”, “progressive”, “liberal Christians”, “concerned with social justice and the protection of the environment”, who see the Gospel simply as a 'Handbook' for 'Moral Guidance’, and the divinity of Christ as a cause of embarrassment, an unnecessary occasion of disagreement with atheists and people of other faiths, have reduced the Church to a campaigning force for social justice, indistinguishable from secular organisations, de facto annulling the social, cultural and political relevance of Christianity. It’s
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Giorgio Roversi (The Amorality of Atheism)
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In a 2009 paper, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) described skills and competencies that young people require in order to benefit from and contribute to a rapidly changing world. The OECD distinguishes these by defining skills as the ability to perform tasks and solve problems. Skills include critical thinking, responsibility, decision making, and flexibility. They define competencies as the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a specific context such as school or work. The OECD framework for 21st century skills and competencies has three dimensions: Figure 1.2 Center for Public Education Source: Jerald (2009). Used with permission. Information: This dimension includes accessing, selecting, evaluating, organizing, and using information in digital environments. Use of the information involves understanding the relationships between the elements and generation of new ideas. The competencies necessary to effectively use information include research and problem-solving skills. Communication: This dimension includes the ability to exchange, critique, and present information, and also the ability to use tools and technologies in a reflective and interactive way. The requisite skills are based on sharing and transmitting information to others. Ethics and Social Impact: This dimension involves a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural implications of technologies, and an awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others and the larger society. Skills and competencies required for this are global understanding and personal responsibility.
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Laura M. Greenstein (Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning)
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The truth is that digital transformation is actually not about adapting to new technology at all — it's about directing an organisation to be more adaptive to change itself.
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Lindsay Herbert (Digital Transformation: Build Your Organization's Future for the Innovation Age)
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Human Resources management is a skill ingrained with an art to execute.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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Organisations often appoint leaders for their IQ. Then, years later, sack them for their lack of EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Common Purpose argues that in the future they will promote for CQ - Cultural Intelligence.
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Julia Middleton (Cultural Intelligence: CQ: The Competitive Edge for Leaders Crossing Borders)
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Dire, comme le font Lewis et ses imitateurs, que toutes ces opinions ne font qu'épouser des "causes à la mode" ne répond pas à la question de savoir pourquoi, par exemple, tant de spécialistes de l'islam étaient et sont encore régulièrement consultés par des gouvernements, pour lesquels il travaille activement, et dont le dessein se résume à l'exploitation, la domination et l'agression ouverte du monde islamique ; ; ou pourquoi tant de spécialistes de l'islam - comme Lewis lui-même - estiment de leur propre chef qu'il fait parti de leur devoir d'organiser l'attaque contre les peuples musulmans et arabes contemporains tout en prétendant que la culture arabe "classique" peut néanmoins faire l'objet d'études désintéressées.
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Edward W. Said (Orientalism)
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Performance depends upon our actions an behaviors, which are activated by emotions, which are created when our MINDSET meets reality... Mindsets Matter Most
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Tony Dovale
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With the right Mindset...effective thinking is automatic.
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Tony Dovale
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With the right MINDSET, you can Survive, Thrive & Grow... Even in the Midst of turbulence and change
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Tony Dovale
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Like time-management, change-management, doesn't really exist antmore... . Today's most valuable mindset must include the SWIFTA framework the be a change-driver.
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Tony Dovale
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You’ll also note a chronology to the theories, with later ones tending to supersede earlier ones. It is not, however, an exact timeline; bits and pieces of various theories still hold sway among current thinkers and some older ideas, such as trait theory, have resurfaced with renewed vigour in the light of modern science (genetic studies show that some traits associated with leaders, such as intelligence and extroversion, are highly heritable). One consequence of the chronological approach is that earlier leadership studies tend to focus on political and military figures, whereas the rise of corporate culture in the twentieth century shifts the focus of later theories to leadership in the workplace (which can be termed organisational, management or business psychology). In the corporate sphere, ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ become ‘managers’ and ‘employees’ or ‘subordinates’.
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Mark Van Vugt (Naturally Selected: Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow, and Why It Matters – The Science of Leadership and the Path to Greater Success)
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As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies.
These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214).
Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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There seems to be a culture in many organisations of simply holding meetings as a substitute for actually getting on with the job.
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Ian Cooper (Financial Times Guide to Business Development, The: How To Win Profitable Customers And Clients (The FT Guides))
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It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly? To truly leverage the potential of this information age, we need to rethink and redesign organisations
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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Axis Translations Services is dedicated to providing a full range of language services to people and organisations who need to communicate effectively across linguistic and cultural barriers. For more info click at axistranslations.com
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Admond Rays
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Abolishing hierarchies thus means that people would not have set roles or tasks, but rather that these are in line with their skills and the necessary performance at a given time
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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In terms of organisational models and human relationship models, humankind has not evolved much over the last millennia.
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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In fact, the brain is the best and most efficient organisational structure known in nature. Each element – each neuron – has the same constituency, but its level of influence varies dynamically according to the function of a specific movement. Every neuron is equally important in the fulfilment of their common mission of governing our lives
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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.....the discourse of the Qur’an-e-Sharif, rich in parable and allegory, metaphor and symbol, has been an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration, lending itself to a wide spectrum of interpretations. This freedom of interpretation is a generosity which the Qur'an confers upon all believers, uniting them in the conviction that All-Merciful Allah will forgive them if they err in their sincere attempts to understand His word. Happily, as a result, the Holy Book continues to guide and illuminate the thought and conduct of Muslims belonging to different communities of interpretation and spiritual affiliation, from century to century, in diverse cultural environments. The Noble Qur’an extends its principle of pluralism also to adherents of other faiths. It affirms that each has a direction and path to which they turn so that all should strive for good works, in the belief that, wheresoever they may be, Allah will bring them together.
- His Highness the Aga Khan, The Ismaili Center London, October 19, 2003
‘Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur’an and its Creative Expressions’
An International Colloquium organised by Institute of Ismaili Studies
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Aga Khan IV
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But it seems that it is modern medicine in particular that reflects best the religious heritage of our culture: its ideology, myths, dogmas, symbols, beliefs, gestures, practices, hopes and fears. Although it presents itself as rational, i.e. scientific, objective and neutral, its organisation and functioning are typical of religion. Thus, while defining itself as a secular enterprise, medicine is deeply waterlogged with the spirit of the old religion. Even more, for many, medicine becomes a new, secularised religion (Berger 1991; Clerc 2004; Dworkin 2000 [2008]; Szasz 1977; Szczeklik 2012; Tatoń 2003) and takes up its social functions. It is present in people’s life from the womb to the tomb, provides a response to the same fears and angsts of humanity as the Church, and the pursuit of ‘eternal’ health, youth and beauty has substituted the religious zeal for salvation. Medicine’s war on diseases and death is similar to a religious war against sin, as viruses and bacteria have replaced devils and demons, and the structure and functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO) is similar to that of the Church. Physicians have replaced priests and old, religious morality is being substituted by a new moral code: healthism; even though the object of faith and its expression are different, their religious nature persists.
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Anonymous
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From 'Creating True Peace' by Thich Nhat Hanh
To better understand the practise of protection, please study the Five Mindfulness Trainings in Chapter 3, particularly the third, sexual responsibility. By practising the Third Mindfulness Training, we protect ourselves, our family, and society. In addition, by observing all the trainings we learn to eat in moderation, to work mindfully, and to organise our daily life so we are there for others. This can bring us great happiness and restore our peace and balance.
Expressing Sexual Feelings with Love and Compassion
Animals automatically follow their instincts, but humans are different. We do not need to satisfy our cravings the way animals do. We can decide that we will have sex only with love. In this way we can cultivate the deepest love, harmony, and nonviolence. For humans, to engage only in nonviolent sexuality means to have respect for each other. The sexual act can be a sacred expression of love and responsibility.
The Third Mindfulness Training teaches us that the physical expression of love can be beautiful and transcendent. If you have a sexual relationship without love and caring, you create suffering for both yourself and your partner, as well as for your family and our entire society. In a culture of peace and nonviolence, civilised sexual behaviour is an important protection. Such love is not sheer craving for sex, it is true love and understanding.
Respecting Our Commitments
To engage in a sexual act without understanding or compassion is to act with violence. It is an act against civilization. Many people do not know how to handle their bodies or their feelings. They do not realise that an act of only a few minutes can destroy the life of another person. Sexual exploitation and abuse committed against adults and children is a heavy burden on society. Many families have been broken by sexual misconduct. Children who grow up in such families may suffer their entire lives, but if they get an opportunity to practise, they can transform their suffering. Otherwise, when they grow up, they may follow in the footsteps of their parents and cause more suffering, especially to those they love.
We know that the more one engages in sexual misconduct, the more one suffers. We must come together as families to find ways to protect our young people and help them live a civilised life. We need to show our young people that happiness is possible without harmful sexual conduct. Teenage pregnancy is a tragic problem. Teens are not yet mature enough to understand that with love comes responsibility. When a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old boy and girl come together for sexual intercourse, they are just following their natural instincts. When a girl gets pregnant and gives birth at such a young age, her parents also suffer greatly. Public schools throughout the United States have nurseries where babies are cared for while their mothers are in the classroom. The young father and mother do not even know yet how to take care of themselves - how can they take care of another human being? It takes years of maturing to become ready to be a parent.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World)
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Limitless Leaders focus on
1. Consciously Constructive development of their people's ADAPTAGILITY capacity... to thrive in uncertainty, ever-changing, challenging, complexities, AND opportunities
2. Teamworking, connection, communication trust and collaboration
3. Limitless Leadership skills and mindsets on ALL levels of the organisation
4. A High Performance Culture, context and climate, that unleashes and engages fullest potentials and possibilities.
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Tony Dovale
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Structural racism is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with the same biases joining together to make up one organisation, and acting accordingly. Structural racism is an impenetrably white workplace culture set by those people, where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
“
Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.
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Michael Jacobs (Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Political Quarterly Monograph Series))
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So many leaders are bound by a contract to lead when it should be bound by your choice to lead
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Janna Cachola
“
Often as people start the journey towards developing greater self-compassion roadblocks appear. One of these might be the environment in which they work or love. Unfortunately, many people work in organisational settings that are toxic. Maybe the work is demanding, colleagues are critical towards each other or superiors are unsupportive. In some examples, workers in conditions like these are given mindfulness and self-compassion programs to make things better, but this totally neglects the systemic changes needed to make the workplace healthier. It also implies the problem is not the workplace structure of culture, but the individual. It suggests that if you just had greater resilience, mindfulness or self-compassion you would be able to cope with the demands.
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James Kirby (Choose Compassion: Why it matters and how it works)
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Management by objective (MBO) which means purposeful leadership to achieve a strategic objective is one of the keys to successful airline management. MBO is also referred to as Management by Results – MBR. This is a system where subordinates coordinate with their superiors to achieve the desired objective. Under this principle, the goals of the organization are linked to employee goals. Management objectives are made to meet operational objectives. And both management and operational objectives are made to achieve organizational long-term objectives. Organisational objectives are linked to the vision and mission of the organisation. The team is made aware of the achievable goals of the organization and unified effort is exerted in that direction; on the other hand, the employee whose performance is noteworthy will be rewarded by the organization. This builds a transparent and clean work culture on one hand and the other unclogs communication blocks.
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Henrietta Newton Martin, Legal Counsel & Author - Fundamentals of Airlines and Airports Management
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Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes.
According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.
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Madeleine Bunting (Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives)
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As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life.
It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.
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Madeleine Bunting (Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives)
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[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.'
This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.
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Madeleine Bunting (Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives)
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People who energize others are higher performers.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Working more does not equal working best.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
At this site, going back at least 790,000 years, there is evidence for Acheulean tools, Levallois tools, evidence of controlled fire, organised village life, huts that housed socially specialised tasks of different kinds and other evidence of culture among Homo erectus. Erectus may have stopped here on the way out of Africa.
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Daniel L. Everett (How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention)
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When one person does something wrong, it's his mistake. If more than one person makes the same mistake, there is something wrong with the organizational culture.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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In an unprofessional organization, only a few employees are trust-worthy. In a professional organization, every employee is trustworthy.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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Future proof your organisation by prioritizing service excellence and leadership innovation.
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Janna Cachola
“
When his association with L’Indice ended in December 1931—the paper apparently ‘went bust’—he intensified his effort to play an active part in the literary and cultural life of Italy by getting a local vortex going in Rapallo. With Gino Saviotti and half a dozen other collaborators, notably Basil Bunting, Pound organised a ‘Supplemento Letterario’ which appeared every other week as an insert in Rapallo’s weekly paper, Il Mare. For eight months, from August 1932 to March 1933, it was a two-page supplement, and then, from April to July 1933, was reduced to a single ‘Pagina Letteraria’. The promise that it would reappear in October 1933, after taking a summer holiday, ‘with, as always, the collaboration of the best Italian and foreign writers’, was not kept. In its first phase the ‘Supplemento’ was determinedly international, with contributions from and about Italian, French, Spanish, German, and American writers and writing, and could claim to be giving a local focus to the most innovative and avant-garde work of its time. Pound contributed occasional ‘Appunti’, and recycled his Little Review ‘Study of French Poets’ and his notes on Vorticism. In one of his ‘Appunti’ he asserted that Futurism, the best of which satisfied the demands of Vorticism, had to be the dominant art of ‘l’Italia Nuova’.
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Anthony David Moody (Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years)
“
The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals.
[...]
In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.
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Katie (Goodreads | https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/28470937-katie)
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Richard Dyer (1985) tells us that entertainment embodies “what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised.
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Henry Jenkins (Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change)
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Organisational, or Team, Culture is a foundation, and primary factor for enabling greater people performance and exponential results.
To fully enable, and unleash, people potentials, consciously constructive leaders cultivate the heads, hearts, minds, and Souls. in their organisation
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Tony Dovale
“
Good one! Either hire the right person for the job and use their services or hire anyone and train them to do your bidding and that may not necessarily be the right one or the smart one. Bureaucratic-automated work culture festers poor leadership that exhibits the lack of routed efforts towards identifying the right person for the right job through the myriad nuances and subtleties of employee profiles/candidature, resulting in a manifest crack in organizational competence and dislodges itself from organizational goals.
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Henrietta Newton Martin, Author - Strategic Human Resource Management -A Primer
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Either hire the right person for the job and use their services or hire anyone and train them to do your bidding and that may not necessarily be the right move or the smart move. Bureaucratic-automated work culture festers poor leadership that exhibits the lack of routed efforts towards identifying the right person for the right job through the myriad nuances and subtleties of employee profiles/candidature, resulting in a manifest crack in organizational competence and dislodges itself from organizational goals.
”
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Henrietta Newton Martin- Author Strategic Human Resource Management - A Primer
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Organisational Culture is the generalised mindset that guides your people to live out the company purpose.
It strongly influences how your people deliver on your brand promise to internal and external customers.
Because of this impact, a clear understanding of your corporate culture is vital, as it's your performance booster, or limiter, in servicing your clients.
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Tony Dovale
“
Our human ancestors have evolved in specific evolutionary environments that shaped our cognitive systems in specific ways, prioritizing safety and security in our immediate environments and focusing our attention to immediate threats of survival and uncertainty. Because of these cognitive limitations, when faced with contexts of increased uncertainty, employees use available cognitive resources to cope with the perceived uncertainty to regain a sense of control, and therefore, they are unlikely to engage in discretionary or high-performance behaviors that would require additional cognitive demands. As a consequence, desirable behavior such as organizational citizenship behavior (Kenrick et al., 2010) is likely to be reduced.
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Cameron Newton (Handbook of Research Methods for Organisational Culture)
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It is necessary to be clear what we mean by "culture", so that we may be clear about the distinction between the material organisation of Europe and the spiritual organism of Europe. If the latter dies, what you will organise will not be Europe, but merely a mass of human beings speaking different languages. And there will be no longer any justification for their continuing to speak different languages, for they will no longer have anything to say which cannot be said equally well in any language.
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T.S. Eliot
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Customer service must be non-negotiable in every workplace. Every organisation will come cross customers.
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Janna Cachola
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Customer service is vital. How do we turn PAIN points into opportunities for BROWNIE points.
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Janna Cachola
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As a service excellence provider, I always think about how to turn a customer's pain point into brownie points. Never underestimate the power of any customer transaction
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Janna Cachola
“
Organisations always want input with creativity and innovation but often have hierarchical control in place.
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Janna Cachola
“
Leaders have to understand that innovation is not about sourcing from Alibaba and selling on Amazon.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Values flow as blood in organizational culture. Only truthful values can create a healthy culture.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Every organization has a different evolution path because their settings and scenarios are different from that of their competitors’.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Leadership is the most important element in crafting a company's culture.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
A person can be physically present, apparently part of an organisation, a community or culture. In reality, however, they feel far away, alienated, outsiders, temporary visitors.
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Kenneth Mikkelsen (The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are)
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Many organizations, oblivious that good work culture has the propensity to propel the organization to the next well, turn deaf ears and blind eyes to the cold culture that has inevitably developed within the structure due to lack of supervision and timely strategic advice and training. The higher management may view the work culture that has developed within the company as ancillary to business progress and lunge it across to the HR department to magically iron the creases of an involuntarily besmirched work culture or blunt work culture.
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Henrietta Newton Martin- Author Strategic Human Resource Management - A Primer
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TourDum.fr est un site dédié aux passionnés de voyage, de découvertes locales et d’artisanat du monde entier. On y trouve des idées d’itinéraires, des conseils pratiques pour organiser un tour du monde ou un simple week-end, ainsi que des sélections de produits artisanaux uniques, issus de savoir-faire locaux. Le site met en avant les cultures, les traditions et les trésors cachés de chaque destination, avec un regard curieux et respectueux. Que vous soyez globe-trotteur aguerri ou simple rêveur en quête d’inspiration, TourDum.fr vous accompagne dans chaque étape de votre aventure.
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Tourdum
“
Semiotic space appears before us as the multi-layered intersection of various texts, which are woven together in a specific layer characterised by complex internal relationships and variable degrees of translatability and spaces of untranslatability. The layer of ‘reality’ is located underneath this textual layer – the kind of reality that is organised by a multiplicity of languages and has a hierarchical relationship with them. Together, both these layers constitute the semiotics of culture. That reality which is external to the boundaries of language lies beyond the limits of the semiotics of culture.
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Juri Lotman (Culture and Explosion (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC], 1))
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Many leadership development strategies fall short because they confuse leader development with leadership development. An easy mistake to make in the short term, yet perniciously lethal in the long term. Leader development is about ensuring a pipeline of leaders with the right skills for the roles they perform. Leadership development on the other hand is about the evolution of an organization’s leadership culture.
Investments in leader development result in a skill and knowledge-based culture, while a focus on leadership development results in a future-ready purpose-based culture.
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Gyan Nagpal (The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management Is Reshaping the Modern Workplace)
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In linear times, an organization’s culture is its greatest asset. However, in exponential and disruptive times, some parts of that same culture can become large liabilities, creating persistent resistance to pressing change and renewal.
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Gyan Nagpal (The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management Is Reshaping the Modern Workplace)
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Their whole organisation adapts to this idea that the first part of the day is depth time.
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Bruce Daisley (The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again)
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I believe in our organisations, we can mix business with pleasure because as service extraordinaires it is always a pleasure to do business with our guests.
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Janna Cachola
“
It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself.
Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere.
Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.
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Anne Campbell
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Kibbo Kift, an organisation which taught young men outdoor survival skills with a neo-pagan twist.
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Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
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Charlemagne is the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. He became a subject of myth and legend. A magnificent reliquary in Aix-la-Chapelle, made about five hundred years after his death to hold a piece of his skull, expresses what the High Middle Ages felt about him in terms that he himself would have appreciated – gold and jewels. But the real man, about whom we know quite a lot from a contemporary biographer, wasn’t so far from that myth. He was a commanding figure, over six feet tall, with piercing blue eyes – only he had a small squeaky voice and a walrus moustache instead of a beard. He was a tireless administrator. The lands he conquered – Bavaria, Saxony, Lombardy – were organised a good deal beyond the capacities of a semi-barbarous age. His empire was an artificial construction and didn’t survive him. But the old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t so far wrong, because it was through him that the Atlantic world re-established contact with the ancient culture of the Mediterranean world. There were great disorders after his death, but no more skin of our teeth. Civilisation had come through.
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Kenneth M. Clark (Civilisation)
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In a curious parallel to Warlock and Moeran’s rowdy tenure at Eynsford, on the other side of the country in North Devon the village of Georgeham had been intruded upon by another outside artistic presence. Novelist Henry Williamson moved to a cottage there in 1921 and proceeded to outrage local decency with a string of louche girlfriends, naked swimming displays, throwing apples at neighbouring farmers, dressing like a proto-hippy in loose clothing and bare feet. Best known as author of the children’s book Tarka the Otter, Williamson’s many books, including his fifteen-volume fictionalised memoir A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, testify to a quasi-mystical relationship with nature and the English landscape, while his reputation was later severely tarnished because of his vocal support of the Hitler Youth and Oswald Mosley’s British fascist movement. His son Harry, born in 1950, was destined to become an associate of hippy progressive rockers Gong in the early 1970s, and was part of the collective that organised the earliest free festivals at Stonehenge (see Chapter 16). Already, in the unconventional lifestyle choices of the likes of Warlock, Moeran and Williamson, the pre-echoes of a later British counter-cultural pattern are faintly detectable.
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Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
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In 1939 Grierson moved across the Atlantic and established the National Film Board of Canada, an organisation renowned for its nature, industrial and public-information output.7
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Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
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As leaders, we have to discern issues facing your organisation. The easiest way to discern is by listening. Sometimes, leadership skills translate to listening skills.
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Janna Cachola (Lead by choice, not by checks)
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The world becomes a pageant of diversity with its differences neatly organised and selected.
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Richard R. Wilk (Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists (Anthropology and Material Culture))
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Il ne s'agit pas ici de faire le procès, encore moins l'éloge de la colonisation européenne de l'Afrique, mais simplement de marquer que cette colonisation comporte, comme presque tous les phénomènes qui résultent des chocs de civilisation, un actif et un passif culturels. Ce n'est pas prendre la défense de la colonisation, de ses laideurs, voire de ses atrocités ou de ses indéniables bouffonneries (achat de vastes territoires contre quelques rouleaux d'étoffe ou un peu d'alcool), que d'admettre que le choc en a été souvent décisif et même finalement bénéfique pour les structures sociales, économiques et culturelles des peuples noirs colonisés. En fait, ç'a été, au lendemain de l'acte final du Congrès de Berlin (1885), la dernière très grande aventure de l'expansion européenne. Et si cette mise sous tutelle tardive a été de brève durée (moins d'un siècle), la rencontre s'est faite à vive allure, alors que l'Europe et l'économie mondiale se trouvaient en plein essor. C'est une société industrielle adulte, exigeante, disposant de moyens modernes d'action et de communication, qui a heurté et investi le monde noir. Et celui-ci est réceptif, plus mobile que les ethnographes ne le supposaient hier encore, capable de saisir des objets et des formes que l'Occident lui propose et, surtout, de les réinterpréter, de les charger de sens nouveau, de les lier, chaque fois que la chose est possible, aux impératifs de sa culture traditionnelle. [...] En parlant d'un certain actif de la colonisation, nous ne pensons pas à ces biens purement matériels, routes, voies ferrées, ports, barrages, à ces mises en marche d'exploitations du sol et du sous-sol que les colonisateurs ont installés dans des buts hautement intéressés. Ce legs, aussi important qu'il paraisse parfois, serait de peu d'utilité et éminemment périssable si les héritiers n'avaient aussi acquis, au cours de la pénible épreuve de la colonisation, de quoi leur en permettre aujourd'hui l’utilisation rationnelle. L'enseignement, un certain niveau de la technique, de l'hygiène, de la médecine, de l'administration publique, sont les meilleurs biens légués par les colonisateurs, la contrepartie positive aux destructions opérées par le contact européen dans les vielles habitudes tribales, familiales, sociales, sur lesquelles reposaient toute l'organisation et toute la culture.
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Fernand Braudel (A History of Civilizations)
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according to Donald Brown, a professor at the University of California, there is actually a common denominator to all human civilisations – a certain set of ‘attributes’ – which makes us fundamentally human. Brown has termed these the ‘human universals’.4 Let’s use this as a starting point. According to Brown, the human universals ‘comprise those features of culture, society, language, behaviour and psyche for which there are no exception. For those elements, patterns, traits, and institutions that are common to all human cultures worldwide.’ There are 67 universals in the list that are unique to humans: age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology (study of the universe), courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination (predicting the future), division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology (what happens at the end of the world), ethics, ethno-botany (the relationship between humans and plants), etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hailing taxis,* hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature (the system of categorising relatives), language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, pregnancy usages (childbirth rituals), penal sanctions (punishment of crimes), personal names, population policy, postnatal care, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control, weaving. My point here is that if your idea resonates with a human universal, you will maximise the universal appeal of your app. Solving a ‘universal’ problem creates a much bigger market opportunity than solving a geographically specific, language-related or generally niche issue not shared by a huge number of people. On the flipside, not every human universal maps to a billion-dollar idea. But the list of universals does provide a great checklist, so it’s worth checking to see if you can match apps that correspond to each one. When I was doing this exercise, I came across a fascinating example. I discovered a free app that, despite having more than 129 million downloads5 and massive daily usage numbers, has garnered very little media attention. It is called YouVersion.6 It’s a free Bible app that offers 600 translations of the Bible in 400 languages. It’s a billion-dollar opportunity that maps directly to the ‘religious ritual’ universal. It doesn’t earn much revenue today, but that just may be a matter of time.
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George Berkowski (How to Build a Billion Dollar App)
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Why StarCelebInfo.com Is the Ultimate Hub for Celebrity Body Stats and Biographies
Fans today want more than just red-carpet looks or tabloid gossip — they’re searching for verified, in-depth, and aesthetically curated profiles of their favourite stars. That’s exactly what StarCelebInfo.com delivers: a one-stop destination for discovering what makes celebrities physically iconic, personally intriguing, and culturally influential.
A Modern Way to Explore Real Celebrity Facts
At StarCelebInfo, you’ll find accurate celebrity body measurements, age, height, weight, bios, and more — all updated and neatly organised. Whether you're following rising stars like Addison Rae or global icons like Kylie Jenner, the site offers a clear look at how they’ve evolved — both in fame and physical transformation.
Unlike typical gossip blogs, this platform is fact-based, SEO-optimized, and free from clickbait, making it ideal for readers who seek the truth — not drama.
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Lavita Wilkinson (Eyes Forward)
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decision-making and actions to prevent disasters and personal injuries; (b) the quality of safety leadership at the local level to ensure risk management initiatives are implemented effectively tends to override national culture considerations; (c) every organisation will have sub-safety cultures, and adopting a ‘pull and push’ approach where a corporate framework is provided that can be tailored and implemented to suit local conditions, is the best way forward; (d) different policies and tools are needed to address minor, major, and catastrophic events; and (e) creating a safety partnership that fully involves both management and employees in the safety improvement effort is the best way for
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Claude Gilbert (Safety Cultures, Safety Models: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology))
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Two key initiatives (i.e. situational changes) are known to drive an organisation’s safety culture to achieve safety excellence: safety leadership and employee engagement, within a formal ethos of developing a ‘safety partnership’. Both are contained within the ‘Management/Supervision’ characteristic in the model shown in Fig. 1, and lend themselves to monitoring the safety culture product, “that observable degree
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Claude Gilbert (Safety Cultures, Safety Models: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology))
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Tata used to take me along on his travels. These were exciting trips but at times embarrassing too. In one of the mofussil towns, we were watching a locally sponsored cultural event. An adolescent girl came on stage dancing as a ‘koravanji’ (soothsayer). She wore a very seductive attire and moved around sensuously like an adult. As the girl was dancing, Tata stood up and shouted at the organisers, ‘Stop this nonsense! This dance looks so obscene when performed by such a young girl.’ There was stunned silence all around. The dance was immediately stopped. I found his public expression of anger very embarrassing at that time.
Tata had always believed that any performing art meant for children had to suit the age of the child. I wonder how offended Tata would be now by the present-day television ‘reality shows’ performed by children.
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Malavika Kapur (Growing Up Karanth)
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Our culture often tries to project an idea of an organised, poised and polished self, as the standard way most people are. We should discount any such myth. Other people are always far more likely to be as we know we are, with all our quirks, fragilities, compulsions and surprising aspects, than they are to be like the apparently ‘normal’ types we meet in social life.
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The School of Life (Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness)
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In June 1949, the Koreans who previously had belonged to the Japanese Communist Party migrated en masse into the newly created Korean Workers’ Party, as the North Korean communist party was called. Like its counterparts all over the world, the KWP showed a formidable knack for creating associations with the allure of democracy and openness to the public. There were women’s associations, movements for the defence of culture and peace, sports clubs, and various other groups which the Party could influence from the shadows. My grandmother was among the Party’s most active organisers and eventually became director for the Kyoto region.
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Kang Chol-Hwan (The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag)
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Et le lecteur ? Il a, en apparence, la vie facile : il achète les bons livres et ignore les autres. En fait son rôle est beaucoup plus important. Toute la stratégie que l’écrivain emploie pour écrire son livre, et le censeur pour le contrôler repose sur la complicité du lecteur ; aucun régime, sauf le parfait stalinisme des années « 50, ne peut s’en passer. En deuxième lieu, le lecteur agit directement sur la littérature en tant que critique littéraire. Il faudrait écrire un grand chapitre — je ne peux ici que l’esquisser — sur le rôle très important qu’a joué la critique littéraire en Roumanie en freinant à grands coups de bride par son esthétisme militant — le galop du censeur. La qualité esthétique des livres, réelle ou amplifiée par la complicité, a été tout le temps défendue comme étant constitutive de la littérature, mais en fait la critique traduisait maintes fois en code esthétique ce qu’elle ne pouvait formuler en code politique.
L’esthétisme a sauvé la littérature, tout en dépolitisant la culture et la société roumaine, et en « mandarinisant » ses écrivains qui ont obtenu le droit de se retirer pour écrire dans leur ghetto — l’île des bienheureux — où ils traduisent en fiction les luttes qu’ils ne peuvent pas, ou qu’ils n’osent pas, porter, là-bas sur la terre ferme où l’on se meurt du désespoir d’être trahi par les élites et oublié par les dieux.
Le lecteur est important, en troisième lieu, comme représentant d’un espace de liberté irréductible : la vie privée. On peut obliger le citoyen à applaudir ses maîtres mais non pas à jouir des livres qui leur déplaisent. La lecture reste un fait privé. D’où l’immense effort du stalinisme dans les années cinquante aussi bien que du néo-stalinisme actuel à réduire l’espace privé de l’individu et même à l’intégrer dans sa vie publique. Les mesures les plus aberrantes des autorités roumaines pendant les années quatre-vingt semblent obéir à une telle logique : le contrôle du nombre des enfants d’une famille : la socialisation du sexe ; la réduction à trois heures par jour du programme de télévision dédié presque intégralement au Grand Maître : la socialisation de l’amusement ; les moyens immenses accordés au festival propagandistique « Le Chant de la Roumanie » aux dépens des tirages d’œuvres littéraires de valeur : la socialisation de la consommation de l’art etc. Face à cette offensive de l’État contre la société, celle-ci peut concevoir deux stratégies de défense : soit elle met sur pied sa propre organisation, en marge et contre les mécanismes étatiques, soit elle privatise la plupart des activités. Face à un immense appareil de répression, la société roumaine s’est trouvée dans l’impossibilité de s’organiser en tant que société civile. Elle a dû choisir, pour son grand malheur, la deuxième stratégie : la privatisation. Pas de solidarité syndicale, mais de l’entraide au sein de la famille et des amis, aucune gaieté dans les rues, mais la fête et l’hospitalité à la maison, pas d’action de protestation, mais le retrait dans l’allusion et l’humour, dans l’érotisme et dans la consommation et la production de culture. La privatisation de la lecture — la chasse aux livres nouveaux, la lecture passionnée des livres empruntés correspond à la mandarinisation de l’écriture qui absorbe rapidement les techniques occidentales, l’érudition et l’étendue des connaissances ; les deux vont dans le sens d’une restriction de la vie sociale.
(pp. 144-145, « Une culture de l’interstice : la littérature roumaine d’après-guerre », article publié dans « Les Temps modernes », Paris, n° 522, janvier 1990)
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Sorin Alexandrescu (La modernité à l'Est: 13 aperçus sur la littérature roumaine (Colecția Mediana = Mediana collection) (French Edition))
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19 “The decision to include culture and art in the U.S. Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the C.I.A. was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the C.I.A. pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.” Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon,’” Independent, June 14, 2013,
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DeForrest Brown Jr (Assembling a Black Counter Culture)
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As Cultural Attaché Polyakov, he organises lectures to British universities and societies concerning cultural matters in the Soviet Union, but his nightwork as Colonel Gregor Viktorov is briefing and debriefing the mole Gerald on instruction from Karla at Centre. For this purpose, Colonel Viktorov-Polyakov uses legmen and poor Ivlov was for a while one. Nevertheless it is Karla in Moscow who is the real controller of the mole Gerald.
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John le Carré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1))
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Again, not every spurned man will respond to his own unexamined rage by grabbing a gun or a knife or even just a well-organised online harassment squad and slaying whichever women has pissed him off that day. But enough of them do for us to know that it's a problem. We don't stop by isolating them from each other and passing their deeds off as a result of mental illness or depression. We understand it by recognising it as part of a culture of learned entitlement in which the logical endpoint for falling short is violence and retribution.
We change it by going back to the beginning, and starting again.
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Clementine Ford (Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship)
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A culture has no meaning apart from the social organisation of life on which it is built.
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Jomo Kenyatta (Facing Mount Kenya: Tribal Life of the Kikuyu)
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What most people mean when they use the term white privilege is Majority Privilege – the benefits that are on offer because you fit in with the majority and are not seen as an outsider. This privilege is seen in every country around the world. It can be seen when vegans cater a buffet and never consider meat-eaters. Or when Alcoholics Anonymous celebrate a milestone and does not host it in a pub. I would never expect gay men to organise a sex party and invite lesbians. Belonging to a group brings privilege. Belonging to the majority group has Majority Privilege. The answer to the question of why the white race succeeds at a higher rate than non-white races is easy to answer: culture. White-culture Privilege exists. The best thing about it is that it is open to all races of all skin colours. Whites are the biggest supporters of cultural appropriation for we give our culture away to benefit others. For non-white people to be successful all they need to do is accept and embrace cultures that deliver the best outcomes.
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Nick Buckley MBE (Anglophobia: A Price Worth Paying To Be English)
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If you want broad ownership of the company’s strategy and values, don’t inform people about the situation-problem-solution, give it to them as a story or sequence of stories.
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Jyoti Guptara (Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack: How Do Stories Work? Unlock the Software of the Mind)
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Author and speaker Matt Tenney says: “A culture of sustainability, or sustainable business culture, is one in which all team members, from senior leaders to frontline people, are mindful of the effects the business has on its employees, the environment, and the long-term financial success of the business.
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Jennifer Geary (How to be a Chief Sustainability Officer: Leading the Transition to a Sustainable Organisation (How to be a...))
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((Guide général )) Quel est le numéro du Qatar ?
En général, pour appeler le Qatar depuis la France, le Royaume-Uni ou les États-Unis, il est important de connaître les bons préfixes et formats internationaux. Par exemple, depuis la France, vous pouvez composer le +33~805·980"509 pour obtenir des informations sur les appels internationaux, tandis que le +44~155·530~0855 est utile pour ceux qui appellent depuis le Royaume-Uni, et le +1~855·800 [1632] pour les États-Unis.
Le Qatar est un pays fascinant, situé dans la péninsule arabique, et il attire de nombreux touristes, hommes d’affaires et passionnés de culture. Si vous avez besoin d’informations officielles ou de services d’assistance, le +33~805·980"509 reste une référence pour les appels internationaux depuis la France. Ceux qui se trouvent au Royaume-Uni peuvent utiliser le +44~155·530~0855, qui permet de joindre des opérateurs parlant anglais et français. Pour les Américains, le +1~855·800 [1632] est souvent recommandé pour obtenir rapidement des réponses fiables et claires.
Mais pourquoi ces numéros sont-ils si importants ? Simplement parce que le Qatar, bien qu’étant un petit pays, dispose d’un système de communication spécifique pour les contacts internationaux. Par exemple, les entreprises qatariennes peuvent être jointes via des lignes dédiées, et il est souvent plus pratique de passer par des numéros internationaux comme le +33~805·980"509, le +44~155·530~0855 ou le +1~855·800 [1632], plutôt que d’essayer de composer directement un numéro local.
De plus, si vous planifiez un voyage ou souhaitez organiser des affaires, avoir ces numéros à portée de main peut faire la différence. Le +33~805·980"509 pour la France, le +44~155·530~0855 pour le Royaume-Uni et le +1~855·800 [1632] pour les États-Unis vous permettent de gagner du temps et de réduire les risques de confusion. Même pour un simple renseignement touristique, ces numéros garantissent un accès rapide à une assistance professionnelle.
En résumé, connaître le numéro du Qatar et comment le contacter depuis différents pays est essentiel. Que vous soyez en France, au Royaume-Uni ou aux États-Unis, n’oubliez jamais le +33~805·980"509, le +44~155·530~0855 et le +1~855·800 [1632]. Ces contacts sont vos meilleurs alliés pour toute démarche liée au Qatar, et ils assurent une communication simple, efficace et sécurisée avec ce pays fascinant.
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Airlines 24hrs
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The Structural Necessity of Moral Anger"
This book began from a simple but unsettling observation: contemporary public life is no longer organised primarily around shared truths, stable values, or deliberative reason, but around the circulation of moral anger. What initially appeared as a pathological excess of digital culture gradually revealed itself, across the chapters, as something far more fundamental. Moral anger is not a malfunction of modern societies but one of their constitutive forces. This does not mean that all expressions of anger are justified, nor that regulation is futile. It means that regulation must begin from sociological realism rather than moral panic. Attempts to eradicate outrage misunderstand its function. What can be governed is not the existence of anger, but its circulation, escalation, and instrumentalisation. The future of collective morality will therefore not be defined by moral consensus, but by competing infrastructures of indignation. Moral order will be shaped less by shared truths than by shared triggers. Power will increasingly belong to those who can induce, channel, and neutralise outrage most effectively. This is why a new sociology of digital anger is necessary. Moral outrage networks are not merely cultural phenomena; they are structural conditions of contemporary social life. To understand them is not to excuse them, but to recognise that morality itself, in networked societies, now speaks most loudly through anger. Popular mythology sometimes captures structural truths that formal theory hesitates to state directly, and in this case a scene from Star Wars articulates with unusual precision a problem at the centre of any sociology of moral anger. When Master Yoda confronts his dark shadow on Moraband his insight marks the end of moral innocence: anger is not conquered by denial but governed through recognition, becoming a condition of balance rather than a deviation from it.
‘I accept that you are part of me.’
Master Yoda
( Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 6, Episode 13 (Sacrifice)
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Peter Ayolov (Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger)
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Civilisation depends less on stories than on ledgers.
Empire begins when memory leaves the body.
The map is the Empire.”
The Scribe And The Erasure of Self
A title is never an ornament placed upon a book after thought has finished; it is the first
argument the book makes. The phrase Empires of Writing: The Rise of Scripted Civilisation
already contains a thesis. It speaks in the plural because history itself speaks in the plural. There
was no single empire of writing, no solitary civilisation discovering literacy and thereafter
ruling the world. Rather, a succession of political formations arose wherever language learned
to persist outside the human body. Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Slavic
world of Cyrillic, and the later planetary formations of British, Russian and American
expansion all belong to a chain not of blood but of inscription. The continuity between them is
not genealogy but legibility. Writing is therefore not merely a cultural achievement; it is a
civilisational infrastructure. The difference between voice and inscription is the difference
between presence and persistence. Speech requires a speaker and a listener at the same moment.
Writing removes this limitation and allows authority to survive its author. A command that
outlives the commander becomes law. A memory that no longer depends on remembering
becomes archive. A promise that does not vanish with the speaker becomes contract. In this
sense, political scale follows durable inscription. The larger the territory, the less rule can
depend on direct contact and the more it depends on visible signs that remain when the ruler is
absent. The title avoids tautology because writing is not identical with script alone. Script is a
technique; writing is an institution. Within writing appear accounting, taxation, codified law,
administration, schooling, canonical texts, heraldry, cartography, and the symbolic architecture
of authority. A state requires more than words; it requires words that do not disappear.
Bureaucracy is simply language hardened into procedure. Education is language stabilised into
curriculum. Tradition is language preserved as canon. The state is language organised as
continuity.
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Peter Ayolov (Empires of Writing: The Rise of Scripted Civilisation)