Business Skills and Mindfulness

Business schools are beginning to embrace a practise that has grown popular in the corporate world; teaching and studing mindfulness, the originally Budhist approach to increase awareness of oneself and one's surroundings.

For CEO's "It's the smallest things that they do have huge ripple effects. Because their lives are so busy... they miss too many opportunities to make either themselves or their organization different."
- Professor Ben Bryant of IMD (http://www.imd.org/)

Is there a difference between managers and leaders?

Yes:
- Managers are tasks focus
- Leadership is about encouraging people following a vision

The higher you are in your hierarchy the less technical skills (finance IFRS, software development...) you need and the more soft skills you need to learn. Soft skills are conceptual (design, overview...) and human.
Human skills are:
- Personal honesty and integrity
- Building commitment and confidence
- Keen interest in a long term development of others (human capital)
- Work of CEO: Make every other jobs possible
- Capacity to manage their emotions
- Ability to communicate a compelling vision to others

The whole idea of leadership is to have a sustainable success.

Two Screens aren't Better Than One

Because it folds up, the Tablet is much more portable than iPad-size tablets.
Portability is a virtue, but in my point of view the two screen tablet doesn't cut it.
Battery life is also weak.
The price is very high.

Circular Housing: Sun City, Arizona, USA

Sun City was launched January 1, 1960, with five home models, a shopping center, recreation center and golf course. The opening weekend drew 100,000 people, ten times more than expected, and resulted in a Time magazine cover story. The future retirement community was built on the site of the former ghost town of Marinette.

All houses are concentrated around a shopping center.

More info here: http://www.suncityaz.org/

How coud success be defined? (by Jose Ferreiro)

- Helping others realize their goals while pursuing ours.

- Success is the progressive realization of personal, worthwhile, pre-determined goals.

- Progressive realization means that success is not a destination, it is a journey and you start being successful the moment you take the first step. Personal means that my goals will not motivate you, and your goals will not motivate me. Worthwhile means that goals must have an ethical quality or they won't have the power to attract you to them. Pre-determined means that goals never happen by accident, always on purpose.

- Success is a continual journey!!!

- A success is someone who gets up one more time than he/she gets knocked down.

- You can not succeed unless you have failed. Failure is not a bad thing it is a growing experience.

- Success is a PASSION!!!

- Success is a personal goal-oriented concept, in which an individual generates and strives to reach. The end result can be attained by luck or self-motivated ambition. One could argue that luck is a nonfactor, but the essence of success is the end result and not the facets of the journey of which one arrives. 

Setting up a private cloud for academic environment with Open Source Software - jose ferreiro

Take a look of this interesting presentation performed by Zoran Pantic at the IT university of Copenhagen where he explains how to set up a private cloud using Open Source Software (OSS).

More information here: https://blog.itu.dk/MCLC-F2012/

https://blog.itu.dk/MCLC-F2012/lectures/ (lecture 7 of week 5)

Additional Links which Zoran briefly mentioned in the lecture:
http://ken.pepple.info/openstack/2011/04/22/openstack-nova-architecture/
http://ken.pepple.info/openstack/2012/02/21/revisit-openstack-architecture-diablo/

View more presentations from José Ferreiro.

US launches National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano unveiled  the Obama administration’s National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland yesterday (25 January 2012). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is committed to facilitating legitimate trade and travel, while preventing terrorists from exploiting supply chains, protecting transportation systems from attacks and disruptions, and increasing the resilience of global supply chains.





Download the PDF file at www.whitehouse.gov

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