dandelion 蒲公英

dandelion /ˈdændɪlaɪən/ DJ /'dændɪˈlaɪən/ KK

• a small wild plant with a bright yellow flower that becomes a soft white ball of seeds called a dandelion clock 蒲公英 noun

Pre-nup 婚前財產協議

A prenuptial agreement, antenuptial agreement, or premarital agreement, commonly abbreviated toprenup or prenupt, is a contract entered into prior to marriage,..

少用的词汇

If you stand arms akimbo or with arms akimbo, you stand with your hands on your hips and your elbows pointing outwards.雙手叉腰

If someone pouts, they stick out their lips, usually in order to show that they are annoyed or to make themselves sexually attractive.噘起(嘴唇等), 噘著嘴說

余纯顺

Oh my god! 原来那是已经那么久远的事儿了。。。

我都还没加入BDP呢。。。

我看来不会对任何事情太痴迷，否则我早就成名了，成不成就那是另回事儿，

常常觉得自己太理智了，如果目标模糊，就会很容易打退堂鼓，

不会坚持太久，脑子里太多噪音，反省太早太快，也很爱计较付出与成果的对比，

所以绝对做不了先锋。。

跑跑马拉松还可以，因为有前车可鉴，心里比较踏实些，

对这位英雄，我还是敬佩的，更何况他是来自上海的城市人。。。

但是他不是被痴迷所害的，我认为是死于无知。

有那么多人后援，那是多么幸运的探险计划，他却选择了冒险。

---

From: Barbara Shen [mailto:barbara_shen6618@yahoo.com.cn]
Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 1:24 PM
To: rosemonk@gmail.com
Subject: 回复： Adventurer from Shanghai

余纯顺的事当时很轰动。 只有痴迷于某件事时才会不顾一切。 你达到痴迷状态了吗？ --- 09年12月29日，周二, Shall we dance? 写道： 发件人: Shall we dance? 主题: Adventurer from Shanghai 收件人: "BarbaraShen" 日期: 2009年12月29日,周二,上午2:03 正在观看你们上海余纯顺徒步中国的经历，好羡慕，他不顾摄制队的劝阻，支身独闯罗布泊湖心，壮烈牺牲了，好感人，令我回想起以前有时必需在浪漫与理性之间作抉择。。，你有过如此经验吗？

Obama and Afghanistan: Deciding vs. Deliberating

11:16 AM Monday November 30, 2009
Tags:Barack Obama, Decision making
"The strongest of all warriors are these two: Time and Patience." – Leo Tolstoy
"I'm the decider," former President George Bush famously uttered in April of 2006. "I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." Bush's use of the term "decider" captures the essence of his Administration's approach to governing: making "right decisions" as opposed to making decisions the right way. And, as has been ably chronicled by Bob Woodward and numerous others, Bush's "right decisions" were often Texas-cowboy-shoot-from-the-hip-and-ask-questions-later-gut-feelings-of-rightness decisions.
How refreshing it has been, then, to see President Obama engage in a deeply deliberative process over whether to commit more U.S. troops to the war in Afghanistan. Though accused of "dithering" over war strategy by former Vice-President Dick Cheney, Obama's expected decision to commit 30,000 more troops to the war will actually bring him more into line with conservatives than the rank-and-file of his own party. But the thoroughness and transparency of Obama's process will lay the foundation for support in Congress, support that will be essential given the increasing unpopularity of the war.
President Obama's approach exemplifies key "design principles" that research has revealed to be fundamental to effective executive decision-making: Gather the right minds around the table. Decision-making is a process of converting inputs (knowledge, insight, potential support) into outputs (commitments and plans of action). As with all processes, the old maxim that "garbage in equals garbage out" very much applies to decision-making. You can't hope to get the right outcomes if you don't start with the right inputs. That's why gathering the right minds around the table is key. These minds must have the requisite range of expertise (knowledge of Afghan regional politics, counter-insurgency strategy, etc), range of opinion (both for and against committing more troops), as well as a range of cognitive orientation — creative minds and practical minds, analytical and values-driven, structured and flexible. As you decide whom to have at your decision-making table, then, keep in mind Machiavelli's admonition that, "The first opinion which one forms of a [leader] is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise."
Decide how you will decide. When the stakes are high, it's all too easy for decision-making to degenerate into positional bickering. When this happens, opportunities to reframe the problem, generate creative alternatives, and forge consensus agreements are lost. The result is either lowest-common-denominator comprises or deadlock. Effective executives avoid this by adopting structured approaches that parse decision-making into a set of distinct phases, starting with defining the problem, and proceeding through establishing criteria for evaluating potential outcomes, generating and testing alternatives, and finally reaching closure. The virtue of the phased approach is that it moves people through digestible experiences of education and adjustment, blunting the reflexive resort to position-taking, and avoiding premature convergence on an "obvious" solution.
Take care to define desired outcomes early (and don't lose sight of them). This is a corollary to the previous principle. One well-documented decision-trap is the tendency for the scope of decision-making either to expand dangerously (this is known as mission creep) or to get watered down (laboring mightily and giving birth to a mouse). The best antidote to scope drift is early definition of, and commitment to, a statement of desired outcomes. Is the goal in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, and if so, over what time frame? Is it building civil society with the Afghan people? Is it buttressing stability in Pakistan? Is it getting U.S. troops home as quickly as possible? The resulting mission statement, along with supporting criteria for rigorously evaluating potential outcomes, provides an essential anchor for the hard work of option generation and deliberation.
Rest the ladder of inference on a firm foundation. The most dangerous things in the world are outdated assumptions. Assumptions, after all, are the foundation upon which the ladder of logical inference rests in decision-making. If "A" is true, "B" and "C" follow. But what if "A" is not true? What if "A" was once true, but no longer holds? For example, is Al Qaeda still the primary threat to U.S. interests in the region? It's essential to explicitly surface the fundamental assumptions that the people around the table are making, and to test their soundness with deep analysis. Done well, the result is a shared foundation of facts and hypotheses on which the group will build their decision-edifice.
Demand diversity of viewpoints. In Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer, Michael Roberto persuasively argues that leaders must actively foment disagreement to get good decisions. Too much agreement, too early in the process, is as dangerous as too little agreement later on. Why? Because it raises the specter that decision-makers have fallen prey to groupthink, the tendency for "conventional wisdom" to harden too quickly and crowd out divergent opinions. If leaders don't get enough disagreement naturally, Roberto suggests, then they should demand it by elevating the options of thoughtful minority viewpoints, or appointing a devil's advocate (Vice President Biden appears to have played this role in arguing for a more limited focus in the region) or engaging in scenario generating exercises or setting up a "red team" and a "blue team" to argue different viewpoints.
Know when and how to bring the process to closure. Finally, effective leaders know when and how to drive the process to closure and commitment. "Analysis paralysis" is an ever-present danger when potential outcomes are unpalatable. Deliberation can give way to dithering when the stakes are high and interests are powerful. So decision-makers like Obama have to set deadlines and other action-forcing events to bring the process to a conclusion. They must demand that everyone around the table support the outcome, even if there is not full consensus that it is the right way to go.
These principles of effective executive decision-making will help you to avoid the more obvious decision-traps and reach better conclusions. In the case of President Obama's deliberations on Afghanistan, his careful attention to the design of the decision process should contribute to saving lives and increasing our security.
Michael Watkins is the author of many books, including Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating and Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions

Real Business Geniuses Don't Pretend To Know Everything

Real Business Geniuses Don't Pretend To Know Everything
4:53 PM Monday November 23, 2009
Tags:Innovation, Leadership
The Economist owes much of its popularity to its knack for challenging conventional wisdom. In a recent column, it applied its contrarian mindset to the question of what kinds of leaders make the best CEOs, making the case that what the world needs now are more "raging egomaniacs" and "tightly wound empire-builders" rather than the "faceless" and "anonymous" bosses running so many companies today — "bland and boring men and women who can hardly get themselves noticed at cocktail parties."
The crux of The Economist's argument relies on what's known as the Great Man Theory of History. After trumpeting the virtues of business geniuses such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lou Gerstner, and Jack Welch, it then generalizes from this handful of larger-than-life moguls: "The best ambassadors for business are the outsize figures who have changed the world and who feel no need to apologise for themselves or their calling."It's an intriguing essay and a good read. It's also a false choice — and a bad reading of history. For one thing, when it comes to larger-than-life CEOs, I can name as many scoundrels and failures as I can geniuses and world-changers. There's a reason Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind titled their bestseller on the Enron disaster The Smartest Guys in the Room, and it goes beyond the criminality those deeply flawed executives displayed. That familiar phrase captures the mindset too many of us expect even our most honest leaders to display — the assumption that being "in charge" means having all the answers. In simpler times, fierce personal confidence, a sense of infallibility as a leader, might have been be a calling card of success. Today it is a warning sign of failure, whether from bad judgment, low morale among disillusioned colleagues, or sheer burnout from the pressures of always having to be right.
That's not a case (and here's the false choice) for aiming low or being dull. The best executives I've met understand that there is a vast difference between advancing big, exciting, important goals — aspiring to change the game in your field — and assuming that you know best how to achieve those goals. Sure, great leaders champion new ideas and disruptive points of view — they have vision. But that doesn't mean they have to see the future on their own.
Just because you're in charge doesn't mean you have to have all the answers. Real business geniuses don't pretend they know everything.
To be sure, it's easier to divide leaders into either-or categories: risk-takers vs. bureaucrats, those with ambition vs. those with humility. Fortune just named Steve Jobs its CEO of the Decade — and while it's hard to argue with the choice, it's even harder to reproduce his talents. The problem with trumpeting the virtues of one-of-a-kind geniuses like Steve Jobs is that — duh — there is only one of them! Memo to The Economist: It's not a good idea to urge CEOs to emulate leaders whose success is, almost by definition, impossible to copy.
Keith Sawyer, a creativity guru at Washington University in St. Louis, has literally written the book on where good ideas come from. In Group Genius, he explains how few leaders are prepared to recognize the messy and hard-to-manage truth about the real logic of business success. Many (perhaps most) executives subscribe to what Sawyer calls script-think — "the tendency to think that events are more predictable than they really are." In fact, he says, "Innovation emerges from the bottom up, unpredictably and improvisationally, and it's often only after the innovation has occurred that everyone realizes what's happened. The paradox is that innovation can't be planned, it can't be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge."
Harriet Rubin, one of the great innovators in business-book publishing, and an accomplished author in her own right, uses different language to make a similar point about leadership and innovation. "Freedom is actually a bigger game than power," she reminds executives who are eager to make their mark in the world. "Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash."
The most effective leaders no longer want the job of solving their organization's biggest problems or identifying its best opportunities on their own. Instead, they recognize that the most powerful ideas can come from the most unexpected places: the quiet genius buried deep inside the organization, the collective genius that surrounds the organization, the hidden genius of customers, suppliers, and other constituencies who would be eager to share what they know if only they were asked. For companies, and the CEOs at their helms, those are the smartest (and most sustainable) sources of greatness.

How to Pick a Good Fight

.....by Saj-nicole A. Joni and Damon Beyer

Conflict-free teamwork can derail a company. Healthy dissent will keep it on its toes.

Strong leaders create the kind of conflict that can spark creativity and innovation.

The Idea in Brief
• A peaceful, harmonious workplace can be the worst thing possible for a business. Research shows that the biggest predictor of poor company performance is complacency. Conflict can shake things up and boost your staff’s energy and creativity.
• Not everything is worth fighting over, however. Before girding for a battle, make sure it involves an issue that affects the future and has game-changing potential. And if your fight has a noble purpose—if it’s about, say, improving the lives of customers—that’s even better.
• It’s also critical to make the fight fair. Opponents should have an equal shot at winning.
• Leaders should structure fights through the formal organization but allow contestants to use informal connections. Good leaders also will help the losing parties turn their pain into opportunities for development.

***
When Dick Fuld took over at Lehman Brothers in 1994, he inherited a contentious culture. Traders and investment bankers would not share ideas and competed for business, putting their own interests above the firm’s in nearly every instance. In Fuld’s own words, published in Knowledge@Wharton in 2007, “The early Lehman Brothers was a great example of how not to do it. It was all about me. My job. My people. Pay me.” But by the mid-1990s, the financial services industry had shifted toward an integrated sales model, and such blatant disregard for teamwork didn’t fly any longer. Fuld made unity and collaboration priorities at the firm, nudging them along with employee incentives. By the time of its collapse, in 2008, Lehman reportedly had one of the strongest cultures of teamwork and loyalty on Wall Street. As Fortune had noted in April 2006: “Fuld has incongruously turned Lehman into one of Wall Street’s most harmonious firms.”
The effort to eliminate discord at the firm had backfired. Lehman’s board of directors and management team became too agreeable—and too loyal, content to follow even when they knew better. In 2007 and 2008, numerous signals indicated that the firm was heading into a crisis, but insiders who paid attention to them were afraid to point out the elephant in the room. It turned out that loyalty meant loyalty to Fuld, according to accounts from former employees. That loyalty led Lehman executives to an almost willful blindness. Nobody wanted to disrupt the peace.
The problem is that a peaceful, harmonious workplace can be the worst possible thing for a business, according to consultancy eePulse, which conducts in-depth surveys that measure employee engagement. Complacency, in fact, is the single greatest predictor of poor company performance. The second greatest? An environment in which employees are overwhelmed. In the first case, employees are reluctant to rock the boat. In the second, the level of employee satisfaction is low and the amount of dysfunctional fighting is high. In both situations, low energy levels and fear of political fallout curb action that might address any looming crisis. At Lehman, many alums told us, raising difficult questions could kill your career.
Most leadership experts argue that the best way to manage change is to create alignment, but our research indicates that for large-scale change or innovation initiatives, a healthy dose of dissent is usually just as important. Within an acceptable range of competition and tension, science shows, dissent will fire up more of an individual’s brain, stimulating more pathways and engaging more creative centers. In short, more of what makes people unique, innovative, and passionate is available for use.
Many successful companies are known for their stressful work environments. Microsoft, in its early days, had one of the most contentious, high-strung, and fast-paced corporate cultures in the United States. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were famous for yelling at people. Food distributor Sysco, an unusually successful company built on roll-ups and acquisitions, dismisses district managers who don’t meet annual productivity targets—a pretty tough standard for an operating company with thin margins. Market leaders Goldman Sachs and McKinsey are notoriously competitive, hard-driving places to work. Not places you’d go if you were looking for polite and equal regard for all voices.
We’ve seen this phenomenon play out over and over in our work advising CEOs and senior executives. (Full disclosure: We have done consulting work for some of the companies described in this article.) So it’s time to stop candy-coating what’s taught to executives and their direct reports. It’s time to stop pretending that conflict-free teamwork is the be-all and end-all of organizational life. It’s time to own up to the truth that the right balance of alignment and competition is what pushes individuals and groups to do their best. It’s time to push employees into the right fights.
Let’s be clear—alignment is important. But the purpose of alignment is not harmonious agreement. It is to sustain an organization’s ability to fight for what really matters, and to pull everyone together again once the fight is resolved.
Which Fights Should You Take On?
Not all kinds of conflict promote a successful corporate environment. We have all seen organizations that were poisonously political. We have all watched otherwise rational people go to extreme lengths to sabotage their colleagues or to retaliate against fellow employees who offended them in some way. And we have all seen people fight dirty when they believed that straight shooting wouldn’t get the job done. Those kinds of fights are purely destructive—and are not what we recommend. Conflict is healthful only when people’s energies are pointed in the right direction and when carried out in a productive way.
Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

The Racha - Phuket - Thailand

Must go!

St. Maggie's Cafe in New York

St. Maggie's Cafe
Mentioned in 0 Chowhounddiscussons in the past 3 months.
(0 Ratings)
American (Traditional), Financial District
120 Wall St, New York, NY 10005
(212) 943-9050 GO TO WEBSITE

This website has been closed down.

Must go and patronise this what used to be known as the posh restaurant for the Wall Street yuppies.