Cross-cultural Adaptability Project

October 3rd, 2011

Due to the fact that people are unaware of having learned their cultural behavior, they tend to assume that their group’s way of thinking or acting is human nature. Hence their shock or misunderstanding when other people behave in ways they interpret as illogical, unreasonable, or impolite. Before jumping to this conclusion, and placing the conflict or misunderstanding on an interpersonal level, it is often helpful to look at the situation from an intercultural point of view. Therefore, in order to enhance the EFL students’ cross-cultural flexibility. This periodic online multimedia blog is designed with the purpose to enhance students’ cross-cultural flexibility. Students will be assigned to read the materials regarding cross-cultural information on this online blog and a short assessment will be done afterwards. Hopefully after the students has undergone all the videos, their cross-cultural flexibility is enhanced.

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Becoming a leader

March 29th, 2010

Leadership Video

What is Leadership?

Character

•More than talk

•Talent is Gift, Character is a Choice

•Lasting Success with People

•Leaders cannot rise above the limitations of their character

Anyone can say they have integrity. Your character determine who you are. Who you are determines what you see. What you see determines what you do. That’s why your can’t separate a leader from his character.

Charisma

•Love Life •Put a “10” on Every Person’s Head

•Give People Hope

•Share Yourself

Focus on others. Make a good first impression. When meeting new people, learn their name and focus on their interest. Be positive and treat them like a 10.

Commitment

When it comes to commitments, there are really only four types of people:

•Cop-outs (people with no goals, don’t commit)

•Holdouts (people who don’t know if they’ll reach their goals

•Dropouts (people who quit when the going gets tough)

•All-outs (people who set goals, commit to learn and pay the price to reach them)

Communication

•Simplify Your Message

•See the Person (be audience oriented)

•Be Credible

•Believe what you say

•Show conviction

•Be a catalyst for action (Give people something to feel, remember, and do)

The leader must be able to share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to others.

The Qualities of a leader

Competence

Competence goes beyond words.

It’s the leaders ability to say it, plan it, and do it in such a way that others know that you know how — and know that they want to follow you.

•Show up every day

•Keep Improving

•Follow Through with Excellence

•Accomplish More than Expected

•Inspire Others

Courage

•Courage begins with an inward battle

•Courage is making things right, not just smoothing them over

•Courage in a leader inspires commitment from followers

•Your life expands in proportion to your courage

Discernment

•Discover the root issues

•Enhance your problem solving

•Evaluate your options for maximum impact

•Multiply your opportunities

Smart leaders believe only half of what they hear, Discerning leaders know which half to believe.

As the saying goes “Put your foot in the water, before diving in.” – John Maxwell

Focus

•Focus 70% on your Strengths

•25% on New Things

•5% on Areas of Weakness

•Work on yourself

•Shift to strength

•Staff your weaknesses

•Work at your priorities

•Create a competitive edge

Generosity

•Be grateful for whatever you have

•Put people first

•Don’t allow the desire for possessions to control you

•Regard Money as a resources and Develop the habit of giving

Initiative

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly” – Sen. Robert Kennedy

•Know what you want

•Push yourself to act

•Take more risk

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How to become effective?

March 29th, 2010

How to become effective

What is an effective person?

A person producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect. To be impressive or striking.

Being effective is learning to do ‘that which produces the desired result’.

If you want to be extremely successful in business or very happy in life or achieve some large goal, then being effective is consistently doing the things that will bring about the results you are after.

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effective

The 7 habits of highly effective people

1. Be Proactive

Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on somebody. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior. Reactive people, on the other hand, are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance, and they blame the weather. One of the most important things you choose is what you say. Your language is a good indicator of how you see yourself. A proactive person uses proactive language–I can, I will, I prefer, etc. A reactive person uses reactive language–I can’t, I have to, if only.

We may have no control over what life throws at us but we always have a choice about how we are to respond.

2. Begin with the end in mind

The ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. Begin with the End in Mind means to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen. If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.

It’s about connecting again with your own uniqueness and then defining the personal, moral, and ethical guidelines within which you can most happily express and fulfill it.

3. First things first

Things happens day in and day out, moment-by-moment. We deals with many of the questions addressed in the field of time management. But that’s not all it’s about. First things first is about life management as well–your purpose, values, roles, and priorities.

What are “first things?” First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth. If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities you established.

Remember that when it comes to relationships, little things are big things.

4. Think win-win

It is a character-based code for human interaction and collaboration. Most of us learn to base our self-worth on comparisons and competition. We think about succeeding in terms of someone else failing – that is, if I win, you lose; or if you win, I lose. Life becomes a zero-sum game. There is only so much pie to go around, and if you get a big piece, there is less for me; it’s not fair, and I’m going to make sure you don’t get anymore. We all play the game, but how much fun is it really?

Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying. We both get to eat the pie, and it tastes pretty good!

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Communication is the most important skill in life. You spend years learning how to read and write, and years learning how to speak. but what about listening? If you’re like most people, you probably seek first to be understood; you want to get your point across. And in doing so, you may ignore the other person completely, pretend that you’re listening, selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation or attentively focus on only the words being said, but miss the meaning entirely. So why does this happen? Because most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand. You listen to yourself as you prepare in your mind what you are going to say, the questions you are going to ask, etc. You filter everything you hear through your life experiences, your frame of reference. You check what you hear against your autobiography and see how it measures up. And consequently, you decide prematurely what the other person means before he/she finishes communicating.

6. Synergize

Synergy means “two heads are better than one.” Synergize is the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork, open-mindedness, and the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems. It’s a process, and through that process, people bring all their personal experience and expertise to the table. Together, they can produce far better results that they could individually. Synergy lets us discover jointly things we are much less likely to discover by ourselves. It is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Valuing differences is what really drives synergy. Do you truly value the mental, emotional, and psychological differences among people? Or do you wish everyone would just agree with you so you could all get along? Many people mistake uniformity for unity; sameness for oneness. Differences should be seen as strengths, not weaknesses. They add zest to life.

7. Sharpen the saw

Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have — you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. Here are some examples of activities:

Physical: Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting

Social/Emotional: Making social and meaningful connections with others

Mental: Learning, reading, writing, and teaching

Spiritual: Spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through mediation, music, art, prayer, or service.

Source: https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit7.php

Words to ponder:

Decisive

Impressive

Striking

Desired results

Consistently

Circumstances

Genetics

Conditioning

Empower

Competitive arena

Mutual benefit

Self-renewal

Zest

Uniformity

Oneness

Teamwork

Open-mindedness

Selective hearing

Frame of reference

Prematurely

Self-worth

Zero sum game

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Wikinomics

March 29th, 2010

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It’s so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects.

Some advantages of using a wiki are:

1.Instant collaboration

2.Allowing access from anywhere with a web-connection

3.Your archive, since every revision is kept

4.Exciting, immediate, and empowering, since every one has a say

Some disadvantages of using a wiki:

1.Wikis are public, hence, showing something not yet finish to the public might be a problem

2.Hard to maintain

3.Constant monitoring

At its core, a wiki is a content management system. What this means is it is designed to allow people to create and edit web pages without any knowledge of HTML. This allows writers to do what they do best, which is write, and editors to do what they do best, edit.

Source: http://www.oreillynet.com/network/2006/07/07/what-is-a-wiki.html

Many websites utilize content management systems to provide content to users. Blogging software is another example of a content management system.

What are blogs?

A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

What is wikinomics?

Wikinomics is a term that describes the effects of extensive collaboration and user-participation on the marketplace and corporate world. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams popularized the term in their book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything , published in December 2006.

Openness, which includes not only open standards and content but also financial transparency and an open attitude towards external ideas and resources

Peering, which replaces hierarchical models with a more collaborative forum. Tapscott and Williams cite the development of Linux as the “quintessential example of peering.”

Sharing, which is a less proprietary approach to (among other things) products, intellectual property, bandwidth, scientific knowledge

Acting globally, which involves embracing globalization and ignoring “physical and geographical boundaries” at both the corporate and individual level.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Words to ponder:

Website

Multiple participant

Collaboration

Global Realities

March 29th, 2010

The world is flat…

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is an international bestselling book by Thomas L. Friedman that analyzes globalization, primarily in the early 21st century. The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors have an equal opportunity.

The title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

The meaning…

The events…

#1: Collapse of Berlin Wall–11/9/89: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold War, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream.

#2: Netscape–8/9/95: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by ‘early adopters and geeks’ to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.

#3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved was stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration.”

#4: Uploading: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon “the most disruptive force of all.”

#5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. This process became easier with the mass distribution of fiber optic cables during the introduction of the World Wide Web.

#6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company’s manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land to take advantage of less costly operations there. China’s entrance in the WTO allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.

#7: Supply-chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.

#8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company’s employees perform services–beyond shipping–for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.

#9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people”, writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is “now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago”.

#10: “The Steroids”: Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

Words to ponder:

Globalization

Metaphor

Level playing field

Equal opportunity

Cold war

Mainstream

Early adopters

Geeks

Crude

Platform

Open source

Disruptive

Split service

Subcontracted

Relocation

Supply chain

Streamline

In-sourcing

Out-sourcing

Off-shoring

Search engines

Steroids

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The Outlier

March 29th, 2010

The secret of big success

Outliers…

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.

In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Source: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

Outliers… the 10,000 hours for success

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell contrasts the Chinese proverb ‘No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich’ with the American agricultural practice of letting fields lie fallow in winter, which led to a school year with summer vacations — a practice that works for children of the well-educated but fails children of the less-educated who give up many of their school-year academic gains over the summer.

The rules of social epidemics

The Law of the Few

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. According to Gladwell, economists call this the “80/20 Principle”, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the ‘work’ will be done by 20 percent of the participants.

Connectors are people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”

Mavens are information specialists, these are people who we can rely upon to connect us with new information.

Salesmen are persuaders, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.

Six degrees of separation

A social psychologist distributed letters to 160 students in Nebraska, with instructions that they be sent to a stockbroker in Boston (not personally known to them) by passing the letters to anyone else that they believed to be socially closer to the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully.

This rule states that specific types of people are responsible for bringing about large levels of change.

Source: http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com/2008/11/17/outliers-10000-hours-for-success/

The stickiness factor

…is the specific content of a message that renders its impact memorable. Popular children’s television programs such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues pioneered the properties of the stickiness factor, thus enhancing the effective retention of the educational content in tandem with its entertainment value.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point /

The power of context

Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. As Gladwell says, “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” Behavior is a product of social context. In an unkempt environment, people are more apt to misbehave than in formal settings.

Rule of 150: Groups grow too large and loose cohesion at 150 .

Source: http://www.notesofintelligence.com/tipping-point/tipping-point-summary.html

Words to ponder:

Outlier

Phenomena

Below freezing

Very good understanding

A good deal less

One reason or another

Accomplished

Extraordinary

Mastery

Social epidemic

Rare

Social gifts

Economist

Persuaders

Charismatic

Negotiation

Bringing about

Social context

More apt

Unkempt

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The job interview

March 29th, 2010

Please watch the youtube video:

How to choose a right career?

March 22nd, 2010

The job interview… ?

Are you thinking of choosing or changing your career? Maybe you have been dreaming about a career change but don’t know where to start. Perhaps you’re getting increasingly bored at work or realizing that opportunities for growth are limited. Or, like many in this economy, you may be unemployed or facing unemployment. Regardless of your reasons, the right career is out there for everyone. Discover how to find the best career path for you, including finding the courage to make a change, researching options, realizing your strengths, and learning new skills.

How to choose the right career.

The first step in considering a career change is to think carefully about what really drives you. You might find it hard to get past thinking about “what pays the most” or “what is most secure,” especially in today’s economy. However, it’s important to first discover your primary interests and passions. This can open doors to careers that you might not have considered. Once you have that foundation, you can start fine tuning your search to the right career. You may be surprised at how you can fit your passions into a certain career!

Over coming obstacles

It’s too much work to change careers. Where would I ever begin? Changing careers does require a substantial time investment. However, remember that it does not happen all at once. If you sit down and map out a rough plan of attack, breaking down larger tasks into smaller ones, it is a lot more manageable than you think. And if the payoff is a happier, more successful career, it’s worth it.

I’m too old to change careers. I need to stay where I am. If you have worked for a number of years, you may feel that you’ve put too much time and effort into your career to change midstream. Or you may be concerned about retirement and health benefits. However, the more you’ve worked, the more likely you are to have skills you can transfer to a new career. You may also consider planning a transition for after retirement if you are close to receiving a pension or other benefits after a number of years.

I don’t have enough skills to consider a new career. You may be unaware of the skills you have, or underestimate your marketability due to low self esteem. However, you probably have more skills than you think. Consider skills you’ve learned not only from your job but from hobbies, volunteering or other life experiences. And gaining skills is not an all or nothing proposition. You can volunteer once a week or take a night class to move forward, for example, without quitting your current job.

In this economy, I’m lucky to have a job. I don’t want to rock the boat. In today’s climate, it might feel like too much of a risk to consider changing careers. However, if you’re unhappy in your current job, doing research on other options will only benefit you in the long run. You may discover a career with a more stable long-term outlook than your current career, for example. And you don’t have to quit your current job until you are confident of your new career path.

Source: http://www.helpguide.org/life/finding_career.htm

Words to ponder:

Effort

Perseverance

Guidance

Reflection

Research

Belief in yourself

Passion

Strengths

Skills

Talents

Preferences

Needs

Temperament

Interest

Fine tuning

Substantial

Manageable

Payoff

Midstream

Pension

Career path

Marketability

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Lunghwa – DAFL

Cross-cultural Adaptability Project

Becoming a leader

How to become effective?

Wikinomics

Global Realities

The Outlier

The job interview

How to choose a right career?

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