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ROOM
FOR PASSION
Courage is a key ingredient in a business leader, says author and advocate
of passion in business, Charles Kovess. 'They need courage to stand up
against conventional wisdom. I believe courage is the number one capability
of great leaders and that it is fuelled by passion for the vision they
want to achieve. They are passionate about creating a result and that
gives them the courage to be different. I want to suggest to you that
if you slavishly adhere to conventional wisdom, you will get only average
results, and company results in New Zealand and Australia are, on average,
pretty pathetic. Given the challenges of the 21st century we have to overcome
our fears, and passion helps us do that.' - source, NZ Herald, April 25,
2001.
ROOM FOR DREAMS
Not too many workplaces encourage employees to dream. At Food Solutions
Group [a fast-growing NZ food export company] it is fundamental. The company
has even adopted as its symbol the North American dream-catcher. Samples
of the finely structured fibre webs, traditionally fashioned to capture
postive dreams and exclude negative ones, dangle over office desks. In
its literature, the company talks a lot about imagination, courage and
passion. The last two tend to be linked, says chief executive Paul Marra.
'If you have people with a lot of passion for what they do, they also
have courage to get out and act on it. And we encourage that.' - source,
NZ Herald, May 9, 2001.
MORE EMOTION
All decisions in life are made emotionally,' says Marcus Evens, of Carlson
Marketing Group, the world's largest 'relationship marketing' organisation,
specialising in the mechanics of customer-corporate relationships. 'Don't
expect your customers to make decisions based on rational arguments. A
business's key aim is to build an emotional bridge between the brand and
the consumers across which motivational messages can be sent.' - Source,
NZ Herald, June 28, 2001.
A PLACE FOR SOUL
A recent article in American magazine City Journal, describes the new
youth culture among young professionals at least, as 'ecstatic capitalism'.
Youth today want jobs with 'soulfulness'. Work in the new economy, complete
with long hours and a blurring between business and pleasure, is the place
to find individual meaning and recovered community in a fragmented world.
As online magazine Ecompany puts it, the modern workplace is 'not just
a place to work, it's a place to live'. - Source, NZ Herald, May 5 . 2001.
A PLACE FOR HEALTH
People will be the big business issue in the next decade. The question
is how can we make our people want to come to work each day? Most companies
are suffering huge staff turnover and they need to look at how they can
make their environment more supportive and enouraging. How can they use
incentives and bonuses to get people to work? The companies that are making
that work are the ones that have networks in place for family, continued
education and health.' - Corporate wellness consultant Karen Beard. Source,
NZ Herald, March 17, 2001.
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AN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF INTUITION
According to American educator Ned Herriman, about 80% of business leaders
have a strong intuitive syle, says Jonathan Milne, MD of the Learning
Connexion, an independent NZ tertiary education provider. 'Paradoxically,
the information revolution demands more intuitive thinking because the
volume of material is so great that the step-by-step approach isn't possible.
If we want to finish the search and make things happen, we usually have
to trust our hunches because the availibility of information is endless.
This is nothing new for artists because the natural world has always had
far more detail than art can accommodate. But now the same problem of
information overload is challenging everyone.' - Source, Sunday Star Times,
May 6 2001.
IMAGINATIVE
LEARNING
Although a lot of companies have innovation as a key value, not all allow
internet acess, or the time to play and learn, laments Cheryl Regan, founder
of Learning Curve, an Auckland-based company which produces multimedia
training packages. These companies may have integrity and honesty as values,
but take employees off the net in case they waste time. Maybe they need
to performance-manage the few people who are not honest and let the rest,
who are, use it to be innovative. Everybody plays here. You can't have
an innovative company without that.' - Source, NZ Herald, May 30, 2001
BETTER
COPING SKILLS
emotional problems account for 61% of absences from work each year, according
to a brochure outlining the Peak Performance Programme - a new service
designed to ensure that employees receive convenient and effective treatment
for personal problems. 'Our healthcare model is one of taking a target
approach to problem resolution in a relatively brief time period,' says
Gretchen Pilkington, operations director for Health Innovations. 'We work
with people to give them coping skills so they can move on - and be able
to cope in future.' - Source, NZ Herald, April 11 2001.
A WOMAN-FRIENDLY
APPROACH
'This is a new era for women and every buisness has got to be be up for
it. Women don't want to be niched, hate being labelled a segment, don't
want cutdown versions or simplified instructions. In the world world of
rationality, women's subtle understanding of life was never valued. It
is today's killer application. What women go for will spearhead what everyone
goes for.' - Kevin Roberts, worldwide chief of Saatchi & Saatchi. - Source,
NZ Herald, June 28, 2001.
BETTER IN-HOUSE
COMMUNICATION
With average time in jobs now around two years in Auckland, companies
can farewell half their intellectual capital in just five years if they
don't find effective ways to disperse it through the company, warns social
scientist Carl Davidson, of No Doubt Research, a knowledge management
consulting company. 'At its best, knowledge management can also lead to
a more rewarding, more viral workplace. And that could prove a real bonus
in New Zealand just in terms of job retention.' - Source, NZ Herald, July
4, 2001.
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