A little word of support…

We all have our ups and downs,

It is what defines us,

The problem and laughter we own,

Act as a catalyst to remind us,

That life has much more to offer,

If only we could see further,

That these are just life buffer,

Braving us to be a little greater,

Gambatteh! Jiayou! All the best!

These are the words of encouragement,

Not to ask us to be the best,

But to push us to strive for betterment,

Nothing is worth but a surviving the life’s test,

It is a life calling,

Let’s fulfill it with our greatest capability,

So that we live a life of meaning,

Making known of our greatest utility – Myself!

Dr. Phil’s 9 Inspiring Rules to Live By

"Everybody has a personal truth. A personal truth is what you believe about yourself when nobody's listening and nobody's watching" - Dr. Phil

"A strong sense of self is the foundation of personal power. If you define yourself by what someone else thinks, you've already lost the battle. Assert the right to be who you want to be" - Dr. Phil

"A successful reinvention doesn't happen when you hate the person you are. It happens when you love yourself enough to believe that you can do better and deserve better" - Dr. Phil

"The universe rewards action. Successful people take action toward a known outcome. You can't think about it. You have to do it—and you don't do it for a week or a month. You do it until. Until you get what you want." - Dr. Phil

"The major difference between a dream and a goal is a timeline for progress, coupled with accountability." - Dr. Phil

"We generate the results in life we believe we deserve." - Dr. Phil

"Happiness isn't a one-size fits-all proposition. You must define what it looks like for you and then make a conscious effort to access whatever gets you to your unique definition of joy." - Dr. Phil

"If there isn't something in your life that makes you wake up curious and excited to start the day, you will never be a powerful person. Passion is what fuels the jet engine propelling you toward a meaningful existence." - Dr. Phil

"You're going to live either the life chosen or the life assigned. I want you to live the life chosen." - Dr. Phil

20 Amazing Marketing Statistics That Will Drive 2014 (Infographic)

20 Amazing Marketing Statistics That Will Drive 2014 (Infographic)

How to Be a Better Negotiator in 2014. Guaranteed.

January 06, 2014 

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Absolutely. No doubt about it. You can be a more effective negotiator this coming year provided you do one thing differently. Do it faithfully and you’ll:

• Make deals that could otherwise slip through your fingers;
• Create—and capture—more value in the agreements that you reach; and
• Resolve small differences before they escalate into costly disputes.

But there is a catch. This isn’t like those “weird little tricks” with bogus advice about losing belly fat or improving your credit score. This requires some work on your part. Not a lot, but you’ll have to keep at it. Given the upside, the return on your effort will be high.

The assignment is simple: keep a journal tracking every negotiation you undertake in 2014, large or small. It could be securing a promotion, dealing with a difficult customer, or saving a few bucks on your cable service.

Start your entry before you go to the bargaining table. Lay out your strategy. Consider best and worst case scenarios. Reckon your walk away. Try to figure out what might be acceptable to the other side. Document the whole process from how you prepare, what unfolds in the back-and-forth, the outcome, and finally, of course, what lessons you learn along the way.

Keeping a real-time journal is essential. Memories are imperfect. Telling details can get lost. If you reconstruct the story after the fact, the outcome may seem inevitable. Brief notes, taken along the way, will illuminate points where you might have taken things in a different direction.

You don’t have to write a treatise. For simple transactions, an outline will do. But putting your plan down on paper pays off three ways:

1. An explicit plan forces you to weigh tradeoffs in advance. Negotiating a new position, you’ll have to figure out how much salary you’d give up in return for stock options. That could be a tough choice. Analyzing pros and cons beforehand is a whole lot better than making a heat-of-the-moment decision.
2. Imagining different scenarios enhances your creativity. It’s like limbering up before a tennis match. You get your head in the game and become more agile.
3. Planning also a healthy reminder of what you don’t know about the other side’s interests and intentions. Negotiation is an exploratory process. Be ready for surprises, pleasant and otherwise. Don’t treat your assumptions as hard facts.

Some of my posts in coming months will dig more deeply into negotiation preparation and strategic analysis. The more complex the transaction, the more detailed your journal entry should be. But get started now. Making quick notes as you negotiate is far better than nothing. Over the course of the year you’ll gather data that will reveal strengths to build on, as well as weaknesses that you’d better address.

Long-term learning. Think about it: judging performance in any arena requires a baseline. For your annual physical, the doctor compares your latest cholesterol numbers with last year’s results to see if they’re headed in the right direction. You likewise look for trends and patterns over time in weighing investments. The same kind of tracking pays dividends for negotiators. But the only way to learn from experience is having an honest record of your performance.

I’m talking about doing more than calculating your bargaining batting average, where you’d compare the number of agreements made to deals attempted. For one thing, that’s a poor measure of success. As I noted in a post last summer, if you always come to agreement, there are two explanations and both are bad. Either you’re being too agreeable and saying yes to terms you should refuse. Or you’re being too cautious only going after sure-thing opportunities.

So don’t just look at outcomes. Go back to your notes and evaluate how you well you strategized at the outset. Did your negotiations generally play out as you expected? If you tend to be overly optimistic (or pessimistic), that’s something that you can fix. Likewise you may see that you’re better at certain kinds of negotiations than others (value-creating opportunities, for example, rather than haggles over price). Again, you can work on that going forward.

In future posts I’ll have more suggestions about learning from experience. But you can help yourselves now by enlisting a friend to keep a journal of his or her experience. Compare your notes regularly. By coaching one another, you’ll sharpen your strategy going into a negotiation. And by debriefing together, you’ll have twice as many cases to learn from.

So, yes you certainly can be a better negotiator in 2014. Yes, some work is involved, so you might be tempted to slack off. To keep you going here’s a carrot and a stick:

• If you’re diligent, you’ll make more and better deals. You’ll finish the year with a sense of accomplishment and greater confidence in your ability.
• If you fail to make this small effort, but negotiate with people who are serious about enhancing their skills . . . well, best of luck.

*****

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler is the author of The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World (Simon & Schuster).

He has been a key figure at the renowned Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School since its founding 30 years ago. During the 2013-14 academic year, he continues to teach in executive programs at HBS and PON, and is also a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Learning, Living, Pushing, Changing...

"If you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something." - Neil Gaiman

MEE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

First it was our lovely home,

A place we called our home sweet home,

Just a simple and comfortable home,

Nothing fancy nor a dome,

That’s the beginning of MEE,

Nothing to do with mee,

It’s just an acronym for MC, Ethan & Eddy,

So do not mistaken us for mee,

And then came the love of our life,

He’s cute, handsome and lovely,

Our life would never be the same,

Continuous joy and laughter with his smiley J,

Thank you mummy for taking care of us,

You’ve been so great and able,

Without you there won’t be us,

As we count our blessings at our dining table,

We know that a happy family,

Is not by the measure of our wealth,

But by the love and care we pour in the family,

With relentless amount of our happiness health,

So let’s welcome another great year,

As we continue to build our little family,

With the right mixture of love, care and happiness,

As we mold to be the MEE family!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What Best Google's Managers Do

Lesson learned...

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." – Winston Churchill

The Art of Living...

My Pursuit of the Art of Living

Posted: 07 Oct 2013 07:00 AM PDT

By Leo Babauta

For many years I simply lived, and got by.
But in the last few years, after learning a bit about habits and mindfulness and simplicity and love, I have changed my approach to living.
Now I see living as an art form, to be studied and played with and practiced and mastered. Of course, few ever master the art of living, and I don’t know if I ever will. Probably not.
But I can pursue this art. I can appreciate it when others do it well. I can learn about it, through experiments and observation and introspection.
My pursuit of the art of living is only just beginning, but I thought I’d share a bit about this pursuit with you, my good friends.

Beginning the Pursuit

The journey begins with a single step, a wise man said, and for me that first step is simple:
Admit I don’t know.
Learning begins by emptying your cup, so that you can fill it with what you find. Emptying your cup means getting rid of pre-set opinions.
I don’t know what the art of living is, but I am curious.
And so the path is one of open hands, of curiosity and finding out.
And it’s one of bare feet, of being open and naked, willing to be exposed to life and chaos.
It’s about clear seeing, mindfulness turned to seeing reality as it is, without trying to make things rosy or conform to the story you tell yourself.
Clear seeing, naked, open hands, curious without knowing. That’s the path that I’ve found, so far.

The Art Emerges

With clear seeing, I start to see why I (and others) suffer, why we stress and get mad at each other and want more and more.
And now I can start to apply the art of living to my days.
Here’s what I practice with, imperfectly:

• Compassion. Instead of being angry or frustrated, I find the pain in others, and open my heart to them. This includes compassion for myself.
• Gratitude. Life is filled with wonder, and the people around me as well. I try to open myself to that wonder, and be grateful it’s there, instead of complaining.
• Joyfear. Joy is an awesome thing to have, but joyfear is present in the powerful moments in life where joy and fear mix, where we’re taking chances and doing something outside of our comfort zone that both excites us and makes us face the possibility of failure. I now embrace these moments rather than avoiding them.
• Not avoiding discomfort or uncertainty. When we avoid discomfort, we are limited by our comfort zone, and new learning and new ventures become impossible. When we avoid uncertainty, we only stick to what we know. But we can purposely become good at discomfort and uncertainty, by practicing in small bite-sized chunks, over and over.
• Staying with the moment, even when it’s hard. This is the hardest of all. “Living in the moment” sounds wonderful, but actually staying with the present moment isn’t ever easy. Try it: with your eyes open, sit still and stay with the sights and sounds around you for 1 minute, without your mind wandering away from them. If you don’t notice your mind wandering, either you’re an experienced mindfulness practitioner, or you didn’t notice when your mind wandered.
• Relationships are everything. Getting what we want, having things our way, having control, being right … these things matter nothing compared to relationships. Imagine being in your death bed at the age of 80 … will your sense of being right and in control comfort you when you have no good relationships, no one who has loved you? Put relationships first.
• Not holding on to expectations & judgments. Expectations and judgments prevent me from enjoying what I have, from enjoying the simple presence of someone else in my life. I practice with noticing these expectations and judgments, and practice with holding them loosely, letting them go.
• Letting go. This is the art of living in two words: letting go. It’s letting go of judgments, expectations, wanting to be right, wanting to control, fear of discomfort, fear of uncertainty, fear of failure, fear of boredom, comparing myself to others, wanting distraction, being irritated, complaining. It’s noticing when I’m holding these, and letting go. Loosening my heart’s grip on any of these, and letting go. And then letting go again. And again.

And so the art of living is a practice, one that doesn’t end, that doesn’t have a mastery level. It’s a constant letting go, a constant picking up again, and then letting go again. And falling, and getting up without beating myself up.
The art of living is the art of getting back up.

Big Secret in Life...

"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. … There are no back doors, no free rides. There's just you, this moment and a choice."

The do-or-die questions boards should ask about technology

Board members should raise nine critical questions when discussing technology strategy with IT and business managers.

June 2013 | byPaul Willmott
Some organizations are creating new technology forums, building the expertise of corporate directors, and strengthening IT governance—all with the aim of allowing boards to guide management by asking the right questions about technology.¹ But what are the right questions at a time when digital technologies are beginning to disrupt industries and mastering these technologies may be the key to long-term survival and success?
The particulars of each enterprise’s situation will, of course, determine the focus of the discussion and the detailed questions to ask. However, across industries, every corporate director—IT savvy or not—will benefit from reviewing the following questions as a starting point for shaping a fruitful conversation with management about what the company needs to do to become a technology winner.

1. How will IT change the basis of competition in our industry?

Technology is making boundaries between industries more porous and providing opportunities for attacker models. For example, in the banking industry, online consumer-payment products such as Square—a mobile app and device that enables merchants to accept payments—are challenging traditional payment solutions. Free Mobile, a French telecommunications attacker, has captured significant market share by offering inexpensive mobile voice and data plans, in part by offloading some of its traffic onto the home Wi-Fi access points used by its broadband customers.
For incumbents in many sectors, technology is becoming an arms race. Companies are harnessing technologies such as social media and location-based services to reinvent the customer experience and capture market share.

Questions to ask:

• Who are our emerging competitors?
• How is technology helping us win against traditional and new competitors?
• How can we use technology to enter new markets?

2. What will it take to exceed our customers’ expectations in a digital world?

Customers are being educated by e-commerce leaders like Amazon and Apple to expect an ultraconvenient experience, personalized in real time. Attackers in many industries are differentiating themselves from incumbents through convenience and service. Digital finance company Wonga, for example, settles loans in 15 minutes.
As a result, customer expectations are rising quickly. Simply meeting these enhanced expectations can be a major effort for organizations that were not born digital. For instance, retailers may need to step up their development of digital channels. Banks, insurers, and telecommunications players may need to automate end-to-end sales and service processes so that customers can interact with the company in real time in an error-free digital environment. The bar is high for delighting customers in a digital world. Often, doing so requires investment in sophisticated big-data capabilities that use social, location, and other data, for example, to attract potential customers to product promotions at stores in their vicinity.

Questions to ask:

• How does our customer experience compare with that of leaders in other sectors?
• What will our customers expect in the future, and what will it take to delight them?
• Do we have clear plans for how to meet or exceed their expectations?

3. Do our business plans reflect the full potential of technology to improve our performance?

Technology expenses can be high, but they are relatively small compared with their potential to boost the operating performance of the business. Technology can improve business performance by driving revenues (for example, by using big data for cross-selling in digital channels), reducing overall costs (for instance, by automating end-to-end processes), and lowering risk costs (for example, in insurance, by using social-media data to aid risk calculations). Technology can also have a negative impact on performance (for instance, by reducing margins given increased transparency about pricing in the market).
By seizing the opportunities and mitigating the threats, companies can dramatically improve their performance. One retailer has doubled revenue growth by investing in the digital channel. A bank is targeting a 10 percent reduction of operating costs through automation of end-to-end processes. Ultimately, the strategy that emerges from an assessment of opportunities and threats should be an integrated plan that shows how the business will beat the competition using information over a multiyear horizon, not simply a revised annual IT budget. With the right agreement on the scale and scope of the opportunity and threat, the level of investment in IT becomes an outcome rather than a constraint.

Questions to ask:

• Has the P&L opportunity and threat from IT been quantified by business unit and by market?
• Will our current plans fully capture the opportunity and neutralize the threat?
• What is the time horizon of these plans, and have they been factored into future financial projections for both business and IT?

4. Is our portfolio of technology investments aligned with opportunities and threats?

The portfolio should clearly reflect the business opportunities and threats at stake. It also needs to be dynamic—executives must avoid the temptation to reuse the allocations from the previous year’s budget without a close review. Companies should balance short-term P&L opportunities (for example, upgrading digital channels), medium-term platform investments (such as customer databases), and carefully chosen longer-term bets (for instance, piloting new, digitally enabled business models).
Regular, often quarterly, portfolio rebalancing is needed, as assumptions can change quickly. Many companies, for instance, recently cut investment in the Internet channel, as customers have switched to mobile apps. The portfolio should also be managed to keep execution risk in an acceptable range. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. These risks can be managed by monitoring the portfolio carefully and deploying effective processes that assure value will be created.²

Questions to ask:

• How well is our IT-investment portfolio aligned with business value with regard to opportunities and threats?
• How well does the portfolio balance short-term and long-term needs?
• Do we have effective value-assurance processes in place to mitigate execution risk?

5. How will IT improve our operational and strategic agility?

IT has a significant effect on operational business agility (for example, time to market for new products), as well as on strategic business agility (for instance, the ability to extract synergies from an acquired business or the ability to connect systems to a distribution partner).
Leading businesses are continually using IT to improve business agility. For example, one logistics operator has created a control room where the location and condition of assets such as rolling stock can be viewed in real time, enabling a swift response in the case of equipment failure.
Business agility is underpinned by the agility of the IT function itself—its ability to design and implement changes to systems rapidly at low cost and risk. IT agility can be increased by changing the systems landscape (for example, by reducing the number of systems), improving data quality (for instance, by creating enterprise data standards), optimizing IT delivery processes (for example, by applying lean-management techniques), and building flexibility into sourcing arrangements (for instance, by buying processing capacity on demand in the cloud).
Leading businesses measure and manage both business and IT agility, ensuring that the business can respond competitively.

Questions to ask:

• How does our business and IT agility measure up with that of our competitors?
• How do our IT plans increase our business and IT agility?
• Are our sourcing relationships increasing or reducing our agility?

6. Do we have the capabilities required to deliver value from IT?

Technology alone delivers no value. It’s the combination of a clear strategy, the right technology, high-quality data, appropriate skills, and lean processes that adds up to create value. Any weak link in this chain will lead to poor value delivery from IT.
For example, one telecommunications company introduced a new IT system to support cross-selling in stores but found that revenues didn’t increase until the quality of customer data was improved, staff were trained in how to have the right conversations with customers, and sales processes and incentives were realigned.
Leading organizations actively assess their capabilities in these dimensions and target their weak spots. One bank, for example, recently created a group data-services team to improve the quality of data across the enterprise.
In many sectors, a shortage of IT-literate talent in the business is creating a bottleneck. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of executives can, with the appropriate training, learn how to manage value from IT. But capability building must start at the top. Some companies have put their top 200 managers through IT boot camp as a way to start the process.

Questions to ask:

• Do we have the capabilities needed to drive full value from our existing IT systems?
• What are the weakest links in our capabilities?
• Do we have enough IT-literate executives?
• What is our plan for upgrading capabilities?

7. Who is accountable for IT and how do we hold them to account?

In most organizations, accountability is clear for functions such as finance and human resources. In HR, for example, performance can be tracked using a scorecard of intuitive business metrics such as attrition. But accountability for IT is not always so well-defined. So-called shadow IT functions—such as IT developers hired into the marketing department to build social-media apps—can sometimes be out of reach of the core IT function. The emergence of roles such as the chief digital officer and chief data officer can further confuse the picture. Moreover, the IT function can’t be held solely accountable for delivering value from IT. Lower process costs, for example, benefit business units and functions other than IT.
IT can also prove hard to measure. All too often, volumes of technical data are presented instead of a limited set of intuitive, business-relevant metrics. Measures of IT productivity or the bottom-line value delivered by IT are seldom available.
Leading organizations define a clear IT operating model, which determines exactly who is accountable for IT activities such as developing apps, managing data quality, or implementing IT solutions in business processes. The operating model must be aligned with business priorities. Centralized models dominate when cost or control is a priority, whereas businesses seeking growth and agility often adopt federalized IT structures. Whatever the model, IT leaders should be held accountable through scorecards that measure value delivered to the business in the form of efficiency, agility, and risk levels. Scorecards should be intuitive for even the least IT-savvy board member, and they should be aligned with executives’ incentives.

Questions to ask:

• What is our operating model for IT, and is it aligned with our business priorities?
• Who is accountable for delivering business value from IT—both overall and by activity?
• Are those accountable being measured using business-friendly scorecards that create the right incentives?

8. Are we comfortable with our level of IT risk?

Cybersecurity is a significant and growing IT issue. Every large company’s security has been breached, and most executives have a poor understanding of the risks. But cyberattacks are just one category of IT risk. A failure of a small software component can cost a company a lot of money in customer compensation. IT systems can also cause business-conduct risk—for instance, if automated recommendations to cross-sell products conflict with regulatory requirements.
Companies need a comprehensive system for managing IT risk that assesses the full range of risks (for example, hacking attacks, vendor failure, and technical failure) and addresses the root causes, which include redundant technology, incorrect policies, poor processes, and insufficient oversight.

Questions to ask:

• Do we have a comprehensive understanding of the IT risks we face?
• How is our level of IT risk measured, and is it aligned with the company’s overall risk appetite?
• How are we reducing our IT risk on an ongoing basis?
• Who is responsible for overseeing the level of IT risk?

9. Are we making the most of our technology story?

IT is already on the minds of analysts, customers, regulators, and shareholders, and interest will rise as enterprises become increasingly digital. In many industries, digital is likely to become the predominant sales channel. Companies should therefore be ready to communicate their IT strategies externally.

Questions to ask:

• What are the key messages we should communicate?
• How, when, and to whom should they be communicated?