Tomado de: http://vimeo.com/18737662
miércoles, 30 de noviembre de 2011
miércoles, 5 de octubre de 2011
Tobymac - Hold On
Wake up to the morning light
wipe away the lonely nights
let a brand new day wash over you,
Wanna see you smile again
show some love to your crazy friends
wipe your tears away
those days are through
If you move just a little bit closer you can put your head on my shoulder
Yeah, yeah
[Chorus:]
So baby hold on
just another day or two
I can see the clouds are
moving faster now
and the sun is breaking through
If you can hold on, to the one that's holding you
there is nothing that can
stop this crazy love
from breaking through
We're breaking through
We're breaking through
Wake up to the morning sun
thank the Lord for the
things He's done
lift your eyes up to the
hope that's ever true
Wanna see you smiling girl
you're a light in this jaded world
wipe away those tears
this one's for you
Come on, move a little bit closer, you can put your head on my shoulder
Yeah, yeah
[Chorus]
And the stars are up there
shining for you
oh, the Father does adore you
His love will never change
And you and I
we were born to follow
the hope that will lead us to tomorrow
and no one can take it away
So baby hold on
just another day or two
I can see the clouds are
moving faster now
and the sun is breaking through
If you could hold on
to the one that's holding you
there is nothing that can stop this crazy, crazy love from breaking [x2]
You see the clouds are
moving faster now
the clouds are moving faster
You see the clouds are
moving faster now
And the sun is breaking through
We're breaking through
martes, 9 de agosto de 2011
Pfizer to pay £50m after deaths of Nigerian children in drug trial experiment
Tomado de: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/pfizer-to-pay-16350m-after-deaths-of-nigerian-children-in-drug-trial-experiment-1663402.html
Autor: Daniel Howden
Autor: Daniel Howden
Out of court settlement in the case that inspired 'The Constant Gardener'
By Daniel Howden, Africa Correspondent
Monday, 6 April 2009
A divorce case was all that passed for excitement at Richard P Altschuler's "kinda small" lawyer's office in West Haven, Connecticut, when the phone rang nine years ago. On the other end of the line, a world away in the heat of Nigeria, was Etigwe Uwo, a young lawyer with "an incredible story about Pfizer". The Lagos attorney was going to take on the largest pharmaceutical company in the world in an unprecedented class action pitting African parents against an American corporate giant. And he needed help.
Mr Etigwe had chosen Mr Altschuler because, back in 1979, the Connecticut lawyer had successfully defended a friend of the Nigerian. The unlikely pair were about to embark on a marathon journey into the world of "big pharma". Nine years on and their efforts have finally been rewarded with a reported $75m (£50m) settlement, the terms of which are likely to be released this week.
If it sounds like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster that's because it was this story that prompted John Le Carre to write The Constant Gardener, according to Mr Altschuler.
In real life it was to Nigeria, not Kenya, that Pfizer turned. In 1996, the company needed a human trial for what it hoped would be a pharmaceutical "blockbuster", a broad spectrum antibiotic that could be taken in tablet form. The US-based company sent a team of its doctors into the Nigerian slum city of Kano in the midst of an appaling meningitis epidemic to perform what it calls a "humanitarian mission". However the accusers claim it was an unlicensed medical trial on critically-ill children.
A team of Pfizer doctors reached the Nigerian camp just as the outbreak, which killed at least 11,000 people, was peaking. They set themselves up within metres of a medical station run by the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, which was dispensing proven treatments to ease the epidemic.
From the crowd that had gathered at the Kano Infectious Diseases Hospital, 200 sick children were picked. Half were given doses of the experimental Pfizer drug called Trovan and the others were treated with a proven antibiotic from a rival company.
Eleven of the children died and many more, it is alleged, later suffered serious side-effects ranging from organ failure to brain damage. But with meningitis, cholera and measles still raging and crowds still queueing at the fence of the camp, the Pfizer team packed up after two weeks and left.
That would probably have been an end to the story if it weren't for Pfizer employee, Juan Walterspiel. About 18 months after the medical trial he wrote a letter to the then chief executive of the company, William Steere, saying that the trial had "violated ethical rules". Mr Walterspiel was fired a day later for reasons "unrelated" to the letter, insists Pfizer.
The company claims only five children died after taking Trovan and six died after receiving injections of the certified drug Rocephin. The pharmaceutical giant says it was the meningitis that harmed the children and not their drug trial. But did the parents know that they were offering their children up for an experimental medical trial?
"No," Nigerian parent Malam Musa Zango said. He claims his son Sumaila, who was then 12 years old, was left deaf and mute after taking part in the trial. But Pfizer has denied this and says consent had been given by the Nigerian state and the families of those treated. It produced a letter of permission from a Kano ethics committee. The letter turned out to have been backdated and the committee set up a year after the original medical trial.
At stake at one point last year was more than $8bn in punitive damages being sought in a string of cases, as well as potential jail terms in Nigeria for several Pfizer staff. "There has been a complex web of cases with proceedings in Connecticut, New York, Lagos, Abuja and Kano," Mr Etigwe said. "The strategy of big companies when they are dealing with smaller opponents is to stretch the process, to overwhelm us until we are ready to accept whatever they want to offer." Trovan never became the blockbuster that Pfizer had hoped for and it is no longer in production. The EU has banned the drug and it has been withdrawn from sale in the US.
It appears that Pfizer has finally ended the public relations nightmare with Friday's settlement. But the Trovan battle may not be over yet.
At the end of January 2009, a New York appeal court ruled Mr Etigwe and Mr Altschuler's case could be heard in the US. The Connecticut attorney says it could still go ahead. "Our case is firmly embedded in the US ... so a Nigerian settlement does not foreclose our case. But this is very good news. I'm glad we remained the constant gardener and could see this come to fruition."
By Daniel Howden, Africa Correspondent
Monday, 6 April 2009
A divorce case was all that passed for excitement at Richard P Altschuler's "kinda small" lawyer's office in West Haven, Connecticut, when the phone rang nine years ago. On the other end of the line, a world away in the heat of Nigeria, was Etigwe Uwo, a young lawyer with "an incredible story about Pfizer". The Lagos attorney was going to take on the largest pharmaceutical company in the world in an unprecedented class action pitting African parents against an American corporate giant. And he needed help.
Mr Etigwe had chosen Mr Altschuler because, back in 1979, the Connecticut lawyer had successfully defended a friend of the Nigerian. The unlikely pair were about to embark on a marathon journey into the world of "big pharma". Nine years on and their efforts have finally been rewarded with a reported $75m (£50m) settlement, the terms of which are likely to be released this week.
If it sounds like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster that's because it was this story that prompted John Le Carre to write The Constant Gardener, according to Mr Altschuler.
In real life it was to Nigeria, not Kenya, that Pfizer turned. In 1996, the company needed a human trial for what it hoped would be a pharmaceutical "blockbuster", a broad spectrum antibiotic that could be taken in tablet form. The US-based company sent a team of its doctors into the Nigerian slum city of Kano in the midst of an appaling meningitis epidemic to perform what it calls a "humanitarian mission". However the accusers claim it was an unlicensed medical trial on critically-ill children.
A team of Pfizer doctors reached the Nigerian camp just as the outbreak, which killed at least 11,000 people, was peaking. They set themselves up within metres of a medical station run by the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, which was dispensing proven treatments to ease the epidemic.
From the crowd that had gathered at the Kano Infectious Diseases Hospital, 200 sick children were picked. Half were given doses of the experimental Pfizer drug called Trovan and the others were treated with a proven antibiotic from a rival company.
Eleven of the children died and many more, it is alleged, later suffered serious side-effects ranging from organ failure to brain damage. But with meningitis, cholera and measles still raging and crowds still queueing at the fence of the camp, the Pfizer team packed up after two weeks and left.
That would probably have been an end to the story if it weren't for Pfizer employee, Juan Walterspiel. About 18 months after the medical trial he wrote a letter to the then chief executive of the company, William Steere, saying that the trial had "violated ethical rules". Mr Walterspiel was fired a day later for reasons "unrelated" to the letter, insists Pfizer.
The company claims only five children died after taking Trovan and six died after receiving injections of the certified drug Rocephin. The pharmaceutical giant says it was the meningitis that harmed the children and not their drug trial. But did the parents know that they were offering their children up for an experimental medical trial?
"No," Nigerian parent Malam Musa Zango said. He claims his son Sumaila, who was then 12 years old, was left deaf and mute after taking part in the trial. But Pfizer has denied this and says consent had been given by the Nigerian state and the families of those treated. It produced a letter of permission from a Kano ethics committee. The letter turned out to have been backdated and the committee set up a year after the original medical trial.
At stake at one point last year was more than $8bn in punitive damages being sought in a string of cases, as well as potential jail terms in Nigeria for several Pfizer staff. "There has been a complex web of cases with proceedings in Connecticut, New York, Lagos, Abuja and Kano," Mr Etigwe said. "The strategy of big companies when they are dealing with smaller opponents is to stretch the process, to overwhelm us until we are ready to accept whatever they want to offer." Trovan never became the blockbuster that Pfizer had hoped for and it is no longer in production. The EU has banned the drug and it has been withdrawn from sale in the US.
It appears that Pfizer has finally ended the public relations nightmare with Friday's settlement. But the Trovan battle may not be over yet.
At the end of January 2009, a New York appeal court ruled Mr Etigwe and Mr Altschuler's case could be heard in the US. The Connecticut attorney says it could still go ahead. "Our case is firmly embedded in the US ... so a Nigerian settlement does not foreclose our case. But this is very good news. I'm glad we remained the constant gardener and could see this come to fruition."
©independent.co.uk
jueves, 4 de agosto de 2011
Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control. – Proverbs 25:28 (NIV)
To cultivate restraint over our appetites brings us great gain, because it builds in us the reserves that we need when we are tempted to cross a boundary that we will later regret. In the ancient world, a city without walls was vulnerable to any enemy who wanted to attack or loot the city treasures. In the same way, a life that does not cultivate boundaries is vulnerable to any distraction or seduction that comes its way. Don’t give up the treasures of godliness in your life easily. Adding small measures of discipline into your daily lifestyle will bring a huge return.
© 2011 theDailyBibleVerse.org
miércoles, 6 de julio de 2011
miércoles, 29 de junio de 2011
El transbordador espacial se queda en tierra
Tomado de: http://www.motor.com.co/revista-motor/el-ultimo-vuelo-del-transbordador-espacial_9740524-4
Autor: José Clopatofsky
Autor: José Clopatofsky
El aparato más complejo, sofisticado y peligroso hecho por el hombre hace su última misión espacial, después de 136 vuelos y pasa a la historia de los intentos del hombre por conquistar el espacio.
Antieconómico y muy difícil de sostener técnicamente, después de 136 vuelos en 34 años, si es exitosa su última salida, la Nasa jubila su flota de transbordadores.
En este final de junio o en los días próximos, dependiendo del clima, se cerrará el ciclo de la máquina más compleja -y peligrosa- desarrollada por el hombre en materia espacial y probablemente de todos los tipos. El transbordador espacial Atlantis de la NASA (STS, Space Transport System y luego genéricamente Space Shuttle) hará el último viaje al espacio antes de ser dado de baja junto con los otros cinco ejemplares de este subliminal aparato cuyas misiones nunca lograron el rendimiento que les planificó ni la invulnerabilidad de la aeronave más compleja construida hasta la fecha.
En efecto, de los seis aparatos fabricados desde cuando el presidente de Estados Unidos, Richard Nixon, autorizó la construcción de este proyectil tripulado, en febrero de 1972, cinco fueron operativos ya que el primero que se hizo, llamado Enterprise, no estaba previsto para salir al espacio sino para ensayos de vuelos en la atmósfera, tres sobrevivieron y apenas lograron realizar 135 misiones, cuando el proyecto contemplaba 50 vuelos al año.
La necesidad del transbordador venía de la ineficiencia de los cohetes que se estaban usando para colocar satélites y otros elementos en el espacio pues no eran recuperables ni tripulados.
Hacer un avión capaz de salir de la órbita terrestre, realizar misiones de todo tipo y regresar a la tierra, fue la solución que se adoptó mezclando los proyectos de la NASA y la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos. Las cuentas de los promotores del proyecto resultaron completamente irreales pues calcularon cada vuelo en 10.5 millones de dólares y terminaron costando entre 300 y 400 millones en promedio y hay operaciones cuya factura pasó de los 1.000 millones de billetes verdes.
A pesar de que su planificación económica fue un desatino, el Transbordador siguió adelante tan solo para encontrar más dificultades pues operativamente la nave presentó costos astronómicos de recuperación después de los vuelos, derivados especialmente del reemplazo de miles de las "tejas" de silicio (lleva cerca de 30 mil) que protegen la nariz del avión del altísimo calor que produce la fricción con el aire al regresar a la atmósfera cuando alcanza cerca de 27.000 kilómetros por hora. En esos momentos, el frente del transbordador puede estar a más de 2.000 grados centígrados.
Las "tejas" se desprendían o deterioraban aunque nunca fueron la causa de los accidentes tal como se temía siempre que despegaba una misión. El Challenger se incendió porque se presentaron fugas de combustible luego de 73 segundos de vuelo y el Columbia se desintegró al regresar a la atmósfera porque un pedazo de espuma aislante se desprendió y rompió el ala izquierda del aparato, a pesar de lo cual la NASA autorizó su regreso a la tierra, aunque no es claro si habría alguna forma de reparar el plano en el espacio.
El transbordador es un avión pequeño, pero muy ancho y espacioso pues se trata de un carguero. Mide 17.25 metros de altura en la cola, 37.24 metros de largo y se apoya en una envergadura de 23.8 metros de ancho. Para dar una referencia, metros más o menos, es muy cercano al tamaño de un Airbus 320.
Cualquiera de los transbordadores depende de propulsión externa para ascender y salir de la órbita terrestre. Para ello lo acoplan en la plataforma de lanzamiento a dos cohetes. Para surtir el combustible, hay un gran tanque desechable que mide 46.14 metros de largo y 8.28 metros de diámetro. Va lleno de oxígeno e hidrógeno líquidos y alimenta los tres motores del transbordador que funcionan durante 8 minutos y medio después del lanzamiento, hasta una altura de 109 kilómetros.
Otros dos cohetes laterales, recuperables, que pesan cada uno 6 toneladas, van cargados con perclorato de amonio (oxidante) y aluminio (combustible). Todo el conjunto pesa 2.041 toneladas pero apenas regresan 104 toneladas después del viaje, representadas en el peso de la nave vacía.
Para maniobrar en el espacio y para regresar a la tierra quebrando la resistencia de la atmósfera, los transbordadores llevan tres motores que pueden generar un empuje de 1.8 meganewtons y son las plantas motrices más poderosas jamás construidas. Estos motores son reutilizables y se encienden en varias fases de cada
misión. Se fabricaron 46 unidades.
En el diseño de la fantástica máquina que resume la tecnología espacial pues se actualizó constantemente aunque nunca perdió su esencia técnica, tal como pasó con el avión supersónico Concorde, jugó más el aparato que el hombre pues no tiene ningún sistema de protección para los 5 a 7 tripulantes que suelen conducirlo. También es cierto que en cualquiera de las condiciones de funcionamiento, salvo tal vez en su aproximación final a la pista, no hay condiciones exteriores en caso de una eyección para que sobrevivieran sus pilotos, que volaron siempre amarrados a un potencial ataúd.
Los dos accidentes y los fantásticos costos de volar los transbordadores acabaron por enterrar el ambicioso y espectacular programa espacial de los Estados Unidos, que llegó a ser compartido con los orbitadores rusos y la estación espacial soviética, generando una paz en el espacio en donde se temía una guerra de alcances insospechados. En 2004, el presidente Bush le dictó la sentencia de defunción al programa a partir de 2010 una vez se terminara el montaje de la estación espacial, que ahora será atendida por las naves rusas Soyouz.
Bush, sin embargo, dejó el sueño espacial abierto pues lanzó un nuevo programa "Constellation" que supuestamente llevaría de nuevo al hombre a la luna en 2020. En realidad era una reestructuración del programa Apolo, que funcionaría con cohetes y módulos como el ya visto. Poco se demoró el presidente Obama en descartar también este proyecto con una frase contundente:
"A la luna ya fuimos, el espacio es enorme".
Para acometer la conquista del espacio en términos más ambiciosos se hará una nueva generación del transbordador, más eficiente y capaz en el cual el hombre visite asteroides en 2025 y vaya a Marte (2030), según Obama, pero hasta la fecha, cuando el transbordador hace su vuelo de despedida, todo está en puras palabras y fantasía.
Entre tanto, hay sociedades privadas que trabajan en crear un sistema de vuelos comerciales de carga, no tripulados en órbitas bajas. Se trata de las firmas Space X y Orbital Science que han recibido apoyo económico de la Nasa, mientras se inventa una manera rentable de conciliar los sueños espaciales del hombre con la verdadera utilidad de estos aparatos.
José Clopatofsky
Antieconómico y muy difícil de sostener técnicamente, después de 136 vuelos en 34 años, si es exitosa su última salida, la Nasa jubila su flota de transbordadores.
En este final de junio o en los días próximos, dependiendo del clima, se cerrará el ciclo de la máquina más compleja -y peligrosa- desarrollada por el hombre en materia espacial y probablemente de todos los tipos. El transbordador espacial Atlantis de la NASA (STS, Space Transport System y luego genéricamente Space Shuttle) hará el último viaje al espacio antes de ser dado de baja junto con los otros cinco ejemplares de este subliminal aparato cuyas misiones nunca lograron el rendimiento que les planificó ni la invulnerabilidad de la aeronave más compleja construida hasta la fecha.
En efecto, de los seis aparatos fabricados desde cuando el presidente de Estados Unidos, Richard Nixon, autorizó la construcción de este proyectil tripulado, en febrero de 1972, cinco fueron operativos ya que el primero que se hizo, llamado Enterprise, no estaba previsto para salir al espacio sino para ensayos de vuelos en la atmósfera, tres sobrevivieron y apenas lograron realizar 135 misiones, cuando el proyecto contemplaba 50 vuelos al año.
La necesidad del transbordador venía de la ineficiencia de los cohetes que se estaban usando para colocar satélites y otros elementos en el espacio pues no eran recuperables ni tripulados.
Hacer un avión capaz de salir de la órbita terrestre, realizar misiones de todo tipo y regresar a la tierra, fue la solución que se adoptó mezclando los proyectos de la NASA y la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos. Las cuentas de los promotores del proyecto resultaron completamente irreales pues calcularon cada vuelo en 10.5 millones de dólares y terminaron costando entre 300 y 400 millones en promedio y hay operaciones cuya factura pasó de los 1.000 millones de billetes verdes.
A pesar de que su planificación económica fue un desatino, el Transbordador siguió adelante tan solo para encontrar más dificultades pues operativamente la nave presentó costos astronómicos de recuperación después de los vuelos, derivados especialmente del reemplazo de miles de las "tejas" de silicio (lleva cerca de 30 mil) que protegen la nariz del avión del altísimo calor que produce la fricción con el aire al regresar a la atmósfera cuando alcanza cerca de 27.000 kilómetros por hora. En esos momentos, el frente del transbordador puede estar a más de 2.000 grados centígrados.
Las "tejas" se desprendían o deterioraban aunque nunca fueron la causa de los accidentes tal como se temía siempre que despegaba una misión. El Challenger se incendió porque se presentaron fugas de combustible luego de 73 segundos de vuelo y el Columbia se desintegró al regresar a la atmósfera porque un pedazo de espuma aislante se desprendió y rompió el ala izquierda del aparato, a pesar de lo cual la NASA autorizó su regreso a la tierra, aunque no es claro si habría alguna forma de reparar el plano en el espacio.
El transbordador es un avión pequeño, pero muy ancho y espacioso pues se trata de un carguero. Mide 17.25 metros de altura en la cola, 37.24 metros de largo y se apoya en una envergadura de 23.8 metros de ancho. Para dar una referencia, metros más o menos, es muy cercano al tamaño de un Airbus 320.
Cualquiera de los transbordadores depende de propulsión externa para ascender y salir de la órbita terrestre. Para ello lo acoplan en la plataforma de lanzamiento a dos cohetes. Para surtir el combustible, hay un gran tanque desechable que mide 46.14 metros de largo y 8.28 metros de diámetro. Va lleno de oxígeno e hidrógeno líquidos y alimenta los tres motores del transbordador que funcionan durante 8 minutos y medio después del lanzamiento, hasta una altura de 109 kilómetros.
Otros dos cohetes laterales, recuperables, que pesan cada uno 6 toneladas, van cargados con perclorato de amonio (oxidante) y aluminio (combustible). Todo el conjunto pesa 2.041 toneladas pero apenas regresan 104 toneladas después del viaje, representadas en el peso de la nave vacía.
Para maniobrar en el espacio y para regresar a la tierra quebrando la resistencia de la atmósfera, los transbordadores llevan tres motores que pueden generar un empuje de 1.8 meganewtons y son las plantas motrices más poderosas jamás construidas. Estos motores son reutilizables y se encienden en varias fases de cada
misión. Se fabricaron 46 unidades.
En el diseño de la fantástica máquina que resume la tecnología espacial pues se actualizó constantemente aunque nunca perdió su esencia técnica, tal como pasó con el avión supersónico Concorde, jugó más el aparato que el hombre pues no tiene ningún sistema de protección para los 5 a 7 tripulantes que suelen conducirlo. También es cierto que en cualquiera de las condiciones de funcionamiento, salvo tal vez en su aproximación final a la pista, no hay condiciones exteriores en caso de una eyección para que sobrevivieran sus pilotos, que volaron siempre amarrados a un potencial ataúd.
Los dos accidentes y los fantásticos costos de volar los transbordadores acabaron por enterrar el ambicioso y espectacular programa espacial de los Estados Unidos, que llegó a ser compartido con los orbitadores rusos y la estación espacial soviética, generando una paz en el espacio en donde se temía una guerra de alcances insospechados. En 2004, el presidente Bush le dictó la sentencia de defunción al programa a partir de 2010 una vez se terminara el montaje de la estación espacial, que ahora será atendida por las naves rusas Soyouz.
Bush, sin embargo, dejó el sueño espacial abierto pues lanzó un nuevo programa "Constellation" que supuestamente llevaría de nuevo al hombre a la luna en 2020. En realidad era una reestructuración del programa Apolo, que funcionaría con cohetes y módulos como el ya visto. Poco se demoró el presidente Obama en descartar también este proyecto con una frase contundente:
"A la luna ya fuimos, el espacio es enorme".
Para acometer la conquista del espacio en términos más ambiciosos se hará una nueva generación del transbordador, más eficiente y capaz en el cual el hombre visite asteroides en 2025 y vaya a Marte (2030), según Obama, pero hasta la fecha, cuando el transbordador hace su vuelo de despedida, todo está en puras palabras y fantasía.
Entre tanto, hay sociedades privadas que trabajan en crear un sistema de vuelos comerciales de carga, no tripulados en órbitas bajas. Se trata de las firmas Space X y Orbital Science que han recibido apoyo económico de la Nasa, mientras se inventa una manera rentable de conciliar los sueños espaciales del hombre con la verdadera utilidad de estos aparatos.
José Clopatofsky
Con información de Nasa y múltiples sitios de Internet relacionados.
Los seis aparatos
ENTERPRISE: Salió en junio de 1977. Fue una maqueta operativa que nunca estuvo en el espacio pues se utilizó para todos los ensayos preliminares de vuelo. Está en el Museo del Aire y del Espacio, en Washington.
COLUMBIA: Debutó en abril del 81 y fue el primer transbordador que estuvo en el espacio. Después de 28 vuelos y 300 días en órbita, estalló al regresar a la atmósfera terrestre el 1 de febrero de 2003. Hizo la misión más larga, de 17 días y 15 horas.
CHALLENGER: Aparece en abril del 83. Hizo 9 misiones y en una de ellas se hizo la primera salida al espacio por parte de un astronauta. Se incendió al despegar el 28 de enero de 1986.
DISCOVERY: Entró en servicio en agosto de 1984 y realizó 39 misiones, el récord en la materia. Lo jubilaron el 9 de marzo de este año. Puso en órbita el telescopio Hubble y por primera vez tuvo una mujer en sus mandos, Eileen Collins.
ATLANTIS: Lo activaron en octubre de 1985. Hizo 33 misiones que
sumaron 303 días en órbita. Envió la sonda Galileo hacia Júpiter y atendió fundamentalmente labores militares en la estación rusa MIR y en la ISS (International Space Station). A última hora, le autorizaron una misión adicional que será la final del proyecto.
ENDEAVOUR: El más nuevo pues se estrenó el 7 de mayo de 1992 y realizó el, hasta ahora, vuelo final que cerraría la era de los transbordadores el 1 de junio de este año. En 25 misiones hizo el mantenimiento del telescopio espacial Hubble y recuperó el satélite japonés Space Flyer. Lo usaron básicamente en el montaje de la ISS.
Aló... aquí houston
El corazón de las misiones estaba en Houston, donde opera el centro de dirección de vuelo, cuya complejidad se aprecia claramente. El puesto de mandos del transbordador y en general todo su interior son un mar de indicadores y computadores desde los cuales se maneja no solo la nave sino también toda la carga, brazos para manipularla, cámaras, instrumentos de medición y el ambiente interno de la cabina.
Dependencia
Una vez en tierra, el transbordador no tenía posibilidad de movimientos autónomos por falta de motores. Para ir de una base a otra, por ejemplo, cuando aterrizaba en California y debía ir al sitio de lanzamiento en el Kennedy Space Center de Florida, lo volaban sobre un Boeing 747 "Jumbo" acondicionado para este efecto. También estaba previsto remolcarlo en carreteras normales, rodando sobre sus propias ruedas. Un enorme aparato se encargaba de moverlo desde su hangar de preparación y colocarlo en el sitio de lanzamientos.
Llegaba con el impulso
Una de las características desconocidas de los transbordadores es que una vez quebrada la resistencia para reingresar a la atmósfera terrestre, no disponía de motores para llegar a la pista. Funciona como un planeador de ahí que la maniobra de llegada es sumamente compleja y se debía preparar con suma atención desde el punto de vista meteorológico. En Estados Unidos había tres bases preparadas para recibirlo de manera permanente (Kennedy en Florida y Edwards y Vanderberg en California, pero en el resto del mundo había muchos sitios adecuados para un aterrizaje en caso de que el mal tiempo lo obligara y se acabara el impulso.
Después de entrar a la atmósfera a unos 40.000 kilómetros por hora y a 120 kilómetros de altura, se hace el descenso hacia la pista sin motores. A 3.000 metros de altura y a 12 kilómetros de la
pista, se aplican los frenos aerodinámicos para bajar la velocidad de 680 a 346 kph, que es su velocidad de toque (260 kph en un avión normal). El tren de ruedas se saca a 430 kph. Al tocar tierra se activan los frenos aerodinámicos (Speed brakes) y los mecánicos y cuando va a 110 kph. sale un paracaídas, que se despliega asistido por un pequeño cohete, que completa la detención.
Aunque tiene obviamente toda suerte de automatismos de pilotaje en la mayoría de las misiones el aterrizaje se hizo manualmente.
La pista de Florida tiene casi 5 kilómetros de largo y 91 metros de ancho y todas las alternas son similares o más grandes.
FRASES
ENTERPRISE: Salió en junio de 1977. Fue una maqueta operativa que nunca estuvo en el espacio pues se utilizó para todos los ensayos preliminares de vuelo. Está en el Museo del Aire y del Espacio, en Washington.
COLUMBIA: Debutó en abril del 81 y fue el primer transbordador que estuvo en el espacio. Después de 28 vuelos y 300 días en órbita, estalló al regresar a la atmósfera terrestre el 1 de febrero de 2003. Hizo la misión más larga, de 17 días y 15 horas.
CHALLENGER: Aparece en abril del 83. Hizo 9 misiones y en una de ellas se hizo la primera salida al espacio por parte de un astronauta. Se incendió al despegar el 28 de enero de 1986.
DISCOVERY: Entró en servicio en agosto de 1984 y realizó 39 misiones, el récord en la materia. Lo jubilaron el 9 de marzo de este año. Puso en órbita el telescopio Hubble y por primera vez tuvo una mujer en sus mandos, Eileen Collins.
ATLANTIS: Lo activaron en octubre de 1985. Hizo 33 misiones que
sumaron 303 días en órbita. Envió la sonda Galileo hacia Júpiter y atendió fundamentalmente labores militares en la estación rusa MIR y en la ISS (International Space Station). A última hora, le autorizaron una misión adicional que será la final del proyecto.
ENDEAVOUR: El más nuevo pues se estrenó el 7 de mayo de 1992 y realizó el, hasta ahora, vuelo final que cerraría la era de los transbordadores el 1 de junio de este año. En 25 misiones hizo el mantenimiento del telescopio espacial Hubble y recuperó el satélite japonés Space Flyer. Lo usaron básicamente en el montaje de la ISS.
Aló... aquí houston
El corazón de las misiones estaba en Houston, donde opera el centro de dirección de vuelo, cuya complejidad se aprecia claramente. El puesto de mandos del transbordador y en general todo su interior son un mar de indicadores y computadores desde los cuales se maneja no solo la nave sino también toda la carga, brazos para manipularla, cámaras, instrumentos de medición y el ambiente interno de la cabina.
Dependencia
Una vez en tierra, el transbordador no tenía posibilidad de movimientos autónomos por falta de motores. Para ir de una base a otra, por ejemplo, cuando aterrizaba en California y debía ir al sitio de lanzamiento en el Kennedy Space Center de Florida, lo volaban sobre un Boeing 747 "Jumbo" acondicionado para este efecto. También estaba previsto remolcarlo en carreteras normales, rodando sobre sus propias ruedas. Un enorme aparato se encargaba de moverlo desde su hangar de preparación y colocarlo en el sitio de lanzamientos.
Llegaba con el impulso
Una de las características desconocidas de los transbordadores es que una vez quebrada la resistencia para reingresar a la atmósfera terrestre, no disponía de motores para llegar a la pista. Funciona como un planeador de ahí que la maniobra de llegada es sumamente compleja y se debía preparar con suma atención desde el punto de vista meteorológico. En Estados Unidos había tres bases preparadas para recibirlo de manera permanente (Kennedy en Florida y Edwards y Vanderberg en California, pero en el resto del mundo había muchos sitios adecuados para un aterrizaje en caso de que el mal tiempo lo obligara y se acabara el impulso.
Después de entrar a la atmósfera a unos 40.000 kilómetros por hora y a 120 kilómetros de altura, se hace el descenso hacia la pista sin motores. A 3.000 metros de altura y a 12 kilómetros de la
pista, se aplican los frenos aerodinámicos para bajar la velocidad de 680 a 346 kph, que es su velocidad de toque (260 kph en un avión normal). El tren de ruedas se saca a 430 kph. Al tocar tierra se activan los frenos aerodinámicos (Speed brakes) y los mecánicos y cuando va a 110 kph. sale un paracaídas, que se despliega asistido por un pequeño cohete, que completa la detención.
Aunque tiene obviamente toda suerte de automatismos de pilotaje en la mayoría de las misiones el aterrizaje se hizo manualmente.
La pista de Florida tiene casi 5 kilómetros de largo y 91 metros de ancho y todas las alternas son similares o más grandes.
FRASES
La aventura tecnológica más costosa y osada de la historia aterriza definitivamente. Estados Unidos da por terminado el proyecto de los transbordadores espaciales y ahora piensa en otra fantasía: ir a Marte en el 2030.
En cualquier de sus manifestaciones, el Transbordador era espectacular. Por ejemplo cuando era trasladado entre las bases sobre un Boeing 747 especialmente acondicionado para esta tarea tan singular.
Cada vez que se encendían los megamotores había un riesgo enorme de incendios y explosiones.
COPYRIGHT © 2011 EL TIEMPO Casa Editorial
viernes, 3 de junio de 2011
A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense. – Proverbs 19:11 (NIV)
It is one thing to be patient when things are going our way; it is another thing to be patient when we feel wronged. As C.S. Lewis stated, “Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying us at the moment.” We show our true wisdom when we are faced with offense. Can we overlook the faults of others – even when it hurts?
© 2011 theDailyBibleVerse.org
miércoles, 18 de mayo de 2011
martes, 3 de mayo de 2011
viernes, 29 de abril de 2011
Half a Miracle: Medellín's rebirth is nothing short of astonishing. But have the drug lords really been vanquished?
Tomado de: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/half_a_miracle?page=full
Autor: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, SETH COLBY
Autor: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, SETH COLBY
Francis Fukuyama is Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Seth Colby is executive director of the Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Fifteen years ago, a single mother named Libia Gomez converted part of her modest cinder-block house into a shop selling sundries ranging from pencils to toothpaste. The location was hardly ideal. Gomez lived in Santo Domingo Savio, a onetime squatter community on a steep, forested slope overlooking the Colombian city of Medellín that had evolved into a permanent slum.
Santo Domingo had grown so violent that even the police would not dare to enter. Gomez could see Medellín's city center, a mere two miles to the south, from Santo Domingo, but getting there safely was nearly impossible because traveling down the hill into town would have required crossing multiple zones controlled by rival armed groups. The rest of the city was not much better: Several years after Pablo Escobar, kingpin of the Medellín cocaine cartel, had been gunned down by police while fleeing across the rooftops of the middle-class barrio Los Olivos, Medellín remained the world's most violent city.
Today, Gomez is able to look down on the once impassable route from aboard the Metrocable, a ski-resort-style gondola system that carries residents of Santo Domingo high over the cityscape of red-brick buildings to the metro linking them to the rest of Medellín. Her shop sits in the shadow of the Parque Biblioteca España, an ultramodern library complex that presides over the city like the Spanish citadels of 500 years ago. The surrounding community has become one of the city's most popular tourist draws. "In the old days, my son would be afraid to walk to school. Now he walks freely," Gomez told us.
This is the sort of story people offer when they talk about the "Miracle of Medellín." In 1991, the city had an astronomical 381 homicides per 100,000 residents (by contrast, the murder rate in Ciudad Juárez, the bloody epicenter of Mexico's drug war, was only half that last year). But today Medellín has, incredibly, become as safe as Washington.
Medellín's reinvention holds potentially important lessons not only for the drug war in Mexico, but also for everyone else. Over the past generation, Americans have grown cynical about grand experiments in urban planning and other sweeping social-policy programs. But for most of the world's population, consumed with the necessities of day-to-day existence, getting social services right matters a lot more than ideology, as populist autocrats like Hugo Chávez and Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have figured out. Think government can't deliver smart, intelligent urban design that changes lives? Travel to Medellín, and it's hard to remember why it is that Americans have given up trying.
From the outset, Medellín had one big thing going against it: It was in Colombia. Over a 10-year period in the middle of the 20th century known as La Violencia, the country's two main political parties engaged in a brutal civil war that claimed 200,000 lives. The warring factions brokered a power-sharing deal in 1958, but peace was only temporary; the pact excluded other political movements -- most notably the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) -- which took to the jungles and began a still-ongoing guerrilla war against the Colombian state.
The war was enabled, and prolonged, by the traditional weakness of Colombia's national government, which operated only a small army and national police. Members of the country's traditional elite liked things this way, preferring to protect themselves by arming local paramilitaries. Over time, the paramilitaries grew in size, power, and independence and, like the leftist groups, began trafficking in drugs to support themselves. As peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside sought refuge in Medellín, the city's population exploded, growing from 350,000 in 1951 to 1.5 million in 1985 -- an influx the city was in no condition to absorb. The new inhabitants colonized the hillsides and created insular communities, like Santo Domingo, in which the state had no presence at all.
These conditions were exacerbated by the rise of the drug trade in the late 1970s, driven by demand for cocaine in the United States. But Medellín's problems didn't end with the fall of Escobar and the dismantling of the Medellín cartel in 1993; other drug cartels, guerrilla groups, and paramilitaries stepped in. By the early 2000s, so many people were being kidnapped and held for ransom by the FARC that a weekly radio show, Las Voces del Secuestro, was established to allow their relatives to broadcast messages to them.
Things began to change with the election of Álvaro Uribe as president of Colombia in 2002. Pledging "Democratic Security," Uribe dramatically expanded Colombia's military and national police and launched an all-out offensive against the FARC. Doing so rewrote the basic Colombian social contract: Henceforth, it would be the state and not private militias that provided security to Colombian citizens. The president negotiated an agreement with the largest paramilitary organization, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia; the group's fighters were required to lay down their weapons and abide by Colombia's anti-drug laws in exchange for pardons. But the demobilization has been severely criticized by observers both inside and outside Colombia. Human Rights Watch's Maria McFarland, a longtime Colombia observer, argues that the policy was too lenient on the paramilitaries and unenthusiastically enforced; many within the Colombian elite, she and other critics have charged, could not afford to push the judicial process too far for fear of exposing their own ties to the militias. Nevertheless, between 2002 and 2003 Medellín's homicide rate fell 46 percent, and it kept falling until 2007.
At the same time, Medellín was undergoing a crucial social and political transformation. In the early 1990s, fed-up members of the city's community organizations and religious, academic, and business institutions began convening regularly to discuss ideas to fix their embattled city. Alonso Salazar, the current mayor of Medellín and a participant in the meetings, recalls, "At that moment, a social movement came to life within the city that was dedicated to the resistance of the drug trade and violence."
It would take a political revolution, however, to turn the ideas into a real-world policy agenda. This revolution was led by a newcomer to politics: Sergio Fajardo, a professor with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin who became mayor in 2004, boosted by an unorthodox coalition of business people, grassroots community organizers, and the middle class.
Telegenic with his trademark blue jeans, open shirt, and curly locks, Fajardo began writing a regular column in the 1990s for the Medellín newspaper El Mundo about local politics. "We realized," Fajardo told us, "that politicians are the ones who make important decisions in society whether we like it or not, so we said to ourselves that we have to get into politics. Instead of saying how things should be, we said this is the way it is done." In Fajardo's view, Medellín had two fundamental, and related, problems: extreme inequality and a culture of violence. Fajardo believed that policies aimed at repairing the city's damaged social fabric could alleviate both.
The most striking feature of Fajardo's approach was his plan to erect high-quality public architecture in Medellín's poorest neighborhoods. "Architecture sends an important political message," he says. "When you go to the poorest neighborhood and build the city's most beautiful building, that gives a sense of dignity." Fajardo and his colleagues believed in social urbanism: the idea that modernist buildings and transportation systems of the sort Libia Gomez now enjoys would help bridge the enormous gulf of distrust separating the poor from mainstream society. In barrios like Santo Domingo and Comuna 13, the city created digitized maps of every street and building, noting where drug gangs operated and money flowed, and devised architectural features to disrupt them.
Fajardo also needed to deal with the thousands of demobilized fighters who had never interacted with normal society without a gun in their hands. This was no small task; many had lived in a world of violence and criminality for most of their adult lives. More than 70 percent of them were functionally illiterate, and few had employable skills. Unsurprisingly, the success of the reintegration programs Fajardo's administration launched has not been unequivocal. Human Rights Watch claims that many of the more than 30,000 officially "demobilized" in the country were not even active combatants, but, rather, poor individuals seeking generous social programs. In Medellín, 16 percent of the more than 5,000 participants have been expelled, arrested, or killed, and the temptation to relapse is unlikely to go away as long as jobs are few and wages are low. Still, Medellín's failure rate is lower than most other demobilization efforts in Africa and Asia -- and the cartels have not returned, at least not in force.
Of course, these new social programs cost a tremendous amount of money. The renovation of Comuna 13 alone, a barrio of 135,000 inhabitants, cost $155 million over a three-year period. Total spending by Medellín's city government doubled between 2004 and 2008. But two sources of funding in particular have made the gargantuan expense of rebuilding Medellín affordable: Medellín's city-owned utility company, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which is well run and profitable, and a high municipal tax rate that is tolerated by a uniquely civic-minded business elite. Many in this group refused to flee to Miami even at the height of the violence and have come to believe that a safer city is worth the extra cost. "We had a responsibility to our own family, the business, and the city," says Juan Luis Restrepo, the American-educated owner of a Medellín-based textile company.
Can Medellín's example help save Mexico? Yes and no. Because of Colombia's centralized system of government, Uribe was able to professionalize and expand law enforcement from Bogotá; federally organized Mexico's huge problem with police corruption, a major barrier to winning the drug war, lies primarily at the local level, beyond the constitutional reach of authorities in Mexico City.
That said, there are useful lessons Mexico can draw from the Medellín miracle. Like Colombia in the 1990s, Mexico is vastly underpoliced and has a weak judiciary, problems that can be solved in time with sufficient resources and will. But Colombia's drug war shows that the battle will not be won by military force alone. The government needs to bolster its legitimacy by offering people alternatives to crime and violence, as well as a renewed commitment to public services -- something Medellín's metro, its starkly beautiful new buildings, and civilized public spaces now do.
The harder lesson here, however, is that there are no quick fixes in a drug war, and two steps forward are often followed by one step back. After bottoming out in 2007, Medellín's homicide rate has since doubled (though it is still one-fifth of what it was at the city's early-1990s nadir). Nearly everyone in the city agrees that the uptick in violence was the result of the Colombian government's 2008 decision to extradite to the United States former paramilitary leader turned crime boss Diego Murillo Bejarano, locally known as Don Berna. What that meant, in effect, was that the critics had been correct: The Colombian government hadn't actually successfully demobilized the drug-trafficking paramilitaries. Instead, by seriously crippling the competing guerrillas, the government had given a monopoly to Don Berna. It was peace achieved through market dominance, not demilitarization -- and when Don Berna's extradition decapitated his organization and prompted a violent scramble for power among lower-ranking lieutenants, the peace fell apart.
But still, the chances that Colombia will return to the lawlessness of the 1990s are slim. This is the long and arduous path that Mexico has embarked on under President Felipe Calderón. It will not win the drug war anytime soon, but with sufficient political will, it can at least start moving in that direction.
Santo Domingo had grown so violent that even the police would not dare to enter. Gomez could see Medellín's city center, a mere two miles to the south, from Santo Domingo, but getting there safely was nearly impossible because traveling down the hill into town would have required crossing multiple zones controlled by rival armed groups. The rest of the city was not much better: Several years after Pablo Escobar, kingpin of the Medellín cocaine cartel, had been gunned down by police while fleeing across the rooftops of the middle-class barrio Los Olivos, Medellín remained the world's most violent city.
Today, Gomez is able to look down on the once impassable route from aboard the Metrocable, a ski-resort-style gondola system that carries residents of Santo Domingo high over the cityscape of red-brick buildings to the metro linking them to the rest of Medellín. Her shop sits in the shadow of the Parque Biblioteca España, an ultramodern library complex that presides over the city like the Spanish citadels of 500 years ago. The surrounding community has become one of the city's most popular tourist draws. "In the old days, my son would be afraid to walk to school. Now he walks freely," Gomez told us.
This is the sort of story people offer when they talk about the "Miracle of Medellín." In 1991, the city had an astronomical 381 homicides per 100,000 residents (by contrast, the murder rate in Ciudad Juárez, the bloody epicenter of Mexico's drug war, was only half that last year). But today Medellín has, incredibly, become as safe as Washington.
Medellín's reinvention holds potentially important lessons not only for the drug war in Mexico, but also for everyone else. Over the past generation, Americans have grown cynical about grand experiments in urban planning and other sweeping social-policy programs. But for most of the world's population, consumed with the necessities of day-to-day existence, getting social services right matters a lot more than ideology, as populist autocrats like Hugo Chávez and Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have figured out. Think government can't deliver smart, intelligent urban design that changes lives? Travel to Medellín, and it's hard to remember why it is that Americans have given up trying.
From the outset, Medellín had one big thing going against it: It was in Colombia. Over a 10-year period in the middle of the 20th century known as La Violencia, the country's two main political parties engaged in a brutal civil war that claimed 200,000 lives. The warring factions brokered a power-sharing deal in 1958, but peace was only temporary; the pact excluded other political movements -- most notably the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) -- which took to the jungles and began a still-ongoing guerrilla war against the Colombian state.
The war was enabled, and prolonged, by the traditional weakness of Colombia's national government, which operated only a small army and national police. Members of the country's traditional elite liked things this way, preferring to protect themselves by arming local paramilitaries. Over time, the paramilitaries grew in size, power, and independence and, like the leftist groups, began trafficking in drugs to support themselves. As peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside sought refuge in Medellín, the city's population exploded, growing from 350,000 in 1951 to 1.5 million in 1985 -- an influx the city was in no condition to absorb. The new inhabitants colonized the hillsides and created insular communities, like Santo Domingo, in which the state had no presence at all.
These conditions were exacerbated by the rise of the drug trade in the late 1970s, driven by demand for cocaine in the United States. But Medellín's problems didn't end with the fall of Escobar and the dismantling of the Medellín cartel in 1993; other drug cartels, guerrilla groups, and paramilitaries stepped in. By the early 2000s, so many people were being kidnapped and held for ransom by the FARC that a weekly radio show, Las Voces del Secuestro, was established to allow their relatives to broadcast messages to them.
Things began to change with the election of Álvaro Uribe as president of Colombia in 2002. Pledging "Democratic Security," Uribe dramatically expanded Colombia's military and national police and launched an all-out offensive against the FARC. Doing so rewrote the basic Colombian social contract: Henceforth, it would be the state and not private militias that provided security to Colombian citizens. The president negotiated an agreement with the largest paramilitary organization, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia; the group's fighters were required to lay down their weapons and abide by Colombia's anti-drug laws in exchange for pardons. But the demobilization has been severely criticized by observers both inside and outside Colombia. Human Rights Watch's Maria McFarland, a longtime Colombia observer, argues that the policy was too lenient on the paramilitaries and unenthusiastically enforced; many within the Colombian elite, she and other critics have charged, could not afford to push the judicial process too far for fear of exposing their own ties to the militias. Nevertheless, between 2002 and 2003 Medellín's homicide rate fell 46 percent, and it kept falling until 2007.
At the same time, Medellín was undergoing a crucial social and political transformation. In the early 1990s, fed-up members of the city's community organizations and religious, academic, and business institutions began convening regularly to discuss ideas to fix their embattled city. Alonso Salazar, the current mayor of Medellín and a participant in the meetings, recalls, "At that moment, a social movement came to life within the city that was dedicated to the resistance of the drug trade and violence."
It would take a political revolution, however, to turn the ideas into a real-world policy agenda. This revolution was led by a newcomer to politics: Sergio Fajardo, a professor with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin who became mayor in 2004, boosted by an unorthodox coalition of business people, grassroots community organizers, and the middle class.
Telegenic with his trademark blue jeans, open shirt, and curly locks, Fajardo began writing a regular column in the 1990s for the Medellín newspaper El Mundo about local politics. "We realized," Fajardo told us, "that politicians are the ones who make important decisions in society whether we like it or not, so we said to ourselves that we have to get into politics. Instead of saying how things should be, we said this is the way it is done." In Fajardo's view, Medellín had two fundamental, and related, problems: extreme inequality and a culture of violence. Fajardo believed that policies aimed at repairing the city's damaged social fabric could alleviate both.
The most striking feature of Fajardo's approach was his plan to erect high-quality public architecture in Medellín's poorest neighborhoods. "Architecture sends an important political message," he says. "When you go to the poorest neighborhood and build the city's most beautiful building, that gives a sense of dignity." Fajardo and his colleagues believed in social urbanism: the idea that modernist buildings and transportation systems of the sort Libia Gomez now enjoys would help bridge the enormous gulf of distrust separating the poor from mainstream society. In barrios like Santo Domingo and Comuna 13, the city created digitized maps of every street and building, noting where drug gangs operated and money flowed, and devised architectural features to disrupt them.
Fajardo also needed to deal with the thousands of demobilized fighters who had never interacted with normal society without a gun in their hands. This was no small task; many had lived in a world of violence and criminality for most of their adult lives. More than 70 percent of them were functionally illiterate, and few had employable skills. Unsurprisingly, the success of the reintegration programs Fajardo's administration launched has not been unequivocal. Human Rights Watch claims that many of the more than 30,000 officially "demobilized" in the country were not even active combatants, but, rather, poor individuals seeking generous social programs. In Medellín, 16 percent of the more than 5,000 participants have been expelled, arrested, or killed, and the temptation to relapse is unlikely to go away as long as jobs are few and wages are low. Still, Medellín's failure rate is lower than most other demobilization efforts in Africa and Asia -- and the cartels have not returned, at least not in force.
Of course, these new social programs cost a tremendous amount of money. The renovation of Comuna 13 alone, a barrio of 135,000 inhabitants, cost $155 million over a three-year period. Total spending by Medellín's city government doubled between 2004 and 2008. But two sources of funding in particular have made the gargantuan expense of rebuilding Medellín affordable: Medellín's city-owned utility company, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which is well run and profitable, and a high municipal tax rate that is tolerated by a uniquely civic-minded business elite. Many in this group refused to flee to Miami even at the height of the violence and have come to believe that a safer city is worth the extra cost. "We had a responsibility to our own family, the business, and the city," says Juan Luis Restrepo, the American-educated owner of a Medellín-based textile company.
Can Medellín's example help save Mexico? Yes and no. Because of Colombia's centralized system of government, Uribe was able to professionalize and expand law enforcement from Bogotá; federally organized Mexico's huge problem with police corruption, a major barrier to winning the drug war, lies primarily at the local level, beyond the constitutional reach of authorities in Mexico City.
That said, there are useful lessons Mexico can draw from the Medellín miracle. Like Colombia in the 1990s, Mexico is vastly underpoliced and has a weak judiciary, problems that can be solved in time with sufficient resources and will. But Colombia's drug war shows that the battle will not be won by military force alone. The government needs to bolster its legitimacy by offering people alternatives to crime and violence, as well as a renewed commitment to public services -- something Medellín's metro, its starkly beautiful new buildings, and civilized public spaces now do.
The harder lesson here, however, is that there are no quick fixes in a drug war, and two steps forward are often followed by one step back. After bottoming out in 2007, Medellín's homicide rate has since doubled (though it is still one-fifth of what it was at the city's early-1990s nadir). Nearly everyone in the city agrees that the uptick in violence was the result of the Colombian government's 2008 decision to extradite to the United States former paramilitary leader turned crime boss Diego Murillo Bejarano, locally known as Don Berna. What that meant, in effect, was that the critics had been correct: The Colombian government hadn't actually successfully demobilized the drug-trafficking paramilitaries. Instead, by seriously crippling the competing guerrillas, the government had given a monopoly to Don Berna. It was peace achieved through market dominance, not demilitarization -- and when Don Berna's extradition decapitated his organization and prompted a violent scramble for power among lower-ranking lieutenants, the peace fell apart.
But still, the chances that Colombia will return to the lawlessness of the 1990s are slim. This is the long and arduous path that Mexico has embarked on under President Felipe Calderón. It will not win the drug war anytime soon, but with sufficient political will, it can at least start moving in that direction.
All contents ©2011 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
miércoles, 27 de abril de 2011
Valor Ganado utilizando Microsoft Office Project 2007
Tomado de: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27367986/Valor-Ganado-utilizando-microsoft-office-project-2007
Autor: Jeysson Poquioma
Autor: Jeysson Poquioma
Copyright © 2011 Scribd Inc.
jueves, 14 de abril de 2011
Trabajo, responsabilidad y principios son la base de una vida exitosa: Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo
El presidente del Grupo Aval reveló en Caracol Radio los detalles de su vida. Dijo que no llora desde hace muchos años, pero recordó que la última vez que lo hizo fue cuando falleció su padre.
Reconoció que la prioridad en su vida ha sido su familia y que de hay el éxito de todas sus labores.
El hombre que maneja millones de pesos a nivel nacional e internacional manifestó que en su billetera tan solo carga un millón de pesos y manifestó que “me alcanza para bastante rato”.
“Ese millón me lo gasto pagando la peluquería o mando a comprar un remedio o dar una propina en plata en efectivo y todo los demás lo paga la oficina”, dijo Sarmiento Angulo en diálogo con Caracol Radio.
Un día de Sarmiento comienza a las 6:30 de la mañana cuando se despierta, para proceder a leer los periódicos, hace media hora de deporte y luego sale para la oficina. Regresa a su casa a “como a las nueve de la noche”.
Cuando está en la oficina se ocupa de los problemas del día a día y “me ocupo de lo que se ha hecho mal y apagar incendios”. También a leer y a pensar mucho en los negocios del grupo.
Manifestó que es una persona muy tranquila y que en su oficina tiene un computador y reconoció que no es ducho en sistemas porque la “generación electrónica me llegó un poco tarde”.
Luis Carlos Sarmiento manifestó que tiene problemas para conciliar el sueño y que se despierta varias veces en la noche debido a un problema químico en su organismo.
“Me gusta ir mucho a Europa porque esta la primavara y también voy a Bahamas o Miami porque en esta ciudad están mis hijos y mis nietos”, subrayó.
Comentó que a su hijo Luis Carlos Sarmiento lo regañaba mucho cuando era pequeño.
También aceptó que tiene un reloj muy sencillo y que compra la ropa hecha porque “ir al sastre es muy desesperante”.
Aceptó que le han regalado muchas cosas entre ropa, libros y lo más reciente un ipad.
“Siento una gran satisfacción y orgullo por lo poco o mucho que logrado sin atropellar a nadie”, subrayó el presidente del Grupo Aval.
Según Sarmiento un gran amigo fue Enrique Santamaría, quien ya murió y con quien compartió muchas andanzas por la vida.
Comentó que hasta el momento nadie lo consultado de la revista FORBES y que la información que toman provienen de datos públicos de los bancos para calcular cuanto tiene.
Reconoció que la prioridad en su vida ha sido su familia y que de hay el éxito de todas sus labores.
El hombre que maneja millones de pesos a nivel nacional e internacional manifestó que en su billetera tan solo carga un millón de pesos y manifestó que “me alcanza para bastante rato”.
“Ese millón me lo gasto pagando la peluquería o mando a comprar un remedio o dar una propina en plata en efectivo y todo los demás lo paga la oficina”, dijo Sarmiento Angulo en diálogo con Caracol Radio.
Un día de Sarmiento comienza a las 6:30 de la mañana cuando se despierta, para proceder a leer los periódicos, hace media hora de deporte y luego sale para la oficina. Regresa a su casa a “como a las nueve de la noche”.
Cuando está en la oficina se ocupa de los problemas del día a día y “me ocupo de lo que se ha hecho mal y apagar incendios”. También a leer y a pensar mucho en los negocios del grupo.
Manifestó que es una persona muy tranquila y que en su oficina tiene un computador y reconoció que no es ducho en sistemas porque la “generación electrónica me llegó un poco tarde”.
Luis Carlos Sarmiento manifestó que tiene problemas para conciliar el sueño y que se despierta varias veces en la noche debido a un problema químico en su organismo.
“Me gusta ir mucho a Europa porque esta la primavara y también voy a Bahamas o Miami porque en esta ciudad están mis hijos y mis nietos”, subrayó.
Comentó que a su hijo Luis Carlos Sarmiento lo regañaba mucho cuando era pequeño.
También aceptó que tiene un reloj muy sencillo y que compra la ropa hecha porque “ir al sastre es muy desesperante”.
Aceptó que le han regalado muchas cosas entre ropa, libros y lo más reciente un ipad.
“Siento una gran satisfacción y orgullo por lo poco o mucho que logrado sin atropellar a nadie”, subrayó el presidente del Grupo Aval.
Según Sarmiento un gran amigo fue Enrique Santamaría, quien ya murió y con quien compartió muchas andanzas por la vida.
Comentó que hasta el momento nadie lo consultado de la revista FORBES y que la información que toman provienen de datos públicos de los bancos para calcular cuanto tiene.
© CARACOL S.A.
martes, 15 de marzo de 2011
Japan Nuclear Crisis: What Is a Full Meltdown?
Tomado de: http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/12930_japannuclearcrisiswhatisafullmeltdown
Autor: Josh Dzieza
Autor: Josh Dzieza
NEW YORK – As Japan races to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, Josh Dzieza asks MIT's Ron Ballinger and Columbia’s David Brenner about partial and full meltdowns, hydrogen blasts, and windblown radiation. Plus, full coverage of Japan’s crisis.
Japan is on the brink of a nuclear disaster in the wake of its devastating earthquake and tsunami, with a third explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station damaging the steel containment structure of one reactor, and a fire at another spewing radioactive material into the air. Before the latest explosion and fire, as workers raced to stay ahead of a full meltdown, The Daily Beast spoke with Ron Ballinger, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and David Brenner, director of the Columbia University Center for Radiological Research, about the difference between partial and full meltdowns, hydrogen blasts, and windblown radiation.
What’s the difference between a “partial” and “full” meltdown?
Brenner: Both phrases are not technical phrases. What they're to do with is the radioactive core of the nuclear reactor, which needs to be covered with water to keep it cool. What one means by meltdown is that at some point the core isn't covered by water. It could mean that a few inches are uncovered for a few seconds, or that the entire core is uncovered. The phrase covers a multitude of sins.
Ballinger: In that context they're talking about fuel that's been damaged and partially melted. Some of the fuel has probably been oxidized and breached and melted at the top of the core where the heat rises. The core height is about 4 meters, so the top meter of the core has probably been damaged.
And a full meltdown?
Ballinger: If they don't cool the plant, if they're not successful... then eventually the entire core would melt. Then it would melt into the bottom of the vessel. Then you get to this theoretical point where if they can’t cool it, then eventually the vessel itself, the steel, would melt, and you’d end up with a bunch of melted fuel and steel on the bottom of the concrete faceplate of the plant, in the containment vessel. And then it would have to get out of there. That’s what I would call a full meltdown....
Are meltdowns necessarily dangerous?
Brenner: They’re certainly not good. You can contrast the two major nuclear incidents of the past: Both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were meltdowns, but the difference in scale is enormous. Chernobyl was the equivalent of 1 million Three Mile Islands. A “meltdown” certainly is not a good thing, but the ultimate consequence is how much radioactivity is released into the environment. You can have a situation like Three Mile Island, where it’s extremely small amount, or a situation like Chernobyl.
Which does Fukushima look like?
Certainly looks much more like a Three Mile Island. There are a lot of similarities between this and Three Mile Island. In both cases they were able to shut the reactor down almost immediately. That was not the case in Chernobyl. The whole point was that they couldn't shut the reactor down. In Three Mile Island and in the Japanese reactors, they shut it down.
Once you shut it down, there's still a low-level reaction going, so you have to keep water covering the fuel. What happened in Three Mile Island and Japan is that they couldn't do that. The secondary cooling system that pumps water over the core failed.
Cooling
All of the Daiichi reactors shut down automatically when the earthquake struck. The problem is that it fission reactions don’t just stop; they fade slowly, continuing to produce energy and tremendous heat for days. Normally a cooling system would run water over the core after it shut down, but that system lost power, first when the power station was cut off from the grid, then again when the tsunami swamped the backup diesel generators.
Now that the cooling system has failed, what happens?
The core is going to get hotter and hotter. The nuclear material is enclosed in a metal cylinder, zirconium, which can react with water at high temperatures and produce hydrogen, which is explosive in the right situation. So when you start to get buildups of hydrogen, you have to vent it. But when you vent it, you also vent the radioactive material in the air inside the container. That’s probably where the radioactivity detected comes from.
Ballinger: There are two vectors going on. There’s the decay heat generated by the fission products in the fuel, and that heat has to be removed. If they can’t remove the heat, then the thing heats up. But the decay heat rate is decreasing with time, because the radioactive fission products are decaying away, at the same time you’re having to remove the heat. So the amount of heat you have to remove is decreasing with time, so the amount of cooling they need is going to decrease with time.
The other source of vector is the reaction between the zirconium and water. The zirconium alloy will react with water to produce hydrogen and oxide, but it also produces heat that has to be removed. So one source of heat—the decay of the fission products—is decreasing with time, and the other is a function of temperature, so you decrease the temperature, you decrease the oxygenation rate. It’s like baking a cake. If you set the oven at 300 degrees it’ll cook in a hour. If you set it for 350 degrees it will cook in 20 minutes. So as they cool the plant down, the rate of oxygenation will also go down. And it’s not a linear function. For every 50 degrees Centigrade, you change the chemical reaction rate by a factor of two.
Are there any signs that indicate how successful they’re being in cooling the reactor?
You can get an idea of how successful that is by looking at how often they have to vent the gas—the non-condensable gasses, the hydrogen and stuff. That’s going down and down and down. So they’re having success at cooling. It doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of fuel damage, it just means the oxygenation rates are going down, so they’re having success at cooling it.
There were explosions at the No. 2 and 3 reactors when they vented them. Why do they keep exploding? And what can they do to prevent an explosion?
The trick when you’re venting is to make sure you have a lot of dilution, to make sure you don’t have a hydrogen concentration above 5 or 6 percent. So I’m sure what they’re doing is they’re venting it slower and using a lot of blowers to make sure the concentration doesn’t get that high. Hydrogen is a funny gas. It tends to pool. It’s lighter than air, so it rises, and in a building—think of where the fans are, they’re in the ceiling, well that’s where the sparks from the motors are. Hydrogen will tend to rise and pool in the ceiling area, so the hydrogen concentration could be less than flammable on average, but in certain areas if you’re not careful it can get above the flammable point. They either vented too fast or didn’t realize it was concentrating.
I’ve read that there’s spent fuel stored near the reactor. Is it common practice to store fuel on site?
Yes, there are two places where they put spent fuel. When they take it out of the reactor it’s still generating heat. The decay heat is still there. So they put it in pools full of water. After a long enough period of time they can take the fuel and put it in these monstrous cement casks that you could fire a missile at and nothing happens, and they put them out on a pad and it’s cooled by natural convection.
Radiation
Officials have expanded the evacuation radius around the stricken reactors. First it was 3 kilometers, then when they vented the reactor it was expanded to 10 kilometers. When the reactor exploded, it went up to 20. Then the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States said radiation was unlikely to reach the West Coast in harmful amounts.
Is the amount of radiation emitted when they vent the reactor dangerous?
Brenner: Depends on how much comes out. From the point of view of the surrounding population, probably not. But the situation is still ongoing, so we don’t know. There’s one good thing in this terrible situation: Winds are offshore at the moment, blowing what radioactivity is in the air out into the ocean.
Could the wind blow the radiation to North America?
Brenner: Yes, but the question is how much. The Chernobyl accident was far larger than we can imagine this one to be. You could detect the radioactivity worldwide. But it’s a matter of how much radioactivity would arrive at the West Coast. Right now it’s absolutely negligible. And even in a worst-case scenario, it’s hard to imagine it would be significant. It’s hard to imagine a significant exposure to anyone on the West Coast simply because of the distance involved: As the wind blows the plume further, it gets more and more dispersed. The worst case still wouldn’t be Chernobyl.
Would it be dangerous to people nearer the reactor? They’ve evacuated people within a 20-kilometer radius.
Brenner: It’s not an unreasonable precaution. In any scenario, the dose will be less and less as you get further from the source. But it will certainly be closer to Three Mile Island than Chernobyl.
How long will the radiation last?
Brenner: It depends on the isotope. Iodine has a half-life of a week. Cesium will be around for years. But the consequences depend on how much is released. Even if cesium is around for a long time, if there’s not much of it, it won’t be an issue. And it depends on which direction the wind is blowing, and again, that’s favorable right now.
Japan is on the brink of a nuclear disaster in the wake of its devastating earthquake and tsunami, with a third explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station damaging the steel containment structure of one reactor, and a fire at another spewing radioactive material into the air. Before the latest explosion and fire, as workers raced to stay ahead of a full meltdown, The Daily Beast spoke with Ron Ballinger, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and David Brenner, director of the Columbia University Center for Radiological Research, about the difference between partial and full meltdowns, hydrogen blasts, and windblown radiation.
What’s the difference between a “partial” and “full” meltdown?
Brenner: Both phrases are not technical phrases. What they're to do with is the radioactive core of the nuclear reactor, which needs to be covered with water to keep it cool. What one means by meltdown is that at some point the core isn't covered by water. It could mean that a few inches are uncovered for a few seconds, or that the entire core is uncovered. The phrase covers a multitude of sins.
Ballinger: In that context they're talking about fuel that's been damaged and partially melted. Some of the fuel has probably been oxidized and breached and melted at the top of the core where the heat rises. The core height is about 4 meters, so the top meter of the core has probably been damaged.
And a full meltdown?
Ballinger: If they don't cool the plant, if they're not successful... then eventually the entire core would melt. Then it would melt into the bottom of the vessel. Then you get to this theoretical point where if they can’t cool it, then eventually the vessel itself, the steel, would melt, and you’d end up with a bunch of melted fuel and steel on the bottom of the concrete faceplate of the plant, in the containment vessel. And then it would have to get out of there. That’s what I would call a full meltdown....
Are meltdowns necessarily dangerous?
Brenner: They’re certainly not good. You can contrast the two major nuclear incidents of the past: Both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were meltdowns, but the difference in scale is enormous. Chernobyl was the equivalent of 1 million Three Mile Islands. A “meltdown” certainly is not a good thing, but the ultimate consequence is how much radioactivity is released into the environment. You can have a situation like Three Mile Island, where it’s extremely small amount, or a situation like Chernobyl.
Which does Fukushima look like?
Certainly looks much more like a Three Mile Island. There are a lot of similarities between this and Three Mile Island. In both cases they were able to shut the reactor down almost immediately. That was not the case in Chernobyl. The whole point was that they couldn't shut the reactor down. In Three Mile Island and in the Japanese reactors, they shut it down.
Once you shut it down, there's still a low-level reaction going, so you have to keep water covering the fuel. What happened in Three Mile Island and Japan is that they couldn't do that. The secondary cooling system that pumps water over the core failed.
Cooling
All of the Daiichi reactors shut down automatically when the earthquake struck. The problem is that it fission reactions don’t just stop; they fade slowly, continuing to produce energy and tremendous heat for days. Normally a cooling system would run water over the core after it shut down, but that system lost power, first when the power station was cut off from the grid, then again when the tsunami swamped the backup diesel generators.
Now that the cooling system has failed, what happens?
The core is going to get hotter and hotter. The nuclear material is enclosed in a metal cylinder, zirconium, which can react with water at high temperatures and produce hydrogen, which is explosive in the right situation. So when you start to get buildups of hydrogen, you have to vent it. But when you vent it, you also vent the radioactive material in the air inside the container. That’s probably where the radioactivity detected comes from.
Ballinger: There are two vectors going on. There’s the decay heat generated by the fission products in the fuel, and that heat has to be removed. If they can’t remove the heat, then the thing heats up. But the decay heat rate is decreasing with time, because the radioactive fission products are decaying away, at the same time you’re having to remove the heat. So the amount of heat you have to remove is decreasing with time, so the amount of cooling they need is going to decrease with time.
The other source of vector is the reaction between the zirconium and water. The zirconium alloy will react with water to produce hydrogen and oxide, but it also produces heat that has to be removed. So one source of heat—the decay of the fission products—is decreasing with time, and the other is a function of temperature, so you decrease the temperature, you decrease the oxygenation rate. It’s like baking a cake. If you set the oven at 300 degrees it’ll cook in a hour. If you set it for 350 degrees it will cook in 20 minutes. So as they cool the plant down, the rate of oxygenation will also go down. And it’s not a linear function. For every 50 degrees Centigrade, you change the chemical reaction rate by a factor of two.
Are there any signs that indicate how successful they’re being in cooling the reactor?
You can get an idea of how successful that is by looking at how often they have to vent the gas—the non-condensable gasses, the hydrogen and stuff. That’s going down and down and down. So they’re having success at cooling. It doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of fuel damage, it just means the oxygenation rates are going down, so they’re having success at cooling it.
There were explosions at the No. 2 and 3 reactors when they vented them. Why do they keep exploding? And what can they do to prevent an explosion?
The trick when you’re venting is to make sure you have a lot of dilution, to make sure you don’t have a hydrogen concentration above 5 or 6 percent. So I’m sure what they’re doing is they’re venting it slower and using a lot of blowers to make sure the concentration doesn’t get that high. Hydrogen is a funny gas. It tends to pool. It’s lighter than air, so it rises, and in a building—think of where the fans are, they’re in the ceiling, well that’s where the sparks from the motors are. Hydrogen will tend to rise and pool in the ceiling area, so the hydrogen concentration could be less than flammable on average, but in certain areas if you’re not careful it can get above the flammable point. They either vented too fast or didn’t realize it was concentrating.
I’ve read that there’s spent fuel stored near the reactor. Is it common practice to store fuel on site?
Yes, there are two places where they put spent fuel. When they take it out of the reactor it’s still generating heat. The decay heat is still there. So they put it in pools full of water. After a long enough period of time they can take the fuel and put it in these monstrous cement casks that you could fire a missile at and nothing happens, and they put them out on a pad and it’s cooled by natural convection.
Radiation
Officials have expanded the evacuation radius around the stricken reactors. First it was 3 kilometers, then when they vented the reactor it was expanded to 10 kilometers. When the reactor exploded, it went up to 20. Then the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States said radiation was unlikely to reach the West Coast in harmful amounts.
Is the amount of radiation emitted when they vent the reactor dangerous?
Brenner: Depends on how much comes out. From the point of view of the surrounding population, probably not. But the situation is still ongoing, so we don’t know. There’s one good thing in this terrible situation: Winds are offshore at the moment, blowing what radioactivity is in the air out into the ocean.
Could the wind blow the radiation to North America?
Brenner: Yes, but the question is how much. The Chernobyl accident was far larger than we can imagine this one to be. You could detect the radioactivity worldwide. But it’s a matter of how much radioactivity would arrive at the West Coast. Right now it’s absolutely negligible. And even in a worst-case scenario, it’s hard to imagine it would be significant. It’s hard to imagine a significant exposure to anyone on the West Coast simply because of the distance involved: As the wind blows the plume further, it gets more and more dispersed. The worst case still wouldn’t be Chernobyl.
Would it be dangerous to people nearer the reactor? They’ve evacuated people within a 20-kilometer radius.
Brenner: It’s not an unreasonable precaution. In any scenario, the dose will be less and less as you get further from the source. But it will certainly be closer to Three Mile Island than Chernobyl.
How long will the radiation last?
Brenner: It depends on the isotope. Iodine has a half-life of a week. Cesium will be around for years. But the consequences depend on how much is released. Even if cesium is around for a long time, if there’s not much of it, it won’t be an issue. And it depends on which direction the wind is blowing, and again, that’s favorable right now.
Josh Dzieza is an editorial assistant at The Daily Beast.
Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy
We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me. – Colossians 1:28-29
¿Cómo superar la desmotivación laboral?
Tomado de: http://noticias.elempleo.com/colombia/tendencias_laborales/como-superar-la-desmotivacion-laboral/9009787
Autor: Andrés Quintero Palomino
Autor: Andrés Quintero Palomino
Manifestar a tiempo las inconformidades puede ser la clave en este proceso.
Tal vez el peor escenario que pueda afrontar cualquier persona a nivel laboral y profesional es la falta de pasión por lo que se hace.
Algunos síntomas aparecen cuando esto sucede, las labores que antes se desarrollaban con normalidad, ahora son tediosas, demoran el doble y cualquier excusa surge con el objetivo de evitarlas.
"A nivel personal se asume una actitud defensiva y crítica ante las tareas asignadas, se dan frecuentes charlas entre compañeros señalando aspectos negativos del jefe o entorno laboral, las llegadas tarde se incrementan así como los permisos e incapacidades", señala Rosalba Montoya Pereira, presidente de Manpower en Colombia.
Asimismo, la directiva agrega que cuando la desmotivación es grupal, se generan numerosos rumores acerca de la situación de la organización, las renuncias aumentan, se entorpece la comunicación interna y se llega al punto de no acatar las instrucciones e incumplir con las responsabilidades.
¿Pero qué factores causan la desmotivación laboral?
- Improvisación en el trabajo
- Arduas jornadas laborales
- Remuneración inadecuada
- Mal trato
- Falta de reconocimiento
- Pocas oportunidades de crecimiento
Entonces, cómo solucionar esta situación que es tan común y a la que generalmente se le presta tan poca atención en la mayoría de organizaciones.
Montoya Pereira aconseja realizar un seguimiento permanente a los colaboradores, hacerlos participes de las decisiones y de la solución de los problemas, además de tener claro que la motivación empieza desde el proceso de selección.
"La parte más difícil es cuando se escoge al candidato pensando, no solo, en si esa persona tiene la experiencia y las competencias para el cargo, sino, si el puesto reúne las aspiraciones de la persona, se complementa con su proyecto de vida y va a disfrutar realizando la labor para la que fue contratada", complementa.
Y es que este tema no solo pasa por la inconformidad del trabajador en lo que hace, según estudios realizados en Estados Unidos y Europa, una persona desmotivada en sus labores genera un costo tres veces superior al de una con un padecimiento médico.
Otras de las consecuencias de tener empleados desmotivados son:
- Costos por ausentismo
- Daños en producción
- Alta rotación de personal
- Costos en imagen y reputación
- Baja productividad
- Negativos resultados económicos
Finalmente, la experta afirma que para evitar estas situaciones es fundamental que se de un trato respetuoso en todos los niveles de la organización, una orientación permanente, reconocer los logros alcanzados, así como estimular la participación y sobre todo, generar confianza.
Andrés Quintero Palomino
contenido@elempleo.com
Tal vez el peor escenario que pueda afrontar cualquier persona a nivel laboral y profesional es la falta de pasión por lo que se hace.
Algunos síntomas aparecen cuando esto sucede, las labores que antes se desarrollaban con normalidad, ahora son tediosas, demoran el doble y cualquier excusa surge con el objetivo de evitarlas.
"A nivel personal se asume una actitud defensiva y crítica ante las tareas asignadas, se dan frecuentes charlas entre compañeros señalando aspectos negativos del jefe o entorno laboral, las llegadas tarde se incrementan así como los permisos e incapacidades", señala Rosalba Montoya Pereira, presidente de Manpower en Colombia.
Asimismo, la directiva agrega que cuando la desmotivación es grupal, se generan numerosos rumores acerca de la situación de la organización, las renuncias aumentan, se entorpece la comunicación interna y se llega al punto de no acatar las instrucciones e incumplir con las responsabilidades.
¿Pero qué factores causan la desmotivación laboral?
- Improvisación en el trabajo
- Arduas jornadas laborales
- Remuneración inadecuada
- Mal trato
- Falta de reconocimiento
- Pocas oportunidades de crecimiento
Entonces, cómo solucionar esta situación que es tan común y a la que generalmente se le presta tan poca atención en la mayoría de organizaciones.
Montoya Pereira aconseja realizar un seguimiento permanente a los colaboradores, hacerlos participes de las decisiones y de la solución de los problemas, además de tener claro que la motivación empieza desde el proceso de selección.
"La parte más difícil es cuando se escoge al candidato pensando, no solo, en si esa persona tiene la experiencia y las competencias para el cargo, sino, si el puesto reúne las aspiraciones de la persona, se complementa con su proyecto de vida y va a disfrutar realizando la labor para la que fue contratada", complementa.
Y es que este tema no solo pasa por la inconformidad del trabajador en lo que hace, según estudios realizados en Estados Unidos y Europa, una persona desmotivada en sus labores genera un costo tres veces superior al de una con un padecimiento médico.
Otras de las consecuencias de tener empleados desmotivados son:
- Costos por ausentismo
- Daños en producción
- Alta rotación de personal
- Costos en imagen y reputación
- Baja productividad
- Negativos resultados económicos
Finalmente, la experta afirma que para evitar estas situaciones es fundamental que se de un trato respetuoso en todos los niveles de la organización, una orientación permanente, reconocer los logros alcanzados, así como estimular la participación y sobre todo, generar confianza.
Andrés Quintero Palomino
contenido@elempleo.com
Copyright © 2009, Leadersearch S.A.
viernes, 25 de febrero de 2011
viernes, 11 de febrero de 2011
La Colombiana que conmovió al jurado en el concurso de 'American Idol' en EE.UU.
COPYRIGHT © 2011 CEET Prohibida su reproducción parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular
jueves, 10 de febrero de 2011
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest 'burning platform' memo
Tomado de: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/
Autor: Chris Ziegler
Autor: Chris Ziegler
"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable." This is just one of many, many pieces of stark knowledge allegedly dropped by recently-appointed Nokia CEO Stephen Elop -- formerly of Microsoft -- in a roughly 1,300-word memo to the company's employees that we've received today. Though we can't vouch for the authenticity, it's notable that the memo contains a portion previously reported by The Register and heard by sources at TechCrunch Europe, so it would seem that we've simply received the whole thing. Elop goes on to suggest that his company is "standing on a burning platform" and must "change [its] behavior," suggesting that the adoption of a non-homegrown platform like Android or Windows Phone 7 is a more realistic possibility than ever before.
Update: We've now heard from multiple trusted sources that this memo is indeed real, and was posted to an internal Nokia employee system. That makes it one of the most exciting and interesting CEO memos we've ever seen -- and we're absolutely dying to see how Elop plans to shake things up.
Overall, the communique laments Nokia's lateral movement while Apple and Google have started eating its lunch on the mid- and high end and Shenzhen-based off brands have started to cut into its traditional dominance in emerging markets, leaving Espoo with virtually zero market leadership. It's a stark revelation that seems befitting of a man brought in from the outside -- he's neither Finnish, nor raised in the Nokia system -- and he promises to start revealing the way forward this Friday at the company's Capital Markets Day event where grandiose plans have been unveiled in the past.
Whether the memo is legitimate or not, the frequency and intensity of big-time rumors floating around Nokia ahead of Capital Markets Day (and MWC next week) have been pretty wild: we've heard they'll be announcing a partnership with Microsoft possibly revolving around Windows Phone 7, that a boatload of executives would be shown the door, and that Elop would start looking to Nokia's new Silicon Valley campus as its center of gravity, with execs and senior management expected to start spending more time outside Finland.
We'll know far, far more about what's going on over in Espoo in the next few days, but in the meantime, here are some choice quotes from the memo:
Update: We've now heard from multiple trusted sources that this memo is indeed real, and was posted to an internal Nokia employee system. That makes it one of the most exciting and interesting CEO memos we've ever seen -- and we're absolutely dying to see how Elop plans to shake things up.
Overall, the communique laments Nokia's lateral movement while Apple and Google have started eating its lunch on the mid- and high end and Shenzhen-based off brands have started to cut into its traditional dominance in emerging markets, leaving Espoo with virtually zero market leadership. It's a stark revelation that seems befitting of a man brought in from the outside -- he's neither Finnish, nor raised in the Nokia system -- and he promises to start revealing the way forward this Friday at the company's Capital Markets Day event where grandiose plans have been unveiled in the past.
Whether the memo is legitimate or not, the frequency and intensity of big-time rumors floating around Nokia ahead of Capital Markets Day (and MWC next week) have been pretty wild: we've heard they'll be announcing a partnership with Microsoft possibly revolving around Windows Phone 7, that a boatload of executives would be shown the door, and that Elop would start looking to Nokia's new Silicon Valley campus as its center of gravity, with execs and senior management expected to start spending more time outside Finland.
We'll know far, far more about what's going on over in Espoo in the next few days, but in the meantime, here are some choice quotes from the memo:
- "...there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem."
- "They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range."
- "Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core."
- "We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market."
- "...Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements..."
- "Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem."
- "We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning."
Hello there,
There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a "burning platform," and he needed to make a choice.
He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform" caused a radical change in his behaviour.
We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.
Over the past few months, I've shared with you what I've heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I'm going to share what I've learned and what I have come to believe.
I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
And, we have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.
For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.
In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.
And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core.
Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets.
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, "the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation." They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.
And the truly perplexing aspect is that we're not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.
This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we've lost market share, we've lost mind share and we've lost time.
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor's informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody's took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.
Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It's also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.
How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?
This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
We are working on a path forward -- a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.
The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.
Stephen.
© 2011 AOL Inc. All rights Reserved.
jueves, 3 de febrero de 2011
Copycat? Google Says Bing Copies Search Results
Tomado de: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=003000C9B5WF
Autor: Jennifer LeClaire
Autor: Jennifer LeClaire
The search wars have heated up, with Google charging that Bing is copying Google's search results, even gobbledygook queries. Google says an experiment found URLs from Google searches turned up on Bing and proved Microsoft is mining Google search results. Microsoft called Google's experiment a stunt and a "backhanded compliment."
Is Bing copying Google's search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no -- and it's stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing's alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries -- even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
"We created about 100 'synthetic queries' -- queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query."
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results -- i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal said. "We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google's suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they get.
A Spy-Novelesque Stunt
Microsoft quickly responded to Google's allegations. Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Bing, called the issue a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking.
"It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a backhanded compliment," Shum said. "But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer Relevant Products/Services data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."
Shum went on to say that many companies across the Internet use collective intelligence to make their products better every day and defended Bing's "distinct approach to search."
A Bitter PR Turn
So who's right? Is Bing all-out copying Google's search results? Or is Bing simply improving its search engine based on collective intelligence?
As Greg Sterling sees it, the verbal brawl marks a bitter public-relations turn in the intensifying competition between the two companies.
"Arguably Google did catch Bing doing something improper and copying selected Google results. But people also defend what Bing was doing as capturing 'public' user behavior and clicks and factoring that into its algorithm," Sterling said. "As it stands now, this isn't going to have much of an impact on consumers in the end, but among tech insiders it would appear to tarnish Bing's brand."
Is Bing copying Google's search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no -- and it's stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing's alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries -- even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
"We created about 100 'synthetic queries' -- queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query."
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results -- i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal said. "We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google's suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they get.
A Spy-Novelesque Stunt
Microsoft quickly responded to Google's allegations. Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Bing, called the issue a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking.
"It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a backhanded compliment," Shum said. "But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer Relevant Products/Services data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."
Shum went on to say that many companies across the Internet use collective intelligence to make their products better every day and defended Bing's "distinct approach to search."
A Bitter PR Turn
So who's right? Is Bing all-out copying Google's search results? Or is Bing simply improving its search engine based on collective intelligence?
As Greg Sterling sees it, the verbal brawl marks a bitter public-relations turn in the intensifying competition between the two companies.
"Arguably Google did catch Bing doing something improper and copying selected Google results. But people also defend what Bing was doing as capturing 'public' user behavior and clicks and factoring that into its algorithm," Sterling said. "As it stands now, this isn't going to have much of an impact on consumers in the end, but among tech insiders it would appear to tarnish Bing's brand."
© Copyright 2000-2011 NewsFactor Network. All rights reserved.
lunes, 31 de enero de 2011
Saving Your Career After a Failed IT Project
If you can turn it into something positive, a project gone wrong doesn’t have to damage your career.
The odds aren’t exactly in your favor. The Standish Group reports that more than two-thirds of all IT projects failed or didn’t meet expectations in 2008. With statistics like that, you’re probably going to face the ugly reality at least once.
Here are three tips for making sure your career doesn’t suffer:
Learn to spot failure before it happens.
Although you may not realize it the first time you work on a failing project, the warning signs are always there. If stakeholders aren’t attending meetings, developers are leaving the project or there are a lot of questions about daily expenses or resource allocations, for example, your project might be in trouble. If it happens, take some time to reflect on what those harbingers were and be on the lookout for them the next time.
Project managers should be able to step back from a project to see what’s going wrong and how they can correct the situation, says Emad E. Aziz, PMP, CEO, BRISK Consulting SAE, a project management consulting firm in Cairo, Egypt.
“They should be able to dive into the lowest level of detail and yet maintain a holistic view almost at the same time,” he says. “This allows them to learn from mistakes and measure the impact of decisions at one level or the other.”
Project managers can then transfer these learned skills from project to project, Mr. Aziz says. “This [ability] inevitably allows them to turn the negatives to positives and hence learn and progress in their careers,” he says.
Whether the project failure was completely your fault or not, you have to own up to it.
Instead of pointing fingers at others, admit your mistakes. Also clearly state what you’ll do differently next time, which will help restore your reputation.
In job interviews, failures should be presented as a balance to successful projects, says Justin Honaman, director, customer intelligence, Coca-Cola Customer Business Solutions, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
“Most employers expect an individual to have experienced failures in life — and in projects. Honestly, expect the best leaders to learn from failures and have the strength and tenacity to acknowledge lessons learned and apply those in the future,” says Mr. Honaman, who is also the author of Make It Happen! Live Out Your Personal Brand. “Potential employers will be more concerned if a prospective project manager has never had a failure.”
Clearly, the best option is to avoid failure all together, and there are some ways to improve your odds.
Make sure you scope the project properly from its outset, Mr. Aziz says. Clearly define deliverables, project life cycle and other constraints such as time, quality, requirements and platforms. “It is very important that project managers focus on the expected benefits for which the project was incepted. They should be able to track whether the project will realize those benefits or not,” he says.
Mr. Honaman also encourages project managers to be diligent with their communication. If failure seems likely, communicate with the project’s stakeholders about potential problems long before they happen.
“You need to do meeting notes after meetings, agendas for meetings, tackle issues and define owners of those issues, document the resolution and communicate the results,” he says. “It sounds very simple, but it requires very good organization and attention to detail.
If, despite all of your heroics, the project still fails, use that knowledge to your advantage.
“Identify what was learned from the situation and what steps were taken, to ensure the same errors are not made during the next project,” says Mr. Honaman.
The odds aren’t exactly in your favor. The Standish Group reports that more than two-thirds of all IT projects failed or didn’t meet expectations in 2008. With statistics like that, you’re probably going to face the ugly reality at least once.
Here are three tips for making sure your career doesn’t suffer:
Learn to spot failure before it happens.
Although you may not realize it the first time you work on a failing project, the warning signs are always there. If stakeholders aren’t attending meetings, developers are leaving the project or there are a lot of questions about daily expenses or resource allocations, for example, your project might be in trouble. If it happens, take some time to reflect on what those harbingers were and be on the lookout for them the next time.
Project managers should be able to step back from a project to see what’s going wrong and how they can correct the situation, says Emad E. Aziz, PMP, CEO, BRISK Consulting SAE, a project management consulting firm in Cairo, Egypt.
“They should be able to dive into the lowest level of detail and yet maintain a holistic view almost at the same time,” he says. “This allows them to learn from mistakes and measure the impact of decisions at one level or the other.”
Project managers can then transfer these learned skills from project to project, Mr. Aziz says. “This [ability] inevitably allows them to turn the negatives to positives and hence learn and progress in their careers,” he says.
Whether the project failure was completely your fault or not, you have to own up to it.
Instead of pointing fingers at others, admit your mistakes. Also clearly state what you’ll do differently next time, which will help restore your reputation.
In job interviews, failures should be presented as a balance to successful projects, says Justin Honaman, director, customer intelligence, Coca-Cola Customer Business Solutions, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
“Most employers expect an individual to have experienced failures in life — and in projects. Honestly, expect the best leaders to learn from failures and have the strength and tenacity to acknowledge lessons learned and apply those in the future,” says Mr. Honaman, who is also the author of Make It Happen! Live Out Your Personal Brand. “Potential employers will be more concerned if a prospective project manager has never had a failure.”
Clearly, the best option is to avoid failure all together, and there are some ways to improve your odds.
Make sure you scope the project properly from its outset, Mr. Aziz says. Clearly define deliverables, project life cycle and other constraints such as time, quality, requirements and platforms. “It is very important that project managers focus on the expected benefits for which the project was incepted. They should be able to track whether the project will realize those benefits or not,” he says.
Mr. Honaman also encourages project managers to be diligent with their communication. If failure seems likely, communicate with the project’s stakeholders about potential problems long before they happen.
“You need to do meeting notes after meetings, agendas for meetings, tackle issues and define owners of those issues, document the resolution and communicate the results,” he says. “It sounds very simple, but it requires very good organization and attention to detail.
If, despite all of your heroics, the project still fails, use that knowledge to your advantage.
“Identify what was learned from the situation and what steps were taken, to ensure the same errors are not made during the next project,” says Mr. Honaman.
©2011 Project Management Institute, Inc.
Hiring managers are not going to connect the dots for you
Tomado de: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/career/hiring-managers-are-not-going-to-connect-the-dots-for-you/2764
Autor: Toni Bowers
Autor: Toni Bowers
Toni Bowers is the Head Blogs Editor for TechRepublic and also writes for IT Leadership and Career Management.
Takeaway: One of the biggest mistakes job hunters make is to throw all of their experience into a resume without any regard to its relevance to the job at hand.
If there is one thing I’ve learned from being married for many, many, many years, it’s that you can never expect another person to know what you’re thinking unless you tell them. Thoughts do not float out of your brain and then magically absorb into the gray matter of another person.
And if those closest to you can’t read your mind, then you can be certain someone looking at your resume won’t be able to. In fact, unlike your loved ones, he or she won’t even try. That’s why you have to take pains to make the purpose of your resume obvious and match it to the position you’re applying for instead of using a generic resume for all job openings.
For example, if you’re applying for a project management position but you don’t list your PM experience until somewhere in the middle of your resume, then you can’t expect a busy hiring manager to slog through a list of your help desk experience until he finds something that is relevant to the job he’s offering.
You may have a deep history in IT and are responsible for almost everything IT-related in your company. However, stating first in your resume that you were in charge of reducing security risk for company data does not speak directly to project management (unless you specifically managed a roll-out of a security tool).
It’s also great if, for example, you have experience training people in Microsoft Windows 7 or a Cisco curriculum, but that does not directly speak to an ability to manage project teams and stakeholders. If you think it does speak to it that in some way, then spell out why. Don’t expect a harried hiring manager to connect the dots for you.
You may need to use a non-chronological format to do this, but you should begin with any migrations, site upgrades, accounting systems, or anything else that you planned and managed the process for. Then you can follow up with all the incidental education and experience you have that makes you an even better job candidate.
If there is one thing I’ve learned from being married for many, many, many years, it’s that you can never expect another person to know what you’re thinking unless you tell them. Thoughts do not float out of your brain and then magically absorb into the gray matter of another person.
And if those closest to you can’t read your mind, then you can be certain someone looking at your resume won’t be able to. In fact, unlike your loved ones, he or she won’t even try. That’s why you have to take pains to make the purpose of your resume obvious and match it to the position you’re applying for instead of using a generic resume for all job openings.
For example, if you’re applying for a project management position but you don’t list your PM experience until somewhere in the middle of your resume, then you can’t expect a busy hiring manager to slog through a list of your help desk experience until he finds something that is relevant to the job he’s offering.
You may have a deep history in IT and are responsible for almost everything IT-related in your company. However, stating first in your resume that you were in charge of reducing security risk for company data does not speak directly to project management (unless you specifically managed a roll-out of a security tool).
It’s also great if, for example, you have experience training people in Microsoft Windows 7 or a Cisco curriculum, but that does not directly speak to an ability to manage project teams and stakeholders. If you think it does speak to it that in some way, then spell out why. Don’t expect a harried hiring manager to connect the dots for you.
You may need to use a non-chronological format to do this, but you should begin with any migrations, site upgrades, accounting systems, or anything else that you planned and managed the process for. Then you can follow up with all the incidental education and experience you have that makes you an even better job candidate.
© 2011 CBS Interactive.
viernes, 28 de enero de 2011
2 Corinthians 7:10 – Godly sorrow brings repentance
Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. – 2 Corinthians 7:10
One of the great differences between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow is regret. Are we sorry for what we did, but we really wish that we could do that again? If so, you’ve not been gripped by the pain that your sin has brought to the heart of God and those around you. Godly sorrow has no regret of what has to happen in order to walk in a new way. Worldly sorrow is only aware of the pain and consequences of being caught and wants to do the bare minimum to get by. How about us? Are we living more by godly sorrow or worldly sorrow?
martes, 25 de enero de 2011
UNA OBRA MAESTRA PARA LA VIDA!
Autor: GEORGE CARLIN
La paradoja de nuestro tiempo es que tenemos edificios más altos y temperamentos más reducidos, carreteras más anchas y puntos de vista mas estrechos. Gastamos mas pero tenemos menos, compramos mas pero disfrutamos menos. Tenemos casas más grandes y familias más chicas, mayores comodidades y menos tiempo. Tenemos más grados académicos pero menos sentido común, mayor conocimiento pero menor capacidad de juicio, más expertos pero mas problemas, mejor medicina pero menor bienestar.
Bebemos demasiado, fumamos demasiado, despilfarramos demasiado, reímos muy poco, manejamos muy rápido, nos enojamos demasiado, nos desvelamos demasiado, amanecemos cansados, leemos muy poco, vemos demasiado televisión y oramos muy rara vez.
Hemos multiplicado nuestras posesiones pero reducido nuestros valores. Hablamos demasiado, amamos demasiado poco y odiamos muy frecuentemente.
Hemos aprendido a ganarnos la vida, pero no a vivir. Añadimos años a nuestras vidas, no vida a nuestros años. Hemos logrado ir y volver de la luna, pero se nos dificulta cruzar la calle para conocer a un nuevo vecino. Conquistamos el espacio exterior, pero no el interior. Hemos hecho grandes cosas, pero no por ello mejores.
Hemos limpiado el aire, pero contaminamos nuestra alma. Conquistamos el átomo, pero no nuestros prejuicios. Escribimos mas pero aprendemos menos. Planeamos más pero logramos menos. Hemos aprendido a apresurarnos, pero no a esperar. Producimos computadoras que pueden procesar mayor información y difundirla, pero nos comunicamos cada vez menos y menos.
Estos son tiempos de comidas rápidas y digestión lenta, de hombres de gran talla y cortedad de carácter, de enormes ganancias económicas y relaciones humanas superficiales. Hoy en día hay dos ingresos pero más divorcios, casas más lujosas pero hogares rotos. Son tiempos de viajes rápidos, pañales desechables, moral descartable, acostones de una noche, cuerpos obesos, y píldoras que hacen todo, desde alegrar y apaciguar, hasta matar. Son tiempos en que hay mucho en el escaparate y muy poco en la bodega. Tiempos en que la tecnología puede hacerte llegar este mensaje, y en que tú puedes elegir compartir estas reflexiones o simplemente borrarlas.
Bebemos demasiado, fumamos demasiado, despilfarramos demasiado, reímos muy poco, manejamos muy rápido, nos enojamos demasiado, nos desvelamos demasiado, amanecemos cansados, leemos muy poco, vemos demasiado televisión y oramos muy rara vez.
Hemos multiplicado nuestras posesiones pero reducido nuestros valores. Hablamos demasiado, amamos demasiado poco y odiamos muy frecuentemente.
Hemos aprendido a ganarnos la vida, pero no a vivir. Añadimos años a nuestras vidas, no vida a nuestros años. Hemos logrado ir y volver de la luna, pero se nos dificulta cruzar la calle para conocer a un nuevo vecino. Conquistamos el espacio exterior, pero no el interior. Hemos hecho grandes cosas, pero no por ello mejores.
Hemos limpiado el aire, pero contaminamos nuestra alma. Conquistamos el átomo, pero no nuestros prejuicios. Escribimos mas pero aprendemos menos. Planeamos más pero logramos menos. Hemos aprendido a apresurarnos, pero no a esperar. Producimos computadoras que pueden procesar mayor información y difundirla, pero nos comunicamos cada vez menos y menos.
Estos son tiempos de comidas rápidas y digestión lenta, de hombres de gran talla y cortedad de carácter, de enormes ganancias económicas y relaciones humanas superficiales. Hoy en día hay dos ingresos pero más divorcios, casas más lujosas pero hogares rotos. Son tiempos de viajes rápidos, pañales desechables, moral descartable, acostones de una noche, cuerpos obesos, y píldoras que hacen todo, desde alegrar y apaciguar, hasta matar. Son tiempos en que hay mucho en el escaparate y muy poco en la bodega. Tiempos en que la tecnología puede hacerte llegar este mensaje, y en que tú puedes elegir compartir estas reflexiones o simplemente borrarlas.
- Acuérdate de pasar algún tiempo con tus seres queridos porque ellos no estarán aquí siempre.
- Acuérdate de ser amable con quien ahora te admira, porque esa personita crecerá muy pronto y se alejara de ti.
- Acuérdate de abrazar a quien tienes cerca porque ese es el único tesoro que puedes dar con el corazón, sin que te cueste ni un centavo.
- Acuérdate de decir te amo a tu pareja y a tus seres queridos, pero sobre todo dilo sinceramente. Un beso y un abrazo puedes reparar una herida cuando se dan con toda el alma.
- Acuérdate de tomarte de la mano con tu ser querido y atesorar ese momento, porque un día esa persona ya no estará contigo.
- Date tiempo para amar y para conversar, y comparte tus mas preciadas ideas.
- La vida no se mide por el número de veces que tomamos aliento, sino por los extraordinarios momentos que nos lo quitan.
jueves, 20 de enero de 2011
The perfect Enterprise Software Project...myth or reality?
Tomado de: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=5238
Autor: Andrew Kring
Autor: Andrew Kring
I get called from time to time to assist with large software implementation projects that seem to be struggling. They’re either staring a long delay and cost overruns in the face, or just have a sense of uneasiness amongst the executives that things aren’t quite right.
During some of these engagements, I frequently think back to the early 2000’s when I would read Wall Street Journal articles about botched enterprise projects where companies were brought to their knees because they couldn’t ship or process customer orders for weeks. Sometimes the ensuing chaos had a dramatic impact on the profitability of the organization and other times it severely impacted customer satisfaction, or both!
On one recent engagement, I thought to myself: Does a perfect Enterprise software project actually exist? Are there companies who have undertaken massive transformation projects and nailed it out of the park? Or is all of the hype and marketing by large and small software vendors just that, hype?
Well, the reality of that question may surprise you. According to studies, over 65% of all software projects are seriously challenged in some way (source: Standish Group 2007). Whether they go over budget, take too long, or just don’t yield the expected outcome. So, if you were a gambling person, would you bet that your project would succeed or fail? If you are counting on success, what can you do to avoid the pitfalls that befall so many endeavors?
Well, if you’re an IT project manager or even a member of a large project team, the answer actually lies with how engaged the executives are in the project! The number one reason that Enterprise software projects, big or small, fail, is because the executive sponsor(s) is not actively engaged in the process. They just think that one day the system will go live and all will be well. Miraculously, all benefits will be realized and sunshine and blue sky will reign. That is indeed not the case.
Even when I meet with prospective new Clients, the first thing I tell them is how critical their participation is. How they must make the necessary resources available and how they must themselves be engaged in the process. The majority of them give me “thumbs up” and promise with a big grin that they’re up for the task; I haven’t had one keep that promise yet (well, at least not flawlessly). I always have to make sure that my stake holders are engaged and that their teams are dedicated to a successful outcome. Sometimes this process will repeat itself two or three times during a project until, of course, I threaten to charge them. It’s not intuitive to think that an executive would pay thousands and thousands (or millions) of dollars for something and then take a laissez-faire attitude, but it happens all the time.
Making an Enterprise project successful is as much about actively participating as it is about picking the right Partner and software. Most companies focus on a rigorous vendor selection process with demos and presentations and lots of paperwork. But part of the formula for a successful outcome is to find a Partner that you are comfortable working with and software that is well renowned and has numerous successful installs. If you can work well with your Partner, they’ll keep you on the right track and engaged towards a successful outcome.
So what can you do?
As an IT professional leading a project or even as a member of a larger team, you can keep an eye on a few key points:
So if you’re looking to make sure that your software project is part of the minority of those that can be called a success, get your top leaders engaged, ask them the tough questions, and turn that myth into reality!
During some of these engagements, I frequently think back to the early 2000’s when I would read Wall Street Journal articles about botched enterprise projects where companies were brought to their knees because they couldn’t ship or process customer orders for weeks. Sometimes the ensuing chaos had a dramatic impact on the profitability of the organization and other times it severely impacted customer satisfaction, or both!
On one recent engagement, I thought to myself: Does a perfect Enterprise software project actually exist? Are there companies who have undertaken massive transformation projects and nailed it out of the park? Or is all of the hype and marketing by large and small software vendors just that, hype?
Well, the reality of that question may surprise you. According to studies, over 65% of all software projects are seriously challenged in some way (source: Standish Group 2007). Whether they go over budget, take too long, or just don’t yield the expected outcome. So, if you were a gambling person, would you bet that your project would succeed or fail? If you are counting on success, what can you do to avoid the pitfalls that befall so many endeavors?
Well, if you’re an IT project manager or even a member of a large project team, the answer actually lies with how engaged the executives are in the project! The number one reason that Enterprise software projects, big or small, fail, is because the executive sponsor(s) is not actively engaged in the process. They just think that one day the system will go live and all will be well. Miraculously, all benefits will be realized and sunshine and blue sky will reign. That is indeed not the case.
Even when I meet with prospective new Clients, the first thing I tell them is how critical their participation is. How they must make the necessary resources available and how they must themselves be engaged in the process. The majority of them give me “thumbs up” and promise with a big grin that they’re up for the task; I haven’t had one keep that promise yet (well, at least not flawlessly). I always have to make sure that my stake holders are engaged and that their teams are dedicated to a successful outcome. Sometimes this process will repeat itself two or three times during a project until, of course, I threaten to charge them. It’s not intuitive to think that an executive would pay thousands and thousands (or millions) of dollars for something and then take a laissez-faire attitude, but it happens all the time.
Making an Enterprise project successful is as much about actively participating as it is about picking the right Partner and software. Most companies focus on a rigorous vendor selection process with demos and presentations and lots of paperwork. But part of the formula for a successful outcome is to find a Partner that you are comfortable working with and software that is well renowned and has numerous successful installs. If you can work well with your Partner, they’ll keep you on the right track and engaged towards a successful outcome.
So what can you do?
As an IT professional leading a project or even as a member of a larger team, you can keep an eye on a few key points:
- How quickly are decisions being made?
- Does feedback from executive leaders take a long time or are there very few inquiries from top-execs regarding specifics on the project?
- Do the executives attend update meetings religiously?
- Overall, do you sense that the executives are fairly “hands-off”?
So if you’re looking to make sure that your software project is part of the minority of those that can be called a success, get your top leaders engaged, ask them the tough questions, and turn that myth into reality!
By Andrew King, Senior Partner with WebSan Solutions Inc.
WebSan Solutions Inc. is a Toronto based Microsoft Dynamics Certified Partner with a focus on achieving significant business benefit for Professional Services, Manufacturing and Distribution companies.
WebSan Solutions Inc. is a Toronto based Microsoft Dynamics Certified Partner with a focus on achieving significant business benefit for Professional Services, Manufacturing and Distribution companies.
© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
jueves, 13 de enero de 2011
10 workplace rules of engagement
Tomado de: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=2126
Autor: Steve Tobak
Autor: Steve Tobak
Here’s a thought. What if we all admit to being imperfect? While we strive to be good employees, good coworkers, and good bosses, sometimes we’re not. Sometimes the stresses of the modern world get to us and we’re not proud of our behavior. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people, it just means we’re normal human beings.
Instead of making believe that everyone else is “the problem” and painting a big fat bull’s-eye on the boss, calling each other a**holes, or acting out like spoiled children, how about we all fess up, admit that we can do better, and actually deal with the situation. I mean, wouldn’t that be more productive?
Just to be clear, I’m not just talking about behavior that diminishes organizational effectiveness and makes everyone around us miserable. I’m talking about behavior that actually hurts your career. So even if you’re a selfish, narcissistic SOB — like me — you need to pay attention to these 10 workplace rules of engagement.
Instead of making believe that everyone else is “the problem” and painting a big fat bull’s-eye on the boss, calling each other a**holes, or acting out like spoiled children, how about we all fess up, admit that we can do better, and actually deal with the situation. I mean, wouldn’t that be more productive?
Just to be clear, I’m not just talking about behavior that diminishes organizational effectiveness and makes everyone around us miserable. I’m talking about behavior that actually hurts your career. So even if you’re a selfish, narcissistic SOB — like me — you need to pay attention to these 10 workplace rules of engagement.
Note: This article originally appeared as an entry in BNET’s The Corner Office blog. It’s also available as a PDF download.
1: Instead of covering your ass, put your ass on line
Nobody ever advanced their career by covering their ass, and nobody ever got ahead without taking risks. No pain, no gain. Simple as that.
2: Don’t rip off ideas — riff on them
Instead of co-opting or outright stealing a coworker’s or employee’s idea, do what bloggers do: We’re always riffing on each other’s posts. Everybody benefits and some of the offshoots are better than the original.
3: Tell it straight; don’t sugarcoat or breathe your own fumes
That’s right, grow some cojones, be honest about what’s going on, and accept nothing less from others. Being a yes-man or surrounding yourself with them spells disaster for you and your organization.
4: Instead of protecting your turf, open up the playing field
The more you try to protect your domain, the faster you’ll lose it. Also, turf wars quickly deteriorate into dysfunctional silo behavior and bunker mentality. It’s all bad. Besides, influence without authority or control is the true test of leadership.
5: Don’t bitch about the boss; complement his weaknesses
Workers are constantly whining about their boss without realizing the harm it does to themselves. If you want to do your career some good, learn to identify and minimize your boss’s and coworkers’ issues. That’s what good leaders and effective managers do.
6: Attack the problem, not the person
People are always complaining that conflict stresses them out. When it’s directed at a person, it is bad news. But when it’s directed at solving a real customer or product problem, that’s another story. Workplace conflict is beneficial, as long as it isn’t personal.
7: Don’t place blame; take responsibility
Pointing fingers just creates tension or inflames already tense situations. By identifying and taking responsibility for issues, you bring them to light sooner and get them resolved faster — and you will be recognized for your effort.
8: Instead of making waves, make decisions
Dysfunctional managers love to disrupt things and create turmoil. In reality, they’re only disrupting their own already-tenuous jobs. Instead of making waves, dive in, analyze the problem, and propose a solution.
9: To break analysis paralysis, take a chill pill
One or two chronic debaters can effectively stall any kind of decision-making. I’ve seen entire organizations brought down by this insidious behavior. Instead of beating a dead horse, chill out, then meet back and actually make and document a decision. You can always change it later, but not if you never make the call.
10: Replace strategy du jour with strategic planning
The opposite problem of analysis paralysis is overreacting to a single data point and declaring a new direction, oftentimes without key stakeholders present. An effective strategic planning process will take care of that.
Other rules…
Okay, just try to tell me and all your fellow readers that you’ve never ever engaged in a single one of the dysfunctional behaviors that these rules are designed to minimize. Go ahead; but you know we won’t believe you.
In any case, those are my 10 but I can probably come up with more. Any suggestions for new rules to improve the dysfunctional workplace?
Nobody ever advanced their career by covering their ass, and nobody ever got ahead without taking risks. No pain, no gain. Simple as that.
2: Don’t rip off ideas — riff on them
Instead of co-opting or outright stealing a coworker’s or employee’s idea, do what bloggers do: We’re always riffing on each other’s posts. Everybody benefits and some of the offshoots are better than the original.
3: Tell it straight; don’t sugarcoat or breathe your own fumes
That’s right, grow some cojones, be honest about what’s going on, and accept nothing less from others. Being a yes-man or surrounding yourself with them spells disaster for you and your organization.
4: Instead of protecting your turf, open up the playing field
The more you try to protect your domain, the faster you’ll lose it. Also, turf wars quickly deteriorate into dysfunctional silo behavior and bunker mentality. It’s all bad. Besides, influence without authority or control is the true test of leadership.
5: Don’t bitch about the boss; complement his weaknesses
Workers are constantly whining about their boss without realizing the harm it does to themselves. If you want to do your career some good, learn to identify and minimize your boss’s and coworkers’ issues. That’s what good leaders and effective managers do.
6: Attack the problem, not the person
People are always complaining that conflict stresses them out. When it’s directed at a person, it is bad news. But when it’s directed at solving a real customer or product problem, that’s another story. Workplace conflict is beneficial, as long as it isn’t personal.
7: Don’t place blame; take responsibility
Pointing fingers just creates tension or inflames already tense situations. By identifying and taking responsibility for issues, you bring them to light sooner and get them resolved faster — and you will be recognized for your effort.
8: Instead of making waves, make decisions
Dysfunctional managers love to disrupt things and create turmoil. In reality, they’re only disrupting their own already-tenuous jobs. Instead of making waves, dive in, analyze the problem, and propose a solution.
9: To break analysis paralysis, take a chill pill
One or two chronic debaters can effectively stall any kind of decision-making. I’ve seen entire organizations brought down by this insidious behavior. Instead of beating a dead horse, chill out, then meet back and actually make and document a decision. You can always change it later, but not if you never make the call.
10: Replace strategy du jour with strategic planning
The opposite problem of analysis paralysis is overreacting to a single data point and declaring a new direction, oftentimes without key stakeholders present. An effective strategic planning process will take care of that.
Other rules…
Okay, just try to tell me and all your fellow readers that you’ve never ever engaged in a single one of the dysfunctional behaviors that these rules are designed to minimize. Go ahead; but you know we won’t believe you.
In any case, those are my 10 but I can probably come up with more. Any suggestions for new rules to improve the dysfunctional workplace?
© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
What to do after you've made a mistake
Tomado de: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=5206
Author: John McKee
Author: John McKee
“John, this could be the end for me. I’ve done a lot of good work, but where I work there’s little tolerance for screw-ups - the stakes are too big. I need your advice!”
The person speaking wasn’t a client; I’d actually just met him about 10 minutes before. We were at a party, he’d heard from someone that I help individuals improve their performance; and he came over to meet me. Then I got the download about his screw-up. Actually, screw-ups.
He’d clearly experienced a “rough patch.” This most recent hassle seemed to be just one in a series of problems he’d experienced. He told me his boss was probably ready to get rid of him. He wanted to keep his job but didn’t know what to do next.
Everyone, at some point, screws up. How they react afterward can be the difference between a lonely trip downhill and getting a pass for the ski lift to the big slopes. Here are 6 of my favorite tactics for dealing after you’ve made a mistake:
He’d clearly experienced a “rough patch.” This most recent hassle seemed to be just one in a series of problems he’d experienced. He told me his boss was probably ready to get rid of him. He wanted to keep his job but didn’t know what to do next.
Everyone, at some point, screws up. How they react afterward can be the difference between a lonely trip downhill and getting a pass for the ski lift to the big slopes. Here are 6 of my favorite tactics for dealing after you’ve made a mistake:
- Recognize that this issue doesn’t mean you are a bad manager or that you’re not doing a good job overall. It means you screwed up this time. Recognize the difference and vow to do better next time. And don’t aim for perfection; you’ll be disappointed every time.
- Listen to the criticism. Get past your emotions. Then look at the task at hand. Work through the problem using the same approaches you would if someone asked you to fix a problem caused by someone else.
- Don’t get defensive. One way or another, you’ve made a mistake - so make sure you understand the problem or issue. Ask questions to show that you’re open to the feedback. The goal is to get a better grasp on where you went wrong and what needs to be done to rectify the situation.
- Expect heat from others. If this is a big deal, or one in a series of smaller hassles, it’s likely that those affected (or your supervisor) are going to be cranky. Let them. Understand that it’s part of a necessary process. Once they’ve “shared” with you, it will be easier for all involved to move forward. At that point, it can be smart to ask what they’d do to improve things.
- Be a grownup about it - admit that you messed up. Many, perhaps most, people have difficulty admitting they’ve made a mistake. Those who will admit their mistakes often gain even more respect for their “objectivity.” They may even get a reputation of being more emotionally mature in the face of difficulty, which is a sign of leadership.
- Don’t dwell on this for too long. Some individuals spend forever focusing on the past. They review their mistakes over and over, trying to figure out why they did what they did. The smart ones learn from their mistakes. Then they move forward confidently. They know they’re not going to do that again. Beating yourself up has a bad impact on how you regard yourself over time. That, in itself, can be career-limiting behavior.
John M. McKee is the founder and CEO of BusinessSuccessCoach.net, an international consulting and coaching practice with subscribers in 43 countries. One of the founding senior executives of DIRECTV, his hands-on experience includes leading billion dollar organizations and launching start-ups in both the U.S. and Canada. The author of two published books, he is frequently seen providing advice on TV, in magazines, and newspapers.
© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
Cuatro cosas que sus empleados necesitan de usted
Tomado de: http://mailing.hbral.com/inicio/tip/index.asp?date=13-01-2011
Autor: Cleve Stevens
Autor: Cleve Stevens
Los líderes tradicionales ven la relación empleado-jefe como una transacción: dinero a cambio de trabajo. Los líderes transformacionales saben y reconocen que los empleados quieren mucho más que eso. A continuación se muestran las cuatro cosas que su gente necesita para tener éxito:
- Amor. Esto puede sonar sensiblero, pero el amor implica simplemente una inquietud enfocada que es exclusivamente para el bien de esa persona. Muéstreles a sus empleados que usted se preocupa por ellos y su futuro.
- Crecimiento. Nadie quiere estar para siempre en el mismo lugar. Cree una cultura que le permita a su gente crecer y expandirse.
- Contribución. Para sentirse realizados, los empleados deben saber que están contribuyendo con el todo. Enfatice las formas en que su trabajo es importante para la organización.
- Significado. Somos criaturas que buscamos significado. Comparta una visión que demuestre que todos sus empleados están comprometidos con un objetivo mayor.
Este Tip of the Day fue adaptado de "Four Things Employees Need from Leaders" por Cleve Stevens.
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