Bamboo Innovator

How do you align your talent and motives?

Tuesday March 5, 2013

How do you align your talent and motives?

Talking HR with Elisa Dass

“THERE was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could fight the battles that we never could.” Nick Fury, superspy and recruiter of the Avengers.

With that in mind, Fury formed a strong team of superheroes with Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye. Although they were remarkable, Fury had different challenges with each of them. Like the Avengers, we often find that an organisation’s identified high potentials come with their own challenges. For today’s article, we will focus on the alignment of talent (T) and motives (M) of an individual and how we can approach it. Let’s define T and M before we unleash the superheroes.

Werner Barkhuizen, the managing director of Saville Consulting South Africa, defines M as what you want need or enjoy doing; and T as the behaviours you are effective in.

We often say we’d do well in what we enjoy. Is it always true? In our workplace, do we always find pleasure in what we do well in? Is there an alignment between our M and T? With these questions in mind, how does it impact an organisation’s development and succession planning of its talent pool? Read more of this post

Learning for life, the Finnish way; No tuition, only one major exam (with six hours given per paper) and classes that mix kids of all abilities. We discover how they do it, in our two-part special report

Learning for life, the Finnish way

No tuition, only one major exam (with six hours given per paper) and classes that mix kids of all abilities. We discover how they do it, in our two-part special report.

Mention private tuition, and one gets a bemused look from Finnish educators, pupils and parents. This is unheard of in their country, they say. When school ends, so do the lessons.

6 HOURS 44 MIN AGO

Mention private tuition, and one gets a bemused look from Finnish educators, pupils and parents. This is unheard of in their country, they say. When school ends, so do the lessons. Once bell rings at 2pm across schools in Finland, children run to the park to indulge in snowball fights or pastimes like ice hockey and music. The only group missing out on the fun, when TODAY visited last month shortly before the matriculation exam (the only national assessment in Finland), were the 18-year-olds, who duly trooped home to revise. Mr Juha Korhonen, who has three children, did not know of any tuition programmes in Finland. “Even if there were, I wouldn’t send my kids … Children need free time and rest after school and homework,” he said. Homework for Finnish students consists of a few Math problems or perhaps essay assignments. For the minority who have trouble keeping up, teachers provide remedial lessons after school. As Professor Jouni Valijarvi, an expert in international tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), notes: “In Finland, school is the only place where students study.” This has been the tradition, said the Director of Finnish Institute for Educational Research: “Children mark a very clear difference between school time and their free time.” Even the after-school sports or arts activities that students engage in — and which are managed by private or community organisations — are clearly treated as hobbies, and not the mandated co-curricular activities of Singapore schools. Hanna Korhonen, 13, trains in figure skating because “I enjoy it very much and I hope to be a professional skater someday”. Read more of this post

Spielberg to make mini-series about Napoleon

Spielberg to make mini-series about Napoleon
Posted: 05 March 2013 0900 hrs

LOS ANGELES: Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg is to make a television mini-series about Napoleon, based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, he told a French broadcaster.

The 66-year-old “Schindler’s List” and “E.T.” filmmaker is working on the basis of a five-decade old script by Kubrick, who directed classics including “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a mini series, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon,” Spielberg told broadcaster Canal Plus, without saying if he would direct or just produce the project.

“Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, a long time ago,” he said, noting that he and Kubrick were both involved in the development of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, which came out in 2001.

Kubrick, famed for his obsessive perfectionism, abandoned the Napoleon biopic project in the 1970s because of budget and production challenges, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Read more of this post

Interview – UCLA Film School professor Howard Suber explains how you can be a better storyteller

Interview – UCLA Film School professor Howard Suber explains how you can be a better storyteller

by eric barker

Howard Suber is one of my mentors. He founded the graduate program I was in at UCLA and has taught literally thousands of students about the power of film and narrative structure.

From his bio at UCLA:

During his 40 years on the UCLA faculty, Howard Suber helped establish and also chaired the UCLA Film Archive, the Critical Studies and Ph.D. Programs, and the UCLA Producers Program. He is a former Associate Dean, recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and has been a consultant and expert witness to all the major film studios on copyright and creative control issues. He continues to teach Film Structure and Strategic Thinking.

He is the author of The Power of Film and Letters to Young Filmmakers: Creativity and Getting Your Films Made.

I spoke to him about how to be a better storyteller and how we can use narrative to improve our lives.

The full interview was over two hours long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post heavily edited highlights here.

What Do All Great Stories Have In Common?

Howard:

The word “but.” Which is to say inexperienced or poor storytellers structure their material with the words “and” or “then.” So “They did this, and then they did that, and then they did this, and then they did that,” which produces an episodic structure that doesn’t build on anything, and there’s no relationship between what came before and what came after. Read more of this post

Hangzhou eatery chain Grandma’s thrives on making customers wait at its chain of 60 outlets across China; One customer claimed online he had queued for three days before finally securing a seat in his local Grandma’s

Hangzhou eatery chain Grandma’s thrives on making customers wait

• Staff Reporter
• 2013-03-04

Grandma’s, a chain of eateries founded in Hangzhou in 1998 as a single noodle house, now has 60 outlets across China often crammed with diners or those waiting in long queues for a table.

One customer claimed online he had queued for three days before finally securing a seat in his local Grandma’s, reported the Beijing magazine, China Entrepreneur.

However, for most the wait is well worth it as the restaurant chain’s fare is usually priced at about a third of what it costs for similar food at other restaurants, the magazine said.

Whether in Hangzhou, Shanghai or Beijing, the average bill per customer at a Grandma’s restaurant comes to about 60 yuan (US$9.50), compared with around 80 yuan (US$12.70) at similar restaurants.

Although eateries across the country have been hurt by increasing costs and sliding profits since 2010, Grandma’s has remained strong. It opened a dozen new outlets in 2012 alone, and is expected to open more in 2013.

Founder Wu Guoping told the China Entrepreneur the key to his success lay in his unending drive to look for ways to improve the management of his business. Read more of this post

We Are What We Quote

MARCH 2, 2013, 12:59 PM

We Are What We Quote

By GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

Quotes are the mental furniture of my life. From certain angles my inner landscape resembles a gallery hung with half-recalled citations, the rags and tag-ends of a lifetime of reading and listening. They can be anything at all, the exquisitely chiseled perceptions of poets and philosophers or the blurts of unscheduled truth-telling by public figures caught in the spotlight (the former Jersey City mayor Frank Hague’s “I am the law” or Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook”); the punch lines of 1930s comedians or the curtain lines of Jacobean dramatists; or words of wisdom or anguish or ridiculous humor, or simply, for instance, M.F.K. Fisher’s recollection of “the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace.” They are the dangling threads that memory can latch onto when everything else goes blank.

What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspired conversations. But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant — the tiniest identifiable gesture — out of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Shattered wholes reach us in small disconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.

Anyone, of course, might develop a passion for quotes, but for a writer it’s a particularly intimate connection. A good quotation can serve as a model for one’s own work, a perpetual challenge with the neatness and self-sufficiency of its structure laid bare in the mind. How does it work? How might a quotation be done differently, with the materials and urgencies of a different moment? Perhaps writers should begin, in fact, by inwardly uttering again what has already been uttered, to get the feel of it and to savor its full power.

Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space. Read more of this post

Spoiled brats spring from pampering parents

Spoiled brats spring from pampering parents

Created: 2013-3-4

Author:Ni Tao

FOR renowned army singer Li Shuangjiang, the music is over, the curtain brought down by his ne’er-do-well son Li Tianyi. The junior Li has been placed under detention in Beijing for allegedly taking part in the gang-rape of an underage girl in a hotel room, together with four friends. It’s not the first time Li fils has dishonored his father, now 74 and arguably one of China’s best altos.  In 2011, the younger Li was given a one-year term in a juvenile rehabilitation facility for violently beating a man with whom he nearly had a car crash. He was released in September. After only six months, the bad boy struck again, this time bringing greater shame to his father and raising deeper questions about his parenting. The younger Li’s aggression can only be bred by his parents’ indulgence, many assert. This assertion appears plausible.  After the gang-rape case went public, Meng Ge, the boy’s mother and also a singer, appealed to the public to show some tolerance for his son, who is still a minor aged 17. Read more of this post