Dangerous games

This cigarette ad is saying, "Smoking can be deadly". The tagline is "Players welcome". Who's bidding on what? Probabilities? Chances? We like playing with our lives...

Culture is Destiny: Bonn

Very much honorable Sigmund Freud once said that anatomy is destiny. If we paraphrase that, culture is destiny as well. You can travel a lot, learn various languages and consider yourself a citizen of the world, but deep down in your brain and other places (you even suspect exist in your body) you still belong to your primary culture. That culture, at the end of the day, shapes your mental models, has a major input on your behavioral patterns and significantly impacts your values system.

Earlier this week I went to Bonn in Germany for an assessment center with DHL for my internship in winter. I have got the job and I am going to write about my assessment experiences a bit later, so in this particular post I wish to talk about Bonn and the German culture in general.

When you are walking around the "village" of Bonn, it is difficult to believe that it used to be the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in the good old days. The flow of life is so uninterrupted and "sticky" that the entire city (particularly after arriving from Madrid) feels like a shrine. It is metered, measured, mowed and manicured: even the rubbish bins are trying to deny any relationship to trash whatsoever. Cyclists get indignant with you if you are walking on the bike route. Pedestrians stand waiting for the green light even if the street is empty and dead as a cemetery. Overall, I think that we can make a comparison between the German culture and food: plain, unimaginative, hearty and satiating. In short, nothing fancy but true and solid. Do you think that an idea like an "open bookcase" work in the countries in the south of Europe, for instance? People bring and exchange books in public "bookcases" located around the city. Those are not locked, there is nobody supervising, and surprisingly enough - they are full of books: people really bring and exchange, not only take and forget.

Now, when we are all up for integration and vereinigte Europe, what role does culture play in the process? When Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks (for example) need to work together, what mental models are going to clash? My take on this would be - all of those. In Italy there is a political party called Lega Nord, advocating for splitting the country into two - North and South as they feel that people in the Northern Italy work harder, thus they should enjoy more privileges. How do you think Germans feel about it? :)

Culture defines the way you see this world. Combined with the ideas of Sapir and Whorf, we have a powerful destructive (or constructive) mix, which can facilitate or destroy an intercultural dialogue. We cannot be competent in a culture other than our own, but we can be aware of it. That is the ultimate flaw of all the intercultural training programs. Shifting the focus from building the skills to cope in a certain culture to the skill to adapt quickly to whatever culture or cultural elements should be the key.

It's a tough, tough, tough female world

It might sound incredulous but if you google "female violence", you will get about 7.7 million entries. This is nearly a million more than the same search for "male violence". Mitch Abrams, PsyD, a clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at UMDNJ/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School claims that violence is not a male-owned behavior. Claiming that it is linked to testosterone would now constitute a fallacy, since there is much research now available proving that violence is a society-induced function, and it seems that females can be no less violent and ruthless as their male counterparts. Here are some figures:

• at least 50% of over 6000 cases involve a female serial bully (UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line and Bully OnLine)
• in the UK 2002/3, there were 8,702 girls convicted of violence against another person, a figure that rose to 15,525 in 2005/6

The famous case of a female athlete demonstrating extreme acts of violence on the sport ground are captured in the following video:



So far the most extensive research is summarized in the book called The Psychology of Female Violence. It provides interesting insights on the issue of female violence in relation to psychological, social and political agendas. Often you find deep historical roots to the problems, but the real issue is what to do with those who are prone to violence? Such tendencies are easily picked up by special psychometric tests, and if I were recruiting for a position requiring extensive interpersonal contact, I would definitely screen applicants through a battery of tests and will reject those who score high on scales of risk propensity or indicate unstable psychological background. What can society offer those in order to reintegrate?

Blogging

Everybody blogs nowadays. Really, having your personal or professional blog is considered comme il faut in the learned circles and not running one is looked down upon and is deemed something of a faut pas. At the end of last year the number of blogs on the net has reached an unfathomable figure of 126 million. So why is it so popular?

I believe we can identify the following reasons why one might start and run a blog (these are obviously not mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustible, but a good start, in my opinion):

• you are bored and stuck in a job you don't enjoy, so is there a better way to while away your time than pouring out your negative emotions and frustrations to the anonymous, unsuspecting and all accepting Internet audience?
• you have to do it. If you are a student and your Information Systems professor makes it a requirement to pass a class - tough for you. If you must lead a blog at work because your boss tells you so - well, at least you get paid. Quality will suffer, relationships will sour and your creative muse will take a break, but hey - life's not a tray of cupcakes in general.
• you are not sure why you are doing it, but everyone around has one, so why not? Nobody has erased the herd instinct from the list of human motivators and believe me - it's powerful.
• you consider it is a good idea to promote yourself in the virtual world and your blog is a part of your personal brand.
• you are used to having a diary, it is a way to organize your thoughts and a blog is just a different format of what you used to do anyway.
• you want to practice your writing and story-telling skills. Blogging is a playground and a jumpboard for something bigger later.
• your blog is a form of public accountability. Once you commit something to the internet community, it will be more difficult for you to slack. Think about the 365-day blog that Julie had in that marvelous movie Julie & Julia.
• you run a business and you want to gain direct contact with your customers. In addition to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, blogging is a powerful tool of reaching out to thousands of people instantaneously. 
• no publishing house will take your masterpieces for mass reproduction, and blogging is free and reaches the audience instantly. This is a perfect retreat for unrecognized writers, poets and paper-wasters.
• you genuinely like writing and you have a lot to convey to the world. Your contributions are valued and you have followers who regularly check up on the most recent posts. Proliferous bloggers get attention and traffic, generating even more interest to their persona that way.

Why do you (would you) have a blog? What reasons are missing in my list?

Best "Out of Office Automatic e-mail Replies"

Somewhat related to the discussion started yesterday about adding biblical verses to your professional e-mail signature, I am always fascinated about what people put in their out-of-office replies (if any). I mean - it's always irritating to get one, but it is even more irritating not to get anything!!! So how can we get this level of irritation a few notches down? Getting a reply within just a couple of seconds gets you excited only for a jiffy until you realize that you have just be dinged by a robot.


Most of out-of-offices are plain and boring as hell. "Hello... i am out of office.. bla bla... back bla bla... contact bla bla. Get out of my life". Come on, people, where is your creativity? By creativity I do not mean going overboard. The examples I have below is overstepping the line somewhat, but you can always structure your out-of-office in a way, which is humorous, professional and makes the sender smile, rather than sulk in frustration on account of your two-week vacation.


I have a couple of those in store, but first I would be interested in anyone would come up with unusual ideas:)

 

Best Out of Office Automatic e-mails Replies

1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.
  
2. You are receiving this automatic notification, because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.

3. Sorry to have missed you, but I'm at the doctor's having my brain and heart removed so I can be promoted to our management team.
  
4. I will be unable to delete all the emails you send me until I return from vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.
  
5. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first 10 words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.
  
6. The email server is unable to verify your server connection. Your message has not been delivered. Please restart your computer and try sending again. 

(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see who did this over and over and over....)
  
7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

 8. Hi, I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.
  
9. I've run away to join a different circus.
  
10. I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as 'Lucille' instead of Steve. 

Timing the future

I have accidentally bumped into this video on time orientation and behind the easy and entertaining way of narration, there are actually some seriously concerning messages that are being conveyed to us. Besides the never-ending initiative to divide Italy into two parts (would be actually fun), my interest mainly lies in the generational changes, which many fail to account for. It is a fact that the educational and social systems are not keeping up with the speed of change. As a result, the kids who go to school nowadays feel at a loss since their brains are not wired in the same way as ours. Our brains were shaped a while ago, when virtual reality and interactive computer technologies were something from the realm of science fiction. Integration of new ways of absorbing information and traditional educational curricula is necessary. We are not ready for it as a society. Taking a narrower approach, how do we tailor standard corporate training programs to the changing needs of the new generations becoming active in the labor market. Do we create separate classrooms? Who needs to adapt? I don't think that it's the "adapt or die" dilemma here, but it's more of a "snooze and lose" type of a problem.

This is a fascinating video, and I am sure you will enjoy it:

Cigarette butts in organizations

I was lying on the beach near St Tropez a couple of days ago and suddenly I noticed something that sent me thinking about stuff you don't really want to think about when you are on holidays. Cigarette butts. They were all over the beach - but that was not the only thing that drew my attention. "After all," I mused, "this is France... what do I expect of the French - wrap those in little plastic baggies and carry away with them? I am not insane... yet..." What really amused me was how people were behaving when they found some of those butts next to their beach blankets.

There were three typical behavioral patterns towards the cigarette butts:

• cover them up with sand
• shove them off towards their neighbors
• ignore those and enjoy the sun

How often have you observed similar behavior in organizations when it comes to solving problems that nobody has any desire to face (leave alone to solve). People either try to pretend that such issues do not exist,  cover them up and hope that no one will find out or pass the buck and make it someone else's headache. It's all recurring. If you do not care for making things around you better (more beautiful, cleaner, nicer, simpler, etc), it does not matter whether we are talking about picking up trash after yourself or streamlining business processes. It always boils down to sense of responsibility and ownership.

And here we are facing a dilemma. How do we instill the feeling of ownership into our subordinates, peers and managers? If there is little accountability, you can palpably feel it in the organization. Where people do not care about development of their staff, those chores are being ignored, pushed away or done in a manner that deters others from approaching the subject ever again. It's cigarette butts all over again.

Do you have any suggestions on how to approach the cigarette butts issue?