Loud Thinking

Archive for April, 2015

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Reserve all judgment today. Go through your day focusing on finding the good in everybody you encounter.

“The wise do not buy into other people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of. Instead, they bypass a person’s public persona and see who they are in their highest expression. When you see actions taken with integrity, instead of words only, you will then know a soul’s worth.”

—Shannon L. Alder
Author

THE MANAGEMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Harvard Business Review

April 10, 2015

Make Office Politics Less Personal

One of the reasons office politics makes so many of us uneasy is that complex situations are difficult to read and impossible to control. When personalities and motivations intertwine, anything can happen. One tactic for handling office politics is to make its challenges less personal. If you begin to look at politics like a game – you win some, you lose some – you’ll become more resilient and have smarter responses when something takes you by surprise. If a situation starts to feel too personal, try to avoid looking your opponent in the eye. In many business situations eye contact is crucial, but in this case, averting your gaze can help you remain calm and avoid the fight-or-flight impulse that rises when you feel under attack. Keeping an even keel enables you to react more thoughtfully, offer productive suggestions, and regain control of the situation.

Adapted from “4 Strategies for Women Navigating Office Politics” by Kathryn Heath.

My letter titled “PCB: rolling the heads” published today by the daily “Dawn”.

PCB: rolling the heads
FROM THE NEWSPAPER — PUBLISHED about 3 hours ago

Link:- http://www.dawn.com/news/1174984/pcb-rolling-the-heads

WHATEVER happened during our matches of the World Cup was anything but cricket. Now as the chief executive of the country and the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), the nation expects from the prime minister to swiftly take action against the entire board for failing to come up to the expectation of Pakistanis.

More than the players, the responsibility of the World Cup debacle squarely falls on the PCB, which will never do its own accountability and nobody from the top will resign of his own volition. It will surely, with its public relations gimmickry, try to put the blame on others like the media, former chairmen and players and project itself as an innocent angel.

Thus the prime minister should dissolve the cricket board for its shameful World Cup performance, where Australia beat us in the 34th over, in a one-sided quarter-final; and also in all the World Cup matches our team failed to bat for a full 50 overs.

Our team created shameful world records for making minimum runs in the first 10 overs and our top four batsmen got out for just one run.

With the formation of an entirely new PCB, the fresh leadership of the board should be given only two assignments: purge the PCB of an inefficient staff and rebuild a new team on merit alone.

S. Nayyaruddin Ahmad
Lahore

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2015