I observed the following to be true many years ago when I starting my
career. I noticed that the women managers, in the companies I worked
for, searched more widely and tactfully for solutions to workplace
issues than men. Also, there was more sign-on by the fellow employees,
to the implementation process following decisions of women managers.
This article puts into words many of the ideas I already believe because
of many observations I 've made over the last 30 years.
Male hubris has made a mess. We need more female qualities.
By
Mark Lange from the March 26, 2009 edition San Francisco - It is
getting harder to escape the sense that most of the trouble in the world
– whether it's coming out of the Senate, a mortgage lender, or a tank
turret – can be traced to one overriding problem: too many men steering.
Had our economic, domestic, and foreign policy been more informed by
women, we might be enjoying a safer ride.
Doubt it? Here's a test.
Would any of the women you admire have set up a healthcare system as
byzantine, costly, and underperforming as America's? Or a financial
system where mortgage lenders don't have to care about being paid back?
Or a bailout that spends $1 trillion in public money to subsidize the
purchase of junk debt from the same geniuses that generated it?
It may be time for guys to hand over the keys, ask for directions, and sit (quietly, please) in the back seat for a while.
Forget
gender politics; just look at results. Our computer-based fantasy
financial instruments have erased perhaps 45 percent of the world's
wealth. We've waged two wars at the same time for six years at a fully
loaded cost in the trillions. And we've managed the simultaneous
implosion of what amounts to most of the male industrial complex, from
banks to newspapers to automakers.
Women's effectiveness as decisionmakers is well documented, even if it isn't entirely accepted by either gender.
An
MIT study of female leaders running village councils in India found
that by objective measures (building better wells, taking fewer bribes)
women ran their villages better. American women are about to eclipse men
in sheer payroll numbers – and they're now majority owners of nearly
half of the private companies in the country. Yet somehow the average
working woman still devotes much more time to child care and housework.
What's
clear is that, on average, men overestimate their IQ while women
underestimate theirs. And that may be a clue, in terms of effectiveness:
While decisiveness and risk-taking matter, hubris (too often male)
creates problems. Humility and collaboration (more often female) solve
them. What explains the difference?
It could simply be a matter of
emotional need, reinforced by generations of gender stereotyping.
Seeking competition and challenge, guys do tend to cast things in shades
of conflict: defaulting to a win/lose, right ("my") position versus
wrong ("yours"). On this point, scientists, who are mostly men,
disagree. But there's no doubt that social stability is compromised by
masculine habits such as hostile takeovers, and paying enormous
retention bonuses to men who've driven a business into the ground and
have already left.
The difference could be evolutionary.
Primordial hunters (men) had to make rapid decisions and act on them,
right or wrong, but quickly. Chase that bunny! Club that rival! Run
away! Gatherers (women), meanwhile, needed an awareness of the larger
context – knowing which berry bushes would ripen when, how to keep the
kids from clonking each other with rocks, and generally holding the
tribe together and getting things done.
Or, in a world where our
reverence for stature remains primitive, it's possible women just have
to be more creative, collaborative, and clever when they average five
inches shorter and 27 pounds lighter than men.
But it's also
possible that even men are ready to learn that women make better leaders
than they know. A Pew Research survey last year showed that the public
rates women equal or superior to men in seven of the eight qualities
they value most highly in leadership. The results were striking on the
questions of honesty and intelligence, which registered as the two most
important characteristics of leadership, and which lately have been in
relatively short supply. On these dimensions, women were more than twice
as likely to be rated superior to men – by both women and men.
Male
cognitive patterns of linear, command-and-control thinking are no
longer optimal – either with Gen-Y talent in the workplace, or with
geopolitical conflict around the world. We're heading into an era when
we need leadership that enlists self-interest in support of the larger
outcome – less transactional and more transformational. Rather than
punishing failure or reinforcing conflict, motivating progress.
Many
question America's standing and role in the world. Whatever we might do
to mitigate climate change will be completely swamped unless we can
positively engage India and China. Complex and interconnected questions
of nuclear prolifer-ation, resource scarcity, and interconnected human
demands will put an unprecedented premium on collaboration and
cooperation.
As women ascend as leaders in policy and business,
the decisions they make will be more accountable to a wider array of
interests, stakeholders, and outcomes. By example, they will teach us to
lead less through positional authority and more through positive
influence- with more of a bias toward informed action and a clearer
connection between everything we know, and all we have to do.
• Mark Lange is a consultant and former presidential speechwriter.
Season of Jubilee
I'm starting this blog to share my thoughts and ideas from my life and insights about life.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Let's Be Less Critical
Kingdom living, as opposed to reaching salvation and stopping our
Christian growth, has been a theme I've been hearing lately. Our
leaders are teaching this approach but the ball must be picked up by the
mature Christians to be more successful in sharing His light with love
and good works. If not, how can we shine it in baby Christians' face
with the complaint that we wish they'd stop squinting their eyes,
slapping out at us or turning their backs completely. Salt, forced fed
rather than sprinkled, is embittering; and light, glared rather than
glowed, is only more blinding. We, more mature brothers/sisters, need
to be more patient with His sheep. The world is looking at how we treat
each other to determine whether they want what we profess to have.
Let's Be Less Critical
Let's Be Less Critical
I liked this article by Ray Hollenbach, It’s Time to Stop Using John 3:16 for Outreach
I recently reflected on the below article by
Ray Hollenbach, a Chicagoan, writes about faith and culture and think
its good. You can check out his work at studentsofjesus.com
I hate bumper stickers, even when I agree with them. How can anything important be reduced to so few words? Our media soaked, marketing driven age has generated a sound-bite generation. We have been trained to reduce life and death thoughts into catch phrases and slogans. It’s even true in the church, where for the last 60 years the most popular verse in the Bible has been John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
I hate bumper stickers, even when I agree with them. How can anything important be reduced to so few words? Our media soaked, marketing driven age has generated a sound-bite generation. We have been trained to reduce life and death thoughts into catch phrases and slogans. It’s even true in the church, where for the last 60 years the most popular verse in the Bible has been John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
I've been leery about cryptocurrency investing for a longtime. In an article posted by John Biggs, found on the website techcrunch.com, researchers have written a eyeopening paper on Bitcoin price manipulation. Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors.
To me, since I've experienced thin market trading in currency futures trading 10 years ago, it’s been obvious that the Bitcoin markets are, at the very
least, being manipulated by a few big players. “This paper
identifies and analyzes the impact of suspicious trading activity on the
Mt. Gox Bitcoin currency exchange, in which approximately 600,000
bitcoins (BTC) valued at $188 million were fraudulently acquired,” the
researchers wrote. “During both periods, the USD-BTC exchange rate rose
by an average of four percent on days when suspicious trades took place,
compared to a slight decline on days without suspicious activity. Based
on rigorous analysis with extensive robustness checks, the paper
demonstrates that the suspicious trading activity likely caused the
unprecedented spike in the USD-BTC exchange rate in late 2013, when the
rate jumped from around $150 to more than $1,000 in two months.”The team found that many instances of price manipulation happened simply because the market was very thin for various cryptocurrencies including early Bitcoin. A theory, initially espoused in a Reddit post shortly after Mt. Gox’s collapse (Anonymous, 2014b), is that hackers stole a huge number (approximately 650,000) of bitcoins from Mt. Gox in June 2011 and that the exchange owner Mark Karpales took extraordinary steps to cover up the loss for several years.
The bottom line is simple: if Bitcoin wants to be taken seriously it probably shouldn’t be this easy or legal to manipulate the markets. While decentralization is supposed to replace regulation it’s clear that there is still a way to go before it can be truly taken seriously. “As mainstream finance invests in cryptocurrency assets and as countries take steps toward legalizing bitcoin as a payment system (as Japan did in April 2017), it is important to understand how susceptible cryptocurrency markets are to manipulation. Our study provides a first examination,” write the researchers.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Tips of Living Debt Free
1. Get rid of gold and platinum cards, which usually have annual fees which are high
2. Payoff high interest rate cards first, you'll have more money left to pay other debts and more money in your pockets.
3. You don't need a lot of cards maybe a Visa or Mastercard and or American Express. Get rid of department store cards and gas company cards.
4. Pay a little extra each month, over and above the minimun payment. Start with $10 per month, the sooner you payoff this debt, you'll save a lot of interest.
5. Don't miss any payments, the credit card company will raise your interest rate. When it hits your credit report, your other card companies may increase their's too.
6. Ask for no annual fee or lower interest rate, they may do so just to keep your business.
I hope these tips are helpful and they give you the confidence to continue working on ways for proper.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Happy New Year to all. I'm retired now and look forward to spending my days in a more relaxing way. Hasn't 2017 been an interesting year with the new president, North Korea, Bitcoin and the stock market continuing to rise? I will try to share more insight into these and many other topics in 2018. I was just looking at the fact that I started this blog in 2009 when my son was 14 now he is 21 years old, my does time fly. Also, I have added Amazon links here where you can enter the Amazon site to buy items and I've been selling books online on Amazon online under the name Salespro.
Here is my link
Here is my link
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