How mentors help..

A great article on how mentors help..I will just quote a bit

How Are Mentors Valuable to You?

Mentors are helpful because, in addition to expertise in their field, they have a network of business professionals and, most importantly, they are willing to share what and who they know. People who mentor are likely to have had mentors at some point who helped them understand their industry better, hone their strengths or sharpen skills.

The mentor/ mentee relationship is a symbiotic relationship. "It is important to remember that this is a two-way relationship. While you are looking to benefit from the mentor, you are also looking to help the mentor," says Imad Lodhi, a veteran of IBM and the outsourcing industry.

While many times the mentee seems to get the better part of the deal, the person doing the mentoring gets something out of it, too. He or she can directly impact another person's life for the better. "By helping another person succeed, you help create a brighter future for all of us, and gain the satisfaction of knowing that you have made a difference in someone's life," Lodhi says.

That said, mentees should also do what they can to help their mentors. For example, a younger mentee may be more knowledgeable about building an online brand or being a social influencer. Sharing your knowledge is one way to contribute to the relationship.

I have the privilege of having some great mentors and the reverse as well. This week, had a good session and met up with several new mentees and students. I asked my friends, what is a group of mentees called and these were some of the suggestions:

• telemachi
• mentos (womentos as well..)
• mentees gmbh
• coo
• cuddle
• consultation
• tutelage
• gurus
• classment

heh, nice one, but it is nice to be in this kind of a relationship and help them..

Solitude and Leadership

Kannu

Here's an interesting lecture. Focus. Discipline. Some of the interesting aspects that we miss out on. I'm guilty of the same. Too much multi tasking. 

But solitude is important and I'm happy you are self confident enough to be comfortable with being alone. People rush about wanting to be social but if one is comfortable, has books, they have all the company they need. 

Love

Baba

"Solitude and Leadership" by William Deresiewicz [Send Me a Story]

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A speech on the value of being alone with your thoughts, delivered to the plebe class at West Point.

Solitude and Leadership
On the enduring value of being alone with your thoughts.
William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar | Apr 2010

—

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.

My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.

Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

Why women leave science?

One explanation: ;

And another

"The Girl Who Tried to Save the World"

Son

What an great story about a girl who saved the world in her special way. 

She is an extreme example of what I call as people who refuse to work to society's usual somnolent standards. Most folks are vegetables son, only concerned with their immediate family and friends. That's all. Which is ok. Each have their own views and rights to do what they want out of their lives. 

But every now and then, a great soul like this come along and blows you away (no pun intended). They have maniacal energy. They do not respect boundaries. They achieve huge things. 

Very impressive son. Dream big things and never let anybody say no. Make it happen. 

Love

Baba

 

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The life and death of Marla Ruzicka, a young aid worker in Baghdad.

The Girl Who Tried to Save the World
The life and death of Marla Ruzicka, a young aid worker in Baghdad.
Janet Reitman | Rolling Stone | Jun 2005

—

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 16th, Marla Ruzicka sat in her unarmored Mercedes, talking on the phone with her friend Colin McMahon, a reporter in the Baghdad bureau of the Chicago Tribune. She’d had a “great” round of meetings in the Green Zone, she told McMahon, and was just leaving the fortified compound in the hopes of squeezing in one last meeting before the end of the day. The Green Zone, which sits on the west bank of the Tigris River, used to be the heart of Saddam’s empire, and now houses the U.S. Embassy, the Iraqi Parliament and other offices of the new Iraqi government. Outside of the Green Zone, in Baghdad itself, the security situation changes hourly. A route that was safe at noon could be unsafe at 1 p.m. A neighborhood that was peaceful at dawn could be in flames by lunchtime.

A petite, blond, twenty-eight-year-old humanitarian-aid worker from Northern California, Ruzicka knew the volatility of Baghdad as well as anyone. She was virtually the only American aid worker in the Iraqi capital. She was the founder of a small nongovernmental organization called CIVIC — the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict — which assisted families whose lives had been ripped apart in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Passionate and driven, Ruzicka worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, driving around the city with her Iraqi colleague Faiz Ali Salim. The two spent most of their days compiling data on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq, which Ruzicka then used to lobby American officials to compensate the victims’ families, often arranging for wounded children to be evacuated in order to receive medical treatment in the United States. It was revolutionary work — virtually no other aid group or worker has negotiated with the U.S. government on behalf of civilians injured in American military actions — but it was exhausting. Ruzicka, who had begun to demonstrate some of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, was preparing to leave Baghdad the next day for a vacation in Thailand and then a long rest back in the United States. Leaving was difficult. “This place continues to break my heart,” she wrote to a friend in London earlier in the month. “Need to get out of here — but hard!”

What are the odds of having a pee free pool?

heh, nice question.

Many of us have spent time beside a pool. And you have probably wondered: what are the odds that no children (or adults, for that matter) have peed in the water? When pressed, we'd have to admit that the odds that the pool is pee-free are close to zero, but the lack of absolute certainty allows us to relax and swim anyway. We may comfort ourselves with some fuzzy thought about chlorine, or the immense volume of the pool relative to a few bladders, and our concerns slip away.

When things are very close to being certain, but we are still able to pretend otherwise, we are experts at using this window, small though it may be, and expanding it. For example, lots of people don't wash their hands after visiting the lavatory. We all know this, but we can happily imagine that everyone who cooks and serves in a restaurant we patronise does. At least until we see a server leave the stall, straighten their shirt in the mirror, and walk out without so much as a rinse. Dinner is served ruined! It's only when we face direct evidence that we can no longer put our heads in the sand.

Quite an interesting psychological insight into our behaviour, no? But then, the follow up question is, how many people will start washing their hands after seeing that behaviour? Take my own example, I have pee’ed into the pool when I was a child and teenager and then stopped. Washing hands after taking a pee? only idiots who didn't wash their penis’s and keep it clean and manage to get pee over their hands need to wash. Or so I thought.

Its only much later that I realise that the reason you wash your hands is not because of the bacteria on your wee or penis, but because more we wash, the more the overall toilets are cleaner. You have a bigger chance of catching an illness from the taps, the door handles, etc. etc. than from having a few spots of wee on your hands from your tinkle..

A Girl You Should Date

Kannu

I may have sent this to you earlier. But no worries. This is worth reiterating. Again and again. 

You will have loads of girls. As you should. Look around. Know various people. Check them out. Experiment. Spread your wings. You will have your own criteria to select girls. But who do you open up to? Who do you cuddle up in front of a fire and share your thoughts and dreams of winning the world? 

One sure fire way to see if she reads. A girl that reads (and I mean reading dead tree books or e books). I didn't mean magazines or TV guide only. Girls who read voraciously are fascinating creatures son. 

They are usually quieter. They are difficult to spot because they aren't found in noisy places. They need to be found very carefully. You have to walk gently in the undergrowth. Part the leaves carefully and quietly. Peek around the tree trunks slowly. Don't startle her. Pick a good time and then say a hi. 

They are good people to be around. They are full of ideas and full of alternative realities. You can be silly with them and you can be Serious with them. They will never be clingy because they are with their books. You are a fellow traveller. They are difficult to get but the rewards are so much worth it. 

It's a good way to know who is better. And remember one thing, son, they will also be checking you out so always have a book to hand :)

Love

Baba

869
http://nonamerah.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/869/?refid=12

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Oct 03 2011

By nonamerah

A Girl You Should Date

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb

Dear kannu

A very good article on how to get a nuclear bomb. There have been fictional accounts of how people made a nuclear bomb in their backyard but its not even that difficult. Just get some plutonium, grind it up and sprinkle the stuff out of the car while you are travelling in New York or London. And viola, one has achieved what the terrorists want, terror and hitting the enemy (us) when and where we don't expect it. 

So what do you do when the situation is too complex? Or too big? It could be a huge company or a huge project or huge macroeconomic situation. Keep a handle on the detail son, size shouldn't make a difference to keeping an eye on the detail. 

Second, keep things simple. As much as possible. More complexity means more dimensions and it will cause issues managing and fixing the inevitable problems. So reduce the complexity down. 

Third, always keep an eye out on the stupidity factor. There's always that stupidity angle. In my experience there is always some kind of stupidity involved. 

Finally, always use problems. As the man said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. While people may be running around thinking the sky is falling down, stay cool. Use the problem to solve something else, short something etc etc.  

love

Baba

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb [longform.org]
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/12/how-to-get-a-nuclear-bomb/5402/

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Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Force, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but rather atomic, designed to release the energies Einstein described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds, and for maximum effect never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city the bomb fired a lump of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve “criticality” and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is the heaviest element on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless, the explosion over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to 15,000 tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT, achieved temperatures higher than the sun’s, and emitted light-speed pulses of dangerous radiation. More than 150,000 people died.

A Bit of Sarbanes-Oxley for Universities, Please

This is a very interesting and important view on the independence of trustees of a University Board. I quote:

The impulse to impose Sarbanes-Oxley on universities is tempting.  Indeed, formal legal mandates on conflicts of interest and the other attributes of good governance might be even more appropriate for universities than for public corporations, as universities lack many of the safeguards of good governance, such as the ability to measure performance through profitability and engaged  shareholders with incentives to monitor performance.

It has traditionally has been assumed that universities, as ostensibly charitable organizations, would be run with an eye on the public good, thus formal restraints on self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and rules that apply to private corporations would not  be necessary.  Today, however, universities are big businesses riven with self-interest.  And there is little evidence that charitable purpose plays any role in their behavior.  University president's salaries routinely reach into the seven figures--Dartmouth's recent president, for example, earned over one million dollars a year and demanded millions of dollars of renovations to the college president's house and access to a private jet as part of his compensation package, even while laying off dozens of staff members and issuing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt (to be financed by future generations of students and parents) to close a massive budget deficit caused when the endowment cratered in the wake of the financial crisis.

Go read the full article, its very interesting..I fully concur with this view, being in this situation, I am quite concerned in general about the lack of governance that universities have, specially on this side of the pond. Do trustees or board members really hold university management to account? Very doubtful, when was the last time you heard any kind of debate in the newspaper between board members and management in universities as one would frequently hear in the corporate world?

And dont give me that guff about board members not knowing about academics or university policies / procedures, that’s insulting and basically tells me that your cranial end is interposed in your anterior end.

What would happen if we removed the silent letters?

silenc – visualization from Kenneth Aleksander Robertsen on Vimeo.

A nice internship letter

This was a nice letter. I quote

From: BLOCKED
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 1:14PM
To: BLOCKED
Subject: Summer Internship

Dear BLOCKED

My name is (BLOCKED) and I am an undergraduate finance student at (BLOCKED). I met you the summer before last at Smith & Wollensky’s in New York when I was touring the east coast with my uncle, (BLOCKED). I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with me that night.

I am writing to inquire about a possible summer internship in your office. I am aware it is highly unusual for undergraduates from average universities like (BLOCKED) to intern at (BLOCKED), but nevertheless I was hoping you might make an exception. I am extremely interested in investment banking and would love nothing more than to learn under your tutelage. I have no qualms about fetching coffee, shining shoes or picking up laundry, and will work for next to nothing. In all honesty, I just want to be around professionals in the industry and gain as much knowledge as I can.

I won’t waste your time inflating my credentials, throwing around exaggerated job titles, or feeding you a line of crapp (sic) about how my past experiences and skill set align perfectly for an investment banking internship. The truth is I have no unbelievably special skills or genius eccentricities, but I do have a near perfect GPA and will work hard for you. I’ve interned for Merrill Lynch in the Wealth Management Division and taken an investment banking class at (BLOCKED), for whatever that is worth.

I am currently awaiting admission results for (BLOCKED) Masters of Science in Accountancy program, which I would begin this fall if admitted. I am also planning on attending law school after my master’s program, which we spoke about in New York. I apologize for the blunt nature of my letter, but I hope you seriously consider taking me under your wing this summer. I have attached my resume for your review. Feel free to call me at (BLOCKED) or email at (BLOCKED). Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

BLOCKED.

Interesting, eh?