-- JPMorgan Chase (JPM) chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on the Charlie Rose Show last Monday, July 7. Amidst the financial services meltdown, many power players are saying that Dimon, more frankly than most, is shining light on the harsh realities.

We can take these three areas as how people/ professional pursue their interest as well how business and technology piece link together. The importance of all three role is same and only context of business and IT Project lifecycle along with complexity of process define/ decide which is best suited and workout. My genuine defintion is all three are very much influence in business scenarios. Also moving from one area to other take good amount of  study, hardwork and committment.

As a team or as anorganization, all three type of role and people require, it is the work context which define which type of profile more suited in particular phase of project lifecycle. In idea scenario blending is best but having blending cause confusion and overlapping of outline responsibility that is quite tricky and risky.

In project / Product lifecycle, while in research, analysis, requirement phase, there is lot of need of people having functional insight of business, process, procedure along with government law, tax, market etc. In development technical people need to convert and bring all feature and product in best technical part, there if functional people did their job nicely they technical team also deliver with good quality. After that in transition, training or early life or later ongoing support, to bring more productivity as well value of money, people with technical background having enough business awareness are best suited, we call they techno-functional.

Friends , i surely like to know your views and feedback on my thoughts, also plz add your thoughts in this topic to get more clarity and outline some useful way to explain these three terms -- Oracle Technial , Oracle Functional , Oracle Techno-Functional.

Wishes -- Shivmohan

Een leuk boekje dat aan de hand van een aantal pertinente vragen inzicht geeft in job- en managementkwesties.

Zoals ..

Have you ever lied on your CV ?

Is it OK to sleep on the job ?

Can you smooch in the storeroom ?

Of deze ...

Do you work too much ?

"I personally work long hours, but not as long as I used to", Bill Gates once observed. "I certainly haven't expected other people to work as hard as I did. Most days I don't work more than 12 hours. On weekends I rarely work more than eight hours. There are weekends I take off and I take vacations".

What is Oracle Apps (ERP)?

(Also known as e-business suite)

Lets take an example. Suppose you are running a small grocery shop named “Janata Grocery”, so the typical operation as a shop owner is you basically buy groceries from some big seller and stock it in your shop. Now people come to your shop for day-to-day needs and buy stuff from your shop at a slightly higher price than what you originally bought and stocked it in your shop.
Ocassionally you may not be carrying items or run out of stock that people ask for so you make a note of it and promise the person to come back tomorrow and they will get their item. So far so good, now lets name some entities before we proceed and things get complicated. The big seller from whom you buy stock is called as Vendor, the people who come to your shop to buy things are known as customers, the stock in your shop is known as inventory.

So far we have identified few entities that play an active role in your day-to-day operations. As time goes by, your business expands and now you take orders over the phone and provide service to deliver the items to your customers, so you hire people to help you out in maintaining the inventory, do the delivery part and all the necessary stuff to keep the business running smoothly. The people you hire are known as employees.
So in this small shop, you typically manage the bookkeeping activities by hand using a notepad or something similar. Now imagine the same setup on a larger scale where you have more than 10,000 customers, have more than 1000 vendors, have more than 1000 employees and have a huge warehouse to maintain your inventory. Do you think you can manage all that information using pen and paper? Absolutely no way! Your business will come to a sudden stop sign.

To facilitate big businesses, companies like Oracle Corporation have created huge software known in the category of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) as Oracle Applications. Now coming to think of it, Oracle Apps is not one huge software, instead it is a collection of software known as modules that are integrated and talk to each other.

Now what is meant by integrated? First let us identify the modules by entities. For e.g Purchasing and Account Payables deal with the vendors since you typically purchase from vendors and eventually have to pay the dues. Oracle Purchasing handles all the requisitions and purchase orders to the vendors whereas Oracle Accounts Payables handles all the payments to the vendors.

Similarly Oracle Inventory deals with the items you maintain in stock, warehouse etc. Dealing with customers is handled collectively with the help of Oracle Receivables and Oracle Order Management. Order Management helps you collect all the information that your customer is ordering over the phone or webstore etc whereas Receivables help you collect the money for the orders that are delivered to the customers.

Now who maintains the paychecks, benefits of the 1000 employees? right! it is managed by Oracle Human Resources. So you get the idea by now that for each logical function there is a separate module that helps to execute and maintain that function.

So all the individual functions are being taken care but how do I know if I am making profit or loss? That’s where integration comes into play. There is another module known as Oracle General Ledger. This module receives information from all the different transaction modules and summarizes them in order to help you create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc.

Just to simplify the explaination, when you pay your employees that payment is reported back to General Ledgers as cost i.e money going out, when you purchase inventory items the information is transferred to GL as money going out, and so is the case when you pay your vendors. Similarly when you receive items in your inventory it is transferred to GL as money coming in, when your customer sends payment it is transfered to GL as money coming in. So all the different transaction modules report to GL (General Ledger) as either “money going in” or “money going out”, the net result will tell you if you are making a profit or loss.

All the equipment, shops, warehouses, computers can be termed as Assets and they are managed by Oracle Fixed Assets. Initially Oracle Applications started as bunch of modules and as time passed by they added new modules for different and new functions growing out of the need for today’s internet world.

So if you come across a module that you are trying to learn and work on, first try to understand what business need is it trying to fulfill and then try to understand what the immediate modules that it interacts with. For e.g lets say you come across Oracle Cost Management module, you will learn that it helps to maintain the costs of items in your inventory and the immediate modules that it interacts with are Oracle Inventory (ofcourse), Oracle Bills of Material, Order Management and so on..

Publisher's Synopsis: The award-winning design and development firm IDEO, which brought the world the Apple mouse, reveals its secrets to fostering innovative, out-of-the-box thinking across the world of business. In this handbook, the author outlines the steps IDEO and other successful companies use to achieve successful problem solving.

Includes information on brainstorming, teams and prototyping. Totally cool book with practical easy to implement ideas. Also, it turned my thinking on teams around as the author devotes time to discussing their "hot teams" approach and how the myth of the lone inventor is a just that a myth. I didn't realize Edison had a team of people who worked with him, but he did and they all collaborated to come up with some of his patents.

So very inspiring. A must read business book.

Former IBM (IBM) CEO and chairman Lou Gerstner, now chairman of private equity giant Carlyle Group, at the recent Yale CEO Summit in Manhattan

. Here, we list 50 of the best worst examples..

1. "When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss - sorry, "team leader" - it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again."
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers . I think that says it all really."
Anonymous, England

3. At my old company (a US multinational), anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist . And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer."
Philip Lattimore, Thailand

4. " Incentivise is the one that does it for me."
Karl Thomas, Perth, Scotland

5. "My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let's touch base about that offline . I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure."
Gemma, Wolverhampton, England

6. "Have you ever heard the term loop back which means go back to an associate and deal with them?"
Scott Reed, Lakeland, Florida, US

7-8. "We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change . What? Second was we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach , whatever that is."
Turner, Manchester

9. "Until recently I had to suffer working for a manager who used phrases such as the idiotic I've got you in my radar in her speech, letters and e-mails. Once, when I mentioned problems with the phone system, she screamed 'NO! You don't have problems, you have challenges'. At which point I almost lost the will to live."
Stephen Gradwick, Liverpool

10. "You can add challenge to the list. Problems are no longer considered problems, they have morphed into challenges."
Irene MacIntyre, Courtenay, B

11. "Business speak even supersedes itself and does so with silliness, the shorthand for quick win is now low hanging fruit ."
Paul, Formby, UK

12. "And looking under the bonnet ."
Eve Russell, Edinburgh

13-14. "The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning . Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?"
Edward Creswick, Exeter

15-16. "The one that really gets me is pre-plan - there is no such thing. Either you plan or you don't. The new one which has got my goat is conversate , widely used to describe a conversation. I just wish people could learn to 'think outside the box' although when they put us in cubes what do they expect?"
Malcolm, Houston

17. "I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we're doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It's a call centre, not Hogwarts."
Caroline Garlick, Ayrshire

18. "A pet hate is the utterly pointless expression in this space . So instead of the perfectly adequate 'how can I help?' it's 'how can I help in this space?' Or the classic I heard on Friday, 'How can we help our customers in this space going forward?' I think I may have caught this expression at source, as I've yet to hear it said outside my own working environment. So I'm on a personal crusade to stamp it out before it starts infecting other City institutions. Wish me luck in this space."
Colin, London

19. "The one phrase that inspires a rage in me is from the get-go ."
Andy, Herts

20. "'Going forward' is only half the phrase that gets up my nose - all politicians seem to use the phrase go forward together . 'We must... we shall... let us now... go forward together'. It gives me a terrible mental image of the whole country linking arms and goose-stepping in unison, with the politicians out in front doing a straight-armed salute. Is it just me?"
Frances Smith, Toronto, Canada

21. "I am a financial journalist and am on a mission to remove words and phrases such as 360-degree thinking from existence."
Richard, London

22. "The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)."
Alexander, Southampton

23. "I worked in PR for many years and often heard the most ludicrous phrases uttered by CEOs and marketing managers. One of the best was, we'd better not let the grass grow too long on this one . To this day it still echoes in my ears and I giggle to myself whenever I think about it. I can't help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation."
Leon Reilly, Ealing, London

24. "Need to get all my ducks in a row now - before the five-year-olds wake up."
Mark Dixon, Bridgend

25. "Australians have started to use auspice as a verb. Instead of saying, 'under the auspices of...', some people now say things like, it was auspiced by... "
Martin Pooley, Marrickville, Australia

26. "My favourite: we've got our fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule . Translation = Er, no, WE sorted out the problems to cover your backside."
Theo de Bray, Kettering, UK

27. "The health service in Wales is filled with managers who use this type of language as a substitute for original thought. At meetings we play health-speak bingo; counting the key words lightens the tedium of meetings - including, most recently, my door is open on this issue . What does that mean?"
Edwin Pottle, Llandudno

28-29. "The business phrase I find most irritating is close of play , which is only slightly worse than actioning something."
Ellie, London

30. "Here in the US we have the cringe-worthy and also in addition . Then there's the ever-eloquent 'where are we at?' So far, I haven't noticed the UK's at the end of the day prefacing much over here; thank heavens for small mercies."
Eithne B, Chicago, US

31. "The expression that drives me nuts is 110% , usually said to express passion/commitment/support by people who are not very good at maths. This has created something of a cliche-inflation, where people are now saying 120%, 200%, or if you are really REALLY committed, 500%. I remember once the then-chancellor Gordon Brown saying he was 101% behind Tony Blair, to which people reacted 'What? Only 101?'"
Ricardo Molina, London, UK

32. "My least favourite business-speak term is not enough bandwidth . When an employee used this term to refuse an additional assignment, I realised I was completely 'out of the loop'."
April, Berkeley, US

33. "I once had a boss who said, ' You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music .' It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil."
Tim, Durban

34. " Capture your colleagues - make sure everyone attends that risk management workshop (compulsory common sense training for idiots)."
Anglowelsh, UK

35-37. "We too used to have daily paradigm shifts , now we have stakeholders who must come to the party or be left out, or whatever."
Barry Hicks, Cape Town, RSA

38. "I have taken to playing buzzword bingo when in meetings. It certainly makes it more entertaining when I am feeding it back (or should that be cascading ) at work."
Ian Everett, Bolton

39. "In my work environment it's all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don't seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we're being wee'd on. Which we usually are."
LMD, London

40. "At a large media company where I once worked, the head of human resources - itself a weaselly neologism for personnel - told us that she would be cascading down new information to staff. What she meant was she was going to send them a memo. It was one of the reasons I resigned - that, and the fact that the chief exec persisted on referring to the company as a really cool train set ."
Andrew, London

41. "Working for an American corporation, this year's favourite word seems to be granularity , meaning detail. As in 'down to that level of granularity'."
Chris Daniel, Anaco, Venezuela

42. "On the wall of our office we have a large signed certificate, signed by all the senior management team, in which they solemnly promise to leverage their talents, display and inspire 'unyielding integrity', and lots of other pretentious buzz-phrases like that. Clueless, the lot of them."
Chris K, Cheltenham UK

43. "After a reduction in workforce , my university department sent this notice out to confused campus customers: 'Thank you for your note. We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders. We intend to start that process within the week. In the meantime, please continue to raise specific concerns or questions about projects with my office via the Transition Support Center..."
Charles R, Seattle, Washington, US

44. "I was told I'd be living the values from now on by my employers at a conference the other week. Here's some modern language for them - meh. A shame as I strongly believe in much of what my employers aim to do. I refuse to adopt the voluntary sectors' client title of 'service user'. How is someone who won't so much as open the door to me using my service? Another case of using four syllables where one would do."
Upscaled Blue-Sky thinker, Cardiff

45. "Business talk 2.0 is maddening, meaningless, patronising and I despise it."
Doug, London

46. "Lately I've come across the strategic staircase . What on earth is this? I'll tell you; it's office speak for a bit of a plan for the future. It's not moving on but moving up. How strategic can a staircase really be? A lot I suppose, if you want to get to the top without climbing over all your colleagues."
Peter Walters, Cheadle Hulme, UK

47. "When a stock market is down why must we be told it is in negative territory ?"
Phil Linehan, Mexico City, Mexico

48. "The particular phrase I love to hate is drill down , which handily can be used either as an adverb/verb combo or as a compound noun, ie: 'the next level drill-down', sometimes even in the same sentence - a nice bit of multi-tasking."
B, London

49. "Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I'm afraid we're stuck with biz-speak."
Timothy Denton, New York

50. "It wouldn't do the pinstripers any harm to crack a smile and say what they really felt once in a while instead of trotting out such clinical platitudes. Of course a group of them may need to workshop it first: Wouldn't want to wrongside the demographic ."
Trick Cyclist, Tripoli, Libya

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7457287.stm

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

A View on Soft Skills - Its relevence on individual success 

Hello Friends, Few days before i conduct a session on how to give feedback and how to receive feedback, though it was part of regular awareness session happen to make teams aware on appraisal process, its objectives and how to follow appraisal system. During Question & Answers session there were very interesting thought raised about how an individual need to have to grow and be successful in organization. Almost everyone is having same skills and expertize but only few of them possibly will move and will move up more in coming time. what is that difference. somehow i felt i should write something on that and here it is , though it looks little theory but i 100% sure if follow it consciously and put some energy in genuiue approach, it works. We make progress by meeting the challenge and conquering our fears. In that way our emotions motivate greater effort, which invites growth and development. Behavioral training experts say there are several soft skills are required in these circumstances. Some of them include:

i. Interpersonal skills
ii. Team spirit
iii. Social grace
iv. Business etiquette
v. Negotiation skills
vi. Behavioral traits such as attitude, motivation and time management  

In the initial years of your career, your technical abilities are important to get good assignments. However, when it comes to growing in an organization, it is your personality that matters, more so in large organizations where several people with similar technical expertise will compete for a promotion.

While organizations are definitely investing in augmenting their staff's people skills, here are some inputs for professionals and students who would like to initiate the process themselves:

i. Be a part of team activities : Observe your own behaviour in the group and how you relate to others.

ii. Ask family members or close friends to write down your best and worst traits. Ideally, have at least four to five people do this for you. Evaluate the common traits all of them have mentioned. Thus, you can be aware of your strengths and work improving your weaknesses.

iii. How well do you manage your time.  Think.  Can you do more in life  Or is your day too crammed with activities  Effective time management is very essential in the corporate world.

iv. Introspect on how you react to feedback.  In organisations, people skills mostly come into the picture when there is feedback given -- be it for an idea, an executed project or a presentation. You are judged by the way you respond to feedback.  Do you get defensive?  Do you insist you were right?   Do you meekly accept criticism?   Remember, people tend to be judged and stereotyped according to their responses. You will, too.

v. How good are you at critiquing. While responding to feedback is one side of the coin, giving feedback is the other side. Are you aggressive?  Pessimistic?  Do you believe in constructive criticism?  Or prefer to be the yes-man

vi. Live consciously. Any organisation is manned by people, therefore soft skills are all about how you deal with people and present yourself.

plz share your feedback and comments, also plz contribute if you have anything in this topic or in general.

thanks

Shivmohan Purohit

A Perspective on Mentoring

Hello Friends,

In my past organization it was very important to use high jargons even for small things or activities, even for giving help to juniors or bit of guidance used to consider as mentoring. Coaching was very common word. Recently i am reading one book on mentoring, now realizing that mentoring is not just a bigger coverage areas but it is important as well in order to build and keep a successful team/ group and to make them grow in order to achieve your own and their success. Once i get more thoughts i like to share it, here i just putting very high agenda on what mentoring is... i also more from your side as well as feedback.

as per some of thought i gather i can say do
  - Set high expectations of performance.
  - Offer challenging ideas.
  - Help to build self-confidence.
  - Encourage professional behaviour.
  - Offer friendship.
  - Confront negative behaviour & attitudes.
  - Listen to personal problems.
  - Teach by example.
  - Provide growth experiences.
  - Offer meaningful sayings or quotations.
  - Explain how the organization works.
  - Coach their mentorees.
  - Stand by their mentorees in critical situations.
  - Offer wise counsel.
  - Encourage winning behaviour.
  - Trigger self-awareness.
  - Inspire their mentorees.
  - Share critical knowledge.
  - Offer encouragement.
  - Assist with their mentoree's career.

Thanks - Shivmohan Purohit

10 Tips for Career Success in Office, especially applicable in information technology and service industries

1. Find ways to learn continuously.

2. Find ways to improve whatever you do. Be willing to incorporate the new ideas that you learn in #1.

3. Do your work completely and with pride.

4. Be true to your own values.

5. Clear up those irritations (energy drains) so that you can devote your energy to your work.

6. Practice self-care so that you feel good about yourself.

7. Keep work in perspective so that you hav! e time for other parts of your life (family, friends, hobbies, volunteer work).

8. Listen carefully to everyone. Managers need to walk around and talk to employees and customers.

9. Network within your company and outside.

10. Delegate tasks when appropriate and empower those doing the work to do it their own way.

Thanks

Shivmohan Purohit

Recursos Humanos Online, es una propuesta enteramente gratuita donde podrán encontrar información acerca de la materia Recursos Humanos, documentación, teorías administrativas, análisis sobre marketing, managment, infografías, y mucho más....

Espero que lo disfruten.

I tend to read this whenever I feel down and out, seriously these habits push me up and keep me moving, again!!
Few the points although scattered would like to share with you all...
“Our problems fall in three areas Direct Control (problems involving our own behaviour) Indirect Control (problems involving other peoples behavior), No Control (problems we can do nothing about)
Read On-
We need to understand how we focus our time and energy to be effective, the things which we are concerned about are come under “Circle of Concern”, the things which we can really do some about come under “Circle of Influence”, focus your energy on the Circle of Influence inside the Circle of Concerns in order to be effective. Circle of Concern is filled with ‘Have’ Statements Circle Influence filled with “Be’ Statements, anytime we think of problem that is “out there”, that thought itself is the problem.
I would love to share the habits with you all, but highly recommend you to Googlit and read by yourself from the Management Guru Himself.

management Guru Stephen Cowey ------>

Love.

Sameer.S.

Such was the case for our recently released new brand - Sierra Nevada Wealth Management.

The principals of this new company approached our Media Buyer, Connie Weber with the need - to create a brand that conveys their services, strengths, and unique assets. Time would not allow the multiple weeks of research and testing we would normally undertake - but the size and type of company allowed us to move much more quickly than normal through that process.

We began with positioning and developing the brand image (logo) - while multiple streams of development continued on several fronts. In the end, the SNWM executives received:

> A corporate website with an effective "back end" management system that allowed them to establish and maintain individualized client portfolios. This site was quickly developed by JM Studio - our SmartBrand web team...and it's been receiving rave reviews since it's launch.

> Business package (business cards, letter head, envelopes, desk note pads, thank-you notes, etc.)

> Public Relations (with assistance from Don Vetter - a fantastic PR guru here in Northern Nevada). We successfully got an in-depth article in the leading business publication - Northern Nevada Business Weekly. We also had professional head and team photography done by the very talented Digiman Studios.

> A Grand Opening Celebration (including custom invitations, RSVP system, banners, office and locale signage, and full event planning services). July 10th is the date!

> A complete media plan (including Social Media Marketing recommendations) prepared by CW Media. We also produced a :10 TV spot, and prepared two :15 for production later this month.

Here's a snapshot of the campaign in total:

What made this such a great experience was the collaborative experience we had with the principals of the company.

If you get a chance to work with or refer anyone you know to the team and SNWM...don't pass it by.

Principiile managementului:
1. Ca sa pui managementul in actiune, este necesar sa creezi iluzia unei crize, in speranta ca astfel se va actiona.
2. Managementul va selecta actiuni sau evenimente pe care le va preschimba in crize si apoi va reactiona excesiv.
3. Managementul este incapabil de a recunoaste o criza adevarata.

Nu exista "afaceristi murdari", ci numai afaceristi.
Cind produsul este destinat sa esueze, sistemul de desfacere va functiona perfect.
Nu te contrazice niciodata cu fabrica asupra unei erori. Totul a fost verificat, chiar si gaurile care lipsesc.
Camioanele de transport care parcurg un traseu de obicei intr-o zi il vor parcurge in cinci zile atunci cind tu astepti transportul.
Piesa pe care fabrica a uitat s-o expedieze este cea pe care se bazeaza 75% din transport. Si nu numai ca a uitat s-o expedieze. In jumatate din cazuri, nici nu a produs-o.
Daca un platitor poate insela, foarte probabil ca o va face.
In Dumnezeu avem incredere; toti ceilalti platesc cash.
O suta de dolari, plasati cu o dobanda anuala de 7%, in 200 de ani vor creste la mai mult de 100 milioane dolari, dar atunci nu vor mai valora nimic.
Sa nu conduci negocieri inainte de ora 10 sau dupa ora 16. Inainte de 10, vei parea prea nerabdator, iar dupa 16 partenerii te vor credea disperat.
Clientul care plateste cel mai putin se plinge cel mai mult.

As you probably know, Prism Safety tries to focus on three areas all the time: Home Safety, Workplace Safety, and Community Safety. Last Friday there we were, minding our own business trying to prepare the June Newsletter for publication and distribution, when we received an email from one of our certified Safety Directors overseas. They had not responded to some emails we'd sent, but that happens, and we'd not been overly concerned. The reason had been that the Director had been abducted and held hostage for 10 days, was now vacating the country where they were working, and would be in touch when relocation was complete.

Um...

Now, back to the Newsletter process for a moment... There had been debate between two Topics we take the Emergency Response Topic first for June, and then do the Security Focus in July. That had been Plan "A". Before the email.

Bringing us to Plan "B".

So, from then until now, we've been preparing not only the June Newsletter, but also a comprehensive Report on Threat Assessment for the public. You'd be amazed at how much material has been generated worldwide between assassination, targetted violence, school shootings, and judicial and public spaces.  HOWVER, equally, there is not that much for normal workplaces and private spaces except for some excellent OSHA material focusing on the Health Care and Retail sectors.

Research led us back to self-defense and personal protection, which brought us again to a truly fine resource on line from Michael Loftus, Sr. at www.Crime-Safety-Security.com . Really excellent materials and good links to other resources. You'll see his site on our Blog Roll to the right.

At the same time, considering the issues of safety for school aged children, we have run across another WordPress Blog that is just fascinating and may interest you at www.FreeRangeKids.com. Free Range Kids seems to be a parenting movement for reducing "hypervigilance" on the part of parents, and for empowering their children to do more things on their own. Prism Safety is neither advocating nor condemning the view, but we're just bringing it to your attention and consideration.

About Statistics: One really important element to note is that news stories always sensationalize the grotesque. It goes without saying that Prism Safety is first and foremost concerned with... um... well, "Safety". Home, school, community, workplace... Safety. However, especially with regard to children and schools, the headlines do our schools a disservice. All the statistics, all the reports, all agree that the odds of a child dying from violence in a school is astronomically less than just riding in an automobile.

Bottom line: Every situation is different. Risk is defined by environment, behaviors, preparation, and interactions. You always have to consider risks and make your plans individually. But we thought you would enjoy looking at some of the diversity of safety view out there.

My head feels much better now. Perhaps from "sharing the load". Stay Safe... Dr. G.

The next series of articles will outline the details of our successful ReStore business system.  For a frame of reference, our 4000sf ReStore has grossed about $190,000.00 over the past two years in a county population of about 23,000 people (this is our service area).  If you have a ReStore and are reading this, simply ask yourself if your store is grossing about $200,000.00 for every 4000sf of floor space, or per 25,000 people in your service area.  My intention with this series of articles is to hit on all the major areas which contribute to the business system we’ve built to include: 

The Business Philosophy

 Supply/Demand and Demographics

 Location and the Building

 Quality Staff and Continuing Education

 Management Style

 Advertising, Product Acquisition and Sales

My take on why many ReStores fail to maximize their potential

The Business Philosophy

Let’s get started.  I treat our ReStore as a genuine for-profit business venture (yes, I know we’re a nonprofit).  I have put aside all notions relative to the nonprofit world with regard to our ReStore.  In other words, we don’t necessarily do things on the cheap, although we did start our ReStore with a mere $5000.00, which was about a third of our total liquid assets at the time.  I believe that to make money, you have to continue to invest in your business.  You have to invest in location, staff, advertising, etc…  The building should look and feel like a genuine retail operation and represent Habitat for Humanity well.  Customer service should be important, but no more so than any other mom and pop type store in which you would shop.  I simply won’t allow our bottom line to be damaged by a nonprofit mentality.

As the executive director, I play the role of a passive-income business owner.  This means that I should be able to leave my office for weeks at a time, and the ReStore will continue to make money for the affiliate.  My philosophy is simply to allow the ReStore to run like any other retail operation and whatever profit it spins off is used towards our mission.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t play a role, but my role is not critical to the day to day operations of the store.  Further, while there was a ReStore committee formed to get the ReStore started, this committee was disbanded very soon after we opened.  There aren’t too many small retail operations run by a committee of very part-time volunteers, right?  No, a manager who lives and breathes the venture every day must be empowered to run the store and not be micromanaged by the executive director, a subcommittee, or the board of directors. 

Finally, my management style allows me to learn, to move, and to flow as needed; and it allows for my staff to do the same.  We had to write the book on how to build a successful ReStore in a very rural, northern climate community.  There was no detailed manual available for us and no other ReStores like ours to steal ideas from.  I had no illusions that the road was going to be easy.  I knew that we were going to have a learning curve which would be vertical for the foreseeable future.  I knew that neither I nor my staff would have the answers to every situation that would arise.  Mistakes were (and are) an acceptable part of the process.  An example of this fluid style of management can be demonstrated in our search for the best hours of operation, the number of employees needed and the hours they worked, and appliance testing.  We fumbled around with a lot of things until we found what worked.  I am a firm believer that we learn far more from our mistakes than from our successes.  I believe this style of management encourages creative thinking and allows for a much less stressful environment than is found in many corporations, and our results speak for themselves. 

My internship can pretty much be described as 'more of the same'. Of course, you don't know what 'the same' is so I'll explain it a little bit... accounting and paperwork. >_> That sums it up. In the morning, after the mail and packages from the post office gets dealt with, I start my paperwork. I file the previous day's work - the register/stamp/deposit sheet, FedEx and UPs reports, and department postage charges - and also enter them into various Excel spreadsheets. At the end of the month, we get a charge report for general charges from the business office (that we work to make sure our accounts balance) and we issue charge reports to all the departments that sent mailings through us so they know how much they spent for their own bookkeeping. Sound boring? It is. >_>;

I'm a little dissapointed that I don't really feel like I'm training to be a manager for this job. I know I am, a lot of managment IS paperwork. I was hoping to be in a little more on the decision-making process. Sometime this summer I'm supposed to be creating (or at least helping to create) a guide to the mailcenter services that'll be disbursed to all the faculty offices, but we'll see if that actually gets done.

Okay, on to the anime! I finished watching Outlaw Star in between the Netflix I was getting. Aisha naked, hah! Too bad it was in the middle of an episode that was more or less a joke - aside from the Caster shells, but even the aquisition of them was a big joke. The end was a little trippy, and I was hoping for a more romantic final scene. Gene just needed to cup Melfina's cheek, mutter something romantic, and lay a long kiss on her lips. But no, he had to pull on her cheek and turn it into a joke. Bah. >_>

For Netflix, I've been watching Full Metal Panic, and and I got through disc 4. I'll be having disc 5 waiting for me on monday and maybe even disk 7. That's right, you read it correctly. For some stupid-ass reason, Netflix isn't carrying disk 6. So I'll be missing three or four episodes. Hopefully it won't be too overly important, but it probably will. The season is starting to approach its close, afterall. Anyway, the whole mecha competition between the ditzy Captian and Melissa was a riot. I knew it was too much to ask to see one of them carry through with the punishment. I would have been right there with Kurz when he got his face stomped on because he requested the punishment to actually happen when it was all over. Come on, they're both hot, though the Captian has a huge cute advantage and I don't like smokers/drunks so much.

The big up-side to my internship is that I'm staying with friends during the work-week. Friends that love their anime and manga. So I've been going through their manga collection whenever there isn't anything else going on. I read the seven volumes they had of Chibi Vampire already. Cute story, some good inter-personal drama toward volumes 6 and 7. Its a little predictable though, because it was easy to tell that the two main characters would hook up at least for a while.

I've also made it into volume 10 of Negima. I'll tell you something! The manga is soo~oo~ooo much better than the anime (at least what I've seen of it). The anime was kinda stupid and silly. Sure, the manga is like that too at times, but the story is a lot better than the anime. In the anime, Negi was like 'Oh, noes! You know my secret! Now I have to kiss you before this retarted frog and this stupid cat fluffball find out that you know it and turn me into a chupacabra.' It was cute for a while, but after the whole class started to find out, I just faceplamed and turned it off. I love how the manga keeps you in touch with Negi's mentality through the process. He's a little kid, but he's carrying a huge load in his shoulders. Sure, he and the classmates get into some comic mischief from time to time, but that weight is always looming over the horizon.

Well, I think that about does it for this week. Thank you for making it this far (if you actually read what I had to say. Lord knows I would have skipped half of it if I was an outside reader. >_>;). If you didn't actually read it.. well.. at least you gave me a pageview or something. Thanks for that, then. *thumbs up* Well, see you next week!

1. Operating system security out of the box is far better than it used to be. In all likelihood a ‘vanilla’ installation with auto update installed will be in a far more recent patch state than an enterprise machine relying upon some contrived mousetrap for patch deployment that was conceived before the auto update mechanisms matured.
2. To an appropriately skilled attacker the enterprise layered defence looks like a panopticon. One hole is all that it takes to exploit an unpatched (or even unknown) vulnerability and install some malware (as a rootkit, in the kernel, where it will be hard to detect).

This means that the corporate build becomes little more than security theatre against a modern, stealthy and targeted attack.

Dealing with this means that security engineers must go back to square one in questioning what it is that they want to trust? Typical answers to this are:

• Systems connecting to corporate assets must be free from spyware and other types of malware.
• Users interacting with corporate assets must be identified, and from that identity entitlements decisions can be determined.
• The scope of what the corporate help desk can be expected to support should be minimised (in the interest of efficiency and cost effectiveness).

Right now those answers are arrived at by a variety of management mechanisms, and each has its weaknesses:

•  Installing patch management, AV, HIPS etc. in an effort to keep the malware out.
  o These mechanisms simply aren’t effective against the most pernicious malware. They’re great at keeping the lumps out, but things still get through.
• Enrolling machines within corporate directory infrastructure
  o This is a necessary step towards establishing user identity in most situations, but here lies a fundamental question of whether it is the machine that we need to trust, or the user, or some combination of both?
• Restricting the means to install applications
  o This results in a constant tension between user choice and cost of management. To reduce the obvious friction that results this invariably leads to a population of users with enhanced privileges over the machines that they use. This in turn leads to an enlarged risk surface area as those users have far more ability to disrupt configuration from the intended managed baseline (maliciously or otherwise).

So... what could we choose to trust instead?

I proposed that trusted virtual (client) appliances offer a new set of choices. Let me first describe what one of these things is:

• A virtual machine offering a single function, or a limited number of functions.
• A cryptographic chain of trust is established from the hardware (e.g. TPM) through the boot loader and hypervisor to a signed image of the appliance.
• The appliance is able to attest to services that it accesses that it hasn’t been tampered with.
• The appliance can (should?) be constructed from components with known provenance.

Whilst this approach superficially looks like putting a virtual bubble around a traditional managed build it does offer a number of distinct differences:

• When dealing with malware the emphasis has changed from trying to keep the bad stuff out to only running the good stuff that was put in.
• Barriers can be established between different services and the applications that access them.
  o All of the application eggs don’t have to be put into the same security basket.
  o At the extreme this means that there is no issue having an untrusted, unmanaged set of applications accessing public services sitting alongside trusted apps accessing sensitive services.
• The attack surface area associated with a given machine has been reduced from the OS to the hypervisor (a microkernel) – something that security researchers have been suggesting for some time.

There are of course challenges ahead:

• Services haven’t yet been built to understand client attestation
  o Existing methods like 2SSL, SSH and VPN based authentication will have to be reused for the time being
• Provenance services are in their infancy, and even when they do grow up undesirable things still can/will find their way past whatever mechanisms are placed in a secure software development lifecycle on the road to provenance.
• The present generation of hypervisors deal very well with server side resource management (CPU, memory, IO, storage) but aren’t yet very well adapted to client specific concerns around keyboard, video and mouse (with GPU and screen output sharing being the really tricky part).

So... getting back to the original plot... managed builds have probably come to the end of their useful life as a means of dealing with issues of trustworthiness, but by bringing together virtualisation and stronger trust assurance mechanisms it’s possible to recast managed builds in a way that not only deals with the trust problems, but also gives flexibility back to users and service providers.

• Managers administer, leaders innovate
• Managers ask how and when, leaders ask what and why
• Managers focus on systems, leaders focus on people
• Managers do things right, leaders do the right things
• Managers maintain, leaders develop
• Managers rely on control, leaders inspire trust
• Managers have a short-term perspective, leaders have a longer-term perspective
• Managers accept the status-quo, leaders challenge the status-quo
• Managers have an eye on the bottom line, leaders have an eye on the horizon
• Managers imitate, leaders originate
• Managers emulate the classic good soldier, leaders are their own person
• Managers copy, leaders show originality
• Managers administer, leaders innovate
• Managers ask how and when, leaders ask what and why
• Managers focus on systems, leaders focus on people
• Managers do things right, leaders do the right things
• Managers maintain, leaders develop
• Managers rely on control, leaders inspire trust
• Managers have a short-term perspective, leaders have a longer-term perspective
• Managers accept the status-quo, leaders challenge the status-quo
• Managers have an eye on the bottom line, leaders have an eye on the horizon
• Managers imitate, leaders originate
• Managers emulate the classic good soldier, leaders are their own person
• Managers copy, leaders show originality

In short managers supervise and control resources while making and following plans, whereas leaders transcend resources and plans by influencing and inspiring. Managers are often leaders but the converse of this does not have to be true, many talented leaders are not particularly good at supervision, stewardship or planning, but they can influence and inspire.

One of my favorite measures of a leader is the simplest one of all - leaders have followers - irrespective of title, rank or position - they have and gain followers who are inspired or influenced by what they say and how they act.

To close I will leave you with a quote from one of my favorite thinkers on the management and leadership:

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter Drucker

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