Dr. Shailesh Thaker - Best Management Training Blog - Top Management Consultants

Archive for August, 2009

German poet Goethe said, “Never let a day pass without looking at some perfect work of art, hearing some great piece of music and reading, in part, some great book.”

We all have missed the best of the life. We all have at least missed 5 great opportunities that can help us in climb out. We all have missed the best of life has often offer to us. May be subconsciously it is our habit.

We all have not tapped the potentiality at fullest. Even, most of us fail to build up relationship within passion and potentiality.

We should have attitude of exploring, discovering, knowing and learning every day. Today, it is a different world where learning and relearning are going together. To make life more interesting and meaningful, we have to find out new things, everyday, to make things happen. We have to create interest in the work, of course, it is passion oriented. Only work with interest can make the day different.

Remember, life is all about what is happening at the end of the day?

To create a difference at the end of the day, we have to explore and learn new things with interest, to create very meaningful life.

I strongly believe that established relationship with work, of course, with learning attitude make major difference in the life. The more we take interest in the work; chances of growing are more in the life.

They met on Boston Common - two men with little in common. One a well-heeled, high-powered attorney, the other a street-schooled, often ignored homeless person.

Rob slept on a sidewalk. Peter had a swank condo in the Back Bay. But every morning they would cross paths here in the park and over the course of several months, actually became good friends, reports CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman.

How did that happen? Such contrasting men, living such disparate lives. You’d think after the weather and box scores they’d run out of things to talk about. And indeed, they did run out.

“So I gave Robert a copy of a book I really loved called ‘Water for Elephants’ and we would talk about that,” Peter said.

Discussing the book became their way of connecting, and a friendship was born.

“And then one day I asked him, ‘What’d you do with the book?’ and he said, ‘I gave it to a fellow over there,” Peter said.

“I knew there were a lot of people who read,” Rob said.

“So it occurred to us that there was an interest out here that could draw people together,” Peter said.

“You’d be surprised by how many people actually read,” Rob said.

About a year ago, Peter and Rob started the Homeless Book Club. The week CBS News visited, the group was dissecting a group of short stories by O’Henry. They meet every Tuesday in a church conference room. Peter buys the books. In the beginning he offered to bring in lunch too, but the members said, “No thanks.” They wanted this to be about more than just another free lunch.

“For me it’s a place to go and escape,” said Donald, a member.

“And to question things,” said Betsey, another member.

“Yeah, I feel more sophisticated,” said Jamie, a member, laughing.

Unlike the others, Jamie, who lives in a roaming house, says he never used to be a reader. His addictions were the priority.

“I picked up the first book and started reading it and I couldn’t put it down,” Jamie said.

Addicted still, only now, to literature.

“If I keep reading, and keeping my mind occupied, I’m less likely to hurt myself in life,” Jamie said.

Testimonials like that are now inspiring other people in other cities, even other countries, to start putting together their own homeless book clubs.

And as for the homeless man who started it all - Rob - turns out, the only reason he couldn’t get subsidized housing was because he had an unresolved moving violation on his record. Fortunately, he knows a good lawyer.

Peter was able to clear up that traffic ticket, which is why tonight Rob is no longer on the streets. He’s housed and working as a church custodian.

No one can live with pride under the sky and over the surface without the strong character to protect his life and to achieve final objective of the life.

You can have 100 definitions of character. If you ask 100 people, “What is character? You may get at least 50 components of character.”

I try to focus on the following components to shape out character over the surface……..Read more.

Now, a growing group of writers, musicians, visual artists and videographers are turning this Wikipedia-era philosophy into online collaborative art.

Twitter users are banding together to write an opera for London’s Royal Opera House. Bands like ‘My Morning Jacket and Sour’, ‘Out of Japan’, are turning to fans to help film their music videos. Programmers are pulling quotes from online social networks to make automated poems.

More than 50,000 animators are divvying up work on an upcoming animated film called “Live Music,” and amateur videographers are re-filming “Star Wars” in 15-second bites.

This crowd-sourced creativity online is putting a new twist on traditional ideas of artistic ownership, online communication and art production.

 “What’s exciting is that it’s being tested out by a lot of people who have access to the technology,” said Mary Jane Jacob, executive director of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “I think that we’re in a great communal workshop.”

In recent months, the collaborative projects have been showing the professionalism it takes to get noticed amid the clutter of content on the Internet, said Ze Frank, an online personality who orchestrated several early online art projects. Sign up for a CNN art project

Frank said, “People have been making collaborative online art, since the beginning of the Web.” But, much of it wasn’t worth looking at.

Some collaborative books proved to be too much work for even herds of people to tackle. Efforts to create massive drawings with thousands of contributors sometimes ended up looking like random scribbles, for example.

“Even if the [Twitter-written] opera ends up sucking as a performance, the value may have already been played out in the theater of the creation of it,” he said.

Many of the projects aim to hit on universal themes.

“The little elements that aren’t synchronized” in the group art projects remind people that our differences are what make us interesting,” said Matt Maloney, associate dean of the school of film and digital media at the Savannah College of Art and Design, referring to this music video, which features fans of the Japanese band Sour.

Collaborative online art

In B Flat: Create your own music with the help of 20 YouTube musicians Star Wars Uncut: Help re-film “Star Wars” in 15-second clips.

Sour: The music video for this Japanese band’s song “Hibi no neiro” is composed of fan clips.

Twitter opera: The Royal Opera House of London is letting Twitter users write an opera that is scheduled to be performed in September.

Longest Poem in the World: The site makes a poem out of Twitter posts that rhyme.

Eternal Moonwalk: This Michael Jackson tribute site stitches together moon walking videos from fans, “The backgrounds change, the people move differently, the quality and temperature of the photography varies from component to component,” he said. “If that phenomenon didn’t exist, if we were all the same and if we were all uniform, this type of collaboration would not be powerful.”

Jacob, of the Art Institute of Chicago, said, “The projects speak to how people learn to communicate and to be heard in these hyper-connected, digital times.”

“It lets you … meet other people,” she said. “We’re not talking eHarmony, but all these things, they’re interesting and they are of the moment. When people want to use [communication technologies] in a creative way, that’s really exciting.”

 The online art collaborations grow out of a parlor-game tradition called “exquisite corpse,” she said.

 Around 1920, famous surrealist artists gathered to draw portraits in pieces. They folded up large sheets of paper so that each artist could see only the edges of what had already been drawn. The pictures made sense only after the paper was unfolded.

“The online versions of this concept take the idea further because they involve people from all over the world who often know nothing of each other,” she said.

For example, Darren Solomon’s site, inbflat.net, features 20 YouTube videos of musicians, many of whom don’t know each other, playing various melodies in the key of B flat.

“Visitors to the site can play the tunes in any order or combination they choose, meaning that each user in a sense becomes part of the artwork,” Solomon said.

Solomon, who once played bass with Ray Charles and now writes music for TV ads, said the “In B Flat” project shows that “the world can come together and we all speak that [musical] language.”

“Something about it is very hopeful,” he said.

“One key to the project’s success,” he said, is that it takes relatively little effort for musicians to send in Web-quality videos of themselves playing a short melody in a certain key.

“They’re happy to start picking up a video camera and start shooting or they’re happy to pick up an instrument and start playing,” he said.

Solomon finds that idea so compelling that he’s participated in other projects. With his two sons, ages 7 and 11, he shot three of the 15-second clips of the user-generated “Star Wars” that will be stitched together by the site Star Wars Uncut.

In one of the videos, he and the boys act out a scene with puppets. In another, his sons wear hooded sweatshirts and fight with light sabers in a New Jersey tunnel.

In some cases, people don’t even know they’re making contributions to online art.

Andrei Gheorghe, a Web developer in Romania, created the “Longest Poem in the World” by aggregating public Twitter posts and arranging them in rhyming couplets.

“Computers add 10 to 20 lines to the poem each minute,” he said.

Gheorghe said he doesn’t consider his work art. “It was just a random idea that popped up and I played with it. And it is what it is,” he said.

Art professors said deciding what is and isn’t art is a complicated process.

In some ways, these collaborative projects are fine art, they said. In other ways they’re like games or means of communication.

Like all good art, these projects are trying to “stand convention on its ear,” said Maloney, from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“That’s going to keep happening,” he said. “So, as soon as, we finally nail this down you’ll have another group of talented artists that are going to say, ‘Well, I’m going to do something completely different.”

LEADERSHIP IS NOTHING BUT MYTH.

Nationally, the average annual pay for professors in U.S. Public Universities is $115,509. Compare to this what Indian professors of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) get annually – is just a paltry $12,000. Although the cost of living in U.S. is higher, the gap in the salaries of the professors needs correction. Is this what the nation builders get in return for putting in years of hard work into educating and mentoring the future of the nation?

Ever heard of Naveen Jain, the CEO and Co-founder of Intelius. He graduated from IIT Roorkee in 1979. Vinod Khosla? The Co-founder of Sun Microsystems graduated from IIT Delhi in 1976. Bharat Desai, Chairman and CEO of Syntel graduated from IIT Bombay. Arun Sarin, former CEO of Vodafone graduated from IIT Kharagpur. The list goes on. In 2006, two final year students of IIT Bombay landed a job with New York based software group, Lime for $80,000 per year, with a $10,000 signing bonus. The question is, why is the government paying so less to the very people who play such an important role in educating the brightest minds in the country.

 Hundreds of faculty members of IIT Bombay and Roorkee went on mass casual leave on Monday to protest disparities in pay package approved by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD) under the Sixth Pay Commission. Over 200 professors of IIT-Bombay held a silent march on the Powai campus. Over 400 professors of IIT Delhi followed suit. IIT-Madras and IIT Kharagpur professors had gone on leave, on Friday.

 “The pay hike given by the government is at least 30 percent less at the lower level (of faculties) and at higher level it is 40 percent less than what we had asked for. It will be difficult for us to attract good faculty members,” said Saumya Mukherjee, Professor at IIT Bombay.

 The professors have alleged that the HRD ministry has sidelined the Goverdhan Mehta Committee report, which had recommended better pay structure for IIT professors. The demand of scholastic pay in monthly installments of Rs.15, 000 has been overlooked. “The ministry of human resources development is the real villain,” said Hem Chandra Gupta, Professor of Physics at IIT-Delhi.

 Pay scales of Rs.15, 600- 39,100 for lecturers or lecturer-cum-post-doctoral fellow, Rs.30, 000 (minimum fixed) for assistant professors, Rs.37, 400-67,000, Rs.42, 800 (minimum fixed) for associate professors and Rs.37, 400-67,000, Rs 48,000 (minimum fixed) for professors has been decided.

 “If you compare the difference between the stipend of a PhD student and the working salary in a government science lab over, say, six years, the loss is Rs.23 Lakh. Our demand of scholastic pay in monthly installments of Rs.15, 000 has been overlooked though the committee had taken inputs from IIT Faculty Forum Federations and IIT directors,” Mukherjee said.

The IITs have been facing an increasing shortage in faculty for over five years now. Added to that, as per government recommendations, eight new IITs are to be set up. This will need at least 8000 new professors. With pay packages this low, how the government hopes to attract the best is an issue that needs immediate attention.