The Ant

From an email. Click on play to advance slides manually.

Ant - Management Lesson

The Ant
A Fable...
Or
May be not....

Every day, a small ant arrives at work very early and starts work immediately.

She produces a lot and she was happy.

The Chief, a lion, was surprised to see that the ant was working without supervision.

He thought if the ant can produce so much without supervision, wouldn’t she produce even more if she had a supervisor!

So he recruited a cockroach who had extensive experience as supervisor and who was famous for writing excellent reports.

The cockroach’s first decision was to set up a clocking in attendance system.

He also needed a secretary to help him write and type his reports and …

… he  recruited a spider, who managed the archives and monitored all phone calls.

The lion was delighted with the cockroach's reports and asked him to produce graphs to describe production rates and to analyze trends, so that he could use them for presentations at Board meetings.

So the cockroach had to buy a new computer and a laser printer and …

… recruited a fly to manage the IT department.

The ant, who had once been so productive and relaxed, hated this new plethora of paperwork and meetings which used up most of her time…!

The lion came to the conclusion that it was high time to nominate a person in charge of the department where the ant worked.

The position was given to the cicada, whose first decision was to buy a carpet and an ergonomic chair for his office.

The new person in charge, the cicada, also needed a computer and a personal assistant, who he brought from his previous department, to help him prepare a Work and Budget Control Strategic Optimization Plan …

The Department where the ant works is now a sad place, where nobody laughs anymore and everybody has become upset …

It was at that time that the cicada convinced the boss, the lion, of the absolute necessity to start a climatic study of the environment.

Having reviewed the charges for running the ant’s department, the lion found out that the production was much less than before.

So he recruited the owl, a prestigious and renowned consultant to carry out an audit and suggest solutions.

The owl spent three months in the department and came up with an enormous report, in several volumes, that concluded: “The department is overstaffed …”

Guess who the lion fires first?

The ant, of course, because she “showed lack of motivation and had a negative attitude".

You must have seen so many ants and you may be one among them

NB:
The characters in this fable are fictitious; any resemblance to real people or  facts within the Corporation is pure coincidence…

The end
Adapted from Portuguese by PR. Obrigado Mário.

Roger, over and out?

As fans lay transfixed watching the battle for the US Open, it became apparent that there is also a changing of the guards in the tennis world. The champs are getting younger and younger. I am not completely writing Roger Federer off, but since last year, I felt that Roger's chances for a Slam win is higher if Rafael Nadal gets waylaid early. This happened in the French Open and also now in US Open when Juan del Potro gave Rafa no chance after his match with Gonzales.

But del Potro did not stop there. He went on to win it all. He is just 20 years old. Roger is just 27, still years before one's prime in other sports. They get younger all the time. Which makes me feel still older and older.

In the distaff side, 17 year old Melanie Oudin made a very good run for the crown, scoring upsets over people still under 25, before being stopped by Caroline Wozniacki, herself a teenager.

After an astounding streak of 22 consecutive Grand Slam semi-finals, is it now Roger, over and out?

My women's tennis album 9 - Teeners winners at the US Open

Some may not have won all the way, but here are some sexy successes at the US Open.
Photos from SI.com.

 

See also Album 8.

White Hair Chronicles VII - Stroke may be striking at a younger age

A female office mate was rushed to the hospital yesterday after exhibiting signs of a stroke. She is just a couple of years older than me. She is the second or third colleague in recent memory to suffer such disease. While we continue to pray and hope for her full recovery, her predicament and the continuous prayers we offer for our ill parents, make me realize that we are irreversibly going into that part of aging demographics.

As I am wont to do, I googled what causes strokes. I came across this news that stroke may be striking at a younger age in the United States. Research on stroke patients at a St. Louis hospital between 1999 and 2008 found that 45 percent were under 65 and 27 percent were under the age of 55. Although they say it is hard to know from this single study whether this is a trend throughout the United States, I think this could be happening as well elsewhere. My female colleague is a year short of 50. The other colleagues I know are also below 65.

Suddenly, it's not just the white hairs we should worry about.

Autonomy + Mastery + Purpose = Real Change

The above video shows Dan Pink talking about motivation and rewards at the TED conference. He argues that the traditional carrot-and-stick approach is only suitable for defined tasks with a clear set of rules to follow. However, rewards do not work for tasks that require any kind of thinking.

He says that for real change to occur employees need to have a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives; mastery refers to the desire to get better at something that matters; and purpose is the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

"...There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are the natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter...

"...The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, If we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, ... and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world."