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Volume 4, Issue 31, January 2009
avelength The CENTROFIN Newsletter
In this issue pg 3
Management & Leadership
Managing the Human Element pg 6
Short articles, related to group performance and the vital role that empathy and self knowledge play in effective leadership, often appear in this bulletin. Experts continue to occupy prominent space in their leadership literature and in their every day coaching practices. Leadership definitions: the ability of influencing others to work cooperatively towards organisational goals; the ingredient that moves an organisation from adequacy to excellence and thus to more effectively accomplishing assigned responsibilities. Below we'll further expand.
Habits of Highly Effective People “Successful people have the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do. They don't like doing them either, necessarily, but their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”
These habits are interrelated, interdependent and sequential. Some of them are habits of character that help one to achieve the daily 'private victory' and progress. Others are the outward expressions of character that lead to interdependence, mutual benefits and 'public victory'. Namely, some of them are: (1). Be Proactive. The habit of being proactive, or the habit of personal vision, focuses on the responsibility of our attitude and actions. Responsi-bility can be described as Response & Ability. Proactive people develop the ability to choose their responses by making them more a product of their values and decisions rather than the product of their moods and conditions. The more we exercise our freedom to choose our responses the more proactive we become. Do you coach and mentor others with compassion and personally invest time and energy in mentoring?
Egoism
In philosophy, egoism is the theory that one's self is, or should be, the motivation and the goal of one's own action. Egoism has two variants, descriptive or normative. The descriptive (or positive) variant conceives egoism as a factual description of human affairs. That is, people are motivated by their own interests and desires, and they cannot be described otherwise. The normative variant proposes that people should be so motivated, regardless of what presently motivates their behaviour. Altruism is the opposite of egoism. The term “egoism” derives from “ego,” the Greek word for the English “I”. “Egoism” should be distinguished from “egotism,” which means a psychological overvaluation of one's own importance, or of one's own activities.
TO THE MASTER: Please circulate copies of this Bulletin to the CREW.
To reach our Seafarers
Do you provide feedback that people find helpful for their professional development? (2). Begin with the End in Mind. Begin each day with a clear understanding of your desired direction and destination. Management, in contrast to leadership, is more concerned with efficiency and speed than with direction. Things are created mentally before they are created physically. Write a mission or a purpose statement and use it as a frame of reference for making decisions. Clarify values and set priorities before selecting goals and going about the work. Dreams are just dreams, until they are written down. Then the dreams become a plan. Remember ineffective people: Allow old habits; other people; environmental conditions to dictate their mental creation; they adopt values and goals from their culture; they climb the ladder of success, only to find the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Egoism pg 8-9
Safety First !! pg 11
The Story of Language pg 12
Cenmar Manila Officers' Forum pg 14
Near Misses... A Chance To Change
cont'd on pg 2
People act for many reasons; but for whom, or what, do or should they act -- for themselves, for God, or for the good of the planet? Can an individual ever act only according to his/her own interests without regard for others' interests? Conversely, can an individual ever truly act for others in complete disregard for his own interests? The answers will depend on an account of free will. Some philosophers argue that an individual has no choice in these matters, claiming that a person's acts are determined by prior events which make illusory any belief in choice. Nevertheless, if an element of choice is permitted against the great causal impetus from nature, or God, it follows that a person possesses some control over her next action, and, that, therefore, one may inquire as to whether the individual does, or, should choose a self-or-other-oriented action. Morally speaking, one can ask whether the individual should pursue his own interests, or, whether he should reject self-interest and pursue others' interest instead: to what extent are other-regarding acts morally praise worthy compared to self-regarding acts?
cont'd on pg 6