TWSM#7

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# 7 issue, September 2011

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09

The cover story is dedicated to corruption on the basis of four dimensions: Thinking out of the box Corruption in ... 09 Public Contractring

• Few Know This, by Juanita Olaya

• A Curious Dilemma by Frédéric Boehm

11 Country Development

• A Vicious Circle by Nicholas Charron

13 International Anti-Corruption

A New Kind of Tsunami by François Vincke

• Good Tools, by Indira Carr

• In Retrospect, Two Events Stand out as Particularly Important in Changing the View on Corruption, by Tina Søreide

15 Private Sector

• Say “No”, by P. Samengo-Turner

• An Improper Performance by Rosario Imperiali 17

Editorial, by Bernard Luskin Whistleblowing is a Tricky Business 21

Recognition, by Jennifer C. Loftus Successfully Balancing Competing Organizational Needs

Limbo

60

Joining the company, Text by Martha Tintin Illustration by Sandrine Martin War on Talent is Back The Battle for the Best

Design Ideas

5th HI-MACS® Design Contest

The Business Side of Style stylist Irene Colzi

Abrianna Bossman Photo by Akintunde Akinleye

Rosemary Haefner Photo by Rachel Hanel

Stilian Shishkov Photo by Tsvetelina Anastasova

Our Choices Ideas for Free Time

Thessaloniki and Lagos by Giulia de Florio 93 Country Guide Greece

The Enduring Paradox by Thrasy Petropoulos 100 Where to Work. Jump Workplace Hurdles

Tanzania, Looking for Balance by Alex Duval Smith

Culture Integration, by Srini Pillay Bullying Collateral Effects A Review of Work-Related Suicide

People, by Paola Bettinelli Unusual Job The Art of Inking

Principle and Values by Michele Visciòla Action and Learning Open Organizations: Innovate Sustainably

Ben Dattner The Blame Game

Rupert Scofield The Social Entrepreneur’s

Justin Menkes Better Under Pressure

The Workplace in the Age of the Brand by Neil Hogan

Life Coaching Design

Executive Efficiency Through Office Space Design by Elena Davsar

A Glance in the City Looking for a City to Sleep by Thatiana Santos

Environment The Wheel of Life by Fabrice Leclerc

By MIRKO NESURINI

Editorial

Few ideas, jumbled together. This seems to be the slogan for the Fall 2011. It is the result of the actions made by European and American politics that are constantly making things worse. A result that has produced a strange inversion: the Stock Exchange (that makes the prices) drives the action of the Government (that should defend values). In other words: money is the driver. We acknowledge that.

Look at the great confusion that is depicting this moment. It looks like a Francis Bacon’s painting. Realities are distorted. Representation is strong. For Bacon it is a form of art, but for society it is a malfunction.

Let’s go back to us. Back to work. The cover for this issue is dedicated to corruption. A widespread practice that proliferates in states of confusion and authoritarianism. Corruption is also a symptom of lack of identity. In a company where identity matches facts and it is based on rules (and not on press office’s stories), corruption takes root. In a company where Bosses are also Leaders, corruption is not needed. In an organization where people’s identity is a value, corruption is defeated. Good companies are not corrupted. Bad companies are.

Thrasy Petropoulos, our correspondent from Greece has accepted our proposition to work on all of our Country Guides and not just his first one published in this issue. They will be wider and more structured. We have always been trying to understand countries and cities where we work, linking articles to city guides and to our column, “A Glance in the City”. Good luck Thrasy.

Also our “To be cool” column has changed. And is now called “Private eye”. Our intent is to get behind the scenes into the lives, passions, design, fashion and lesser known facts about the managers. Other columns will change. Most of all we have a new Editor – in – Chief and a new Editor. Many thanks to Rosario Imperiali d’Afflitto and Marta Scetta for accepting the assignments. A big thank you also to Giorgio Tedeschi and Paola Bettinelli for the excellent job they did for us over the years.

Keep following us and sending your ideas. Enjoy!

Mirko Nesurini Chairman

mirko@theworkstylemagazine.com

Contributors

around the world for The Work Style magazine #7.

Barranquilla Frédéric Boehm is a Professor of Economics at Universidad del Norte, interested in corruption in all its aspects and fields. He worked as an independent consultant collaborating with the German Technical Cooperation, the UK Department for International Development and the Anti-Corruption Training & Consulting.

Belair Ian Berry is the author of Changing What’s Normal, his fourth book. He is Founder of the Difference Makers Community. He holds Certified Speaking Professional and is a Fellow Australian Institute of Management.

Bergen Tina Søreide is an economist, Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute. From 2008 to 2010, Soreide worked on the Governance and AntiCorruption agenda in the World Bank. She also published a book about the same topic, The International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption.

Berlin Juanita Olaya Lawyer with a PhD in International Law with Master’s degrees in Economics and Public Administration and almost 20 years public sector and NGO experience both at national and international levels. Paul Samengo-Turner is the CFO of the UK and Central European region of Otis Elevator Company. He has been with Otis and its parent company, United Technologies, since 1979. His roles have included financial audit, financial management and responsibility for Otis‘ global acquisitions.

Brussels François Vincke Member of the Brussels Bar, Chair of the Anti-Corruption Commission of the International Chamber of Commerce since 1994. Over 20 years experience as company lawyer, general counsel and secretary-general for multinational energy and chemicals corporations.

Cambridge Srinivasan Pillay is the CEO of the Neuro Business Group. He is an internationally recognized executive coach, public speaker, psychiatrist, and brain imaging researcher.

Chicago Rosemary Haefner is the Vice President of HR for Careerbuilder. com. She is responsible for developing and implementing global strategies for employee engagement, talent management, organizational design, recruiting, benefits, and community outreach.

Gothenburg Nicholas Charron is a Research Fellow at the Quality of Government Institute and an assistant professor within the department of political science at the University of Gothenburg. His research interests include quantitative methods, good governance and corruption, comparative political institutions and economy.

Hong Kong Brian Renwick is a Managing Partner of Boyden China. He served for twelve years in various HR positions at two major UK corporations in mining and precious metals.

Indianapolis Glennda McGann is the Assistant Dean of Development and External Affairs at the Herron School of Arts and Design, ranked among the top 50 Master of Fine Art degree programs in the United States.

Istanbul Özlem Ergün is President of Boyden Turkey, expert on Human Resources and Organization Management. She has 20 years of professional experience in the Human Resources field in multinational environments in Turkey.

Johannesburg Fay Voysey-Smit is a Managing Partner and a Director of the Boyden Sub Saharan Africa office, and is a Boyden World Corporation shareholder. She is the global leader of the Consumer Practice Group and is a member of the Human Resources and Diversity practice groups.

Kaohsiung Ching is a tattoo artist and the owner of the East Tattoo Studio in Taiwan. He is a guest at tattoo conventions all over the world.

Kobe Shinichi Imanaka is an artist and illustrator. Graduated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his artworks have been shown in solo expositions and group expositions all over Japan and the world.

Lagos Carasoo is a critic who tells it like it is , sometimes he’s foul mouthed, some others simply cynical. He’s Workstyle movies’ reviewer.

Laguna Beach Michael Savas is a Design Associate Professor of Art and Dean of Visual Communications at Laguna College of Art & Design.

Lake Sherwood Bernard Luskin is the Chairman and CEO of Luskin

International, the CEO and Provost of Touro University Worldwide and Chairman of the Board of HiTechHi L.A. In the past he has served as president and CEO of four colleges and universities, CEO of Fortune 10 and 50 companies, has written nine books and more than 200 articles.

London Mauro Coppoletta is a tattoo artist and owner of The Family Business Tattoo, one of the best tattoo studios in London, his work has been published on several trade magazines.

Neil Hogan is the Creative Director of SHH Architects and Designers. Neil and his team’s work includes the highly anticipated revamp of McDonald’s in London’s Oxford Street, winner of six design awards around the world.

Marco Della Fonte is an independent filmmaker working between Europe and Us, he’s partner of the film company called LOST PICTURES based in London.

Milan Elena Davsar is a designer, owner of Davsar-Design architect bureau. It was also a painter for the Professional Union of Russian Artists.

Anders Lindholm is the Managing Director of Boyden Italy. He has been a member of the European Council of the AESC and served on the Governance Committee.

New York City Jeanne Branthover is Head of Boyden’s Global Financial Services Practice and she serves as Managing Director of Boyden’s New York office. She appears on Bloomberg Business week, Reuters and CNBC television.

Jeremy Garrett is a tattoo artist, owner of the Black Work Studio. He is also an award winning underground professional illustrator, with a Fine Arts degree from the international renowned School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan.

Arnold Roth is a freelance cartoonist. He has written and illustrated several books. He has worked for publications like The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, TIME, GQ and Entertainment Weekly.

Thatiana Silveira Dos Santos is a marketing and communication expert and journalist. Over the course of her career, she worked as a reporter and public relations liaison for entertainment publications, radio stations, and manufacturing corporations.

Oxshott Indira Carr is a Professor of Law at the University of Surrey. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University

9/11, the day that changed everything. 9/11 was the day that changed everything. 10 years went by and the world is still waiting to recover from the echoes of that change. What do we hope for? Or rather want? That these 10 years have been earned and not lost, because in the end, we take the side of people who think positive.

Remembering 9/11. To mark the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, Time Warner Center will present a free exhibition of more than 50 images from Joe McNally’s photos of the tragedy. These portraits represent the everyday people affected by 9/11: firefighters and other uniformed rescuers, families of victims, survivors, caregivers, politicians and students at nearby schools. The exhibition is held at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, New York, from August 24 to September 12, 2011.

College London. She previously taught at the Universities of Warwick, Exeter, Kent and Middlesex.

Pardes Hanna - Karkur Jan Feindt is an artist and editorial and advertising illustrator who collaborates with many magazines and newspapers.

San Clemente Simon Casey is the Founder of Emotional Mastery Intl. He has established a unique counseling technique that is transformational, result oriented and verifiable.

São Paulo Aurea Imai is the Managing Director of Boyden Brazil. In the past she worked at Baker & McKenzie’s Brazilian law office affiliate.

Turin Michele Visciola is President and one of the founding partners of Experientia. Michele is an international expert on usability engineering, human computer interaction and user-centered innovation. He has participated in many national and international information system design projects.

Valencia Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metro Pictures in New York City, at the Anthony Reynolds in London and at the LAXART in Los Angeles.

Warsaw Agata Janus is a freelance designer born and living in Warsaw, Poland. Her work has been seen worldwide, including Spain at the in Espai Chromatic Gallery in 2009, in Austria in the “200 Best Illustrators Worldwide” book in 2010, and in Taiwan in the DPI Magazine in “The Age of European Drawing” special edition also in 2010.

Yonago Takami Horitoshi is a tattoo Artist and the owner of The Knockover Decorate Tattoo Shop. He travels the world attending conventions where he participates in competitions, winning prizes every year.

Thinking out of the box Corruption in Public Contractring

Few Know This

Doing business using corruption is a short-term game. Usually a bribe leads to extortion. The official receiving or wanting to receive bribes and the mediator or the agent paying them on behalf of contractors will want more, or will want to put a price on their silence. Corrupt deals are neither stable nor secure. The problem is, if one company does it, its competitors are not in the same level playing field. Other companies will have to play along if they want to stay in business. The game is over when one stops “getting away with it” and the justice comes in. The game is fully over if a company not only loses its reputation but is completely out of business. Most people think there is nothing they can do. This is not true. You know corruption is a risk, if not a fact. What do you do? Despair is not an option.

The first is making a real assessment of your operations risks, vulnerabilities and actual problems and see what is in your hands and what not.

A Curious Dilemma

Two gangsters robbed a bank. Thanks to an anonymous hint, they were caught by the police, but the prosecutor lacks evidence. He jails them into separate cells and proposes to each of them separately the following deal. “If you confess and denounce your partner, I can offer you witness protection and impunity. I will propose the same deal to your friend. Think about it; I’ll come back to you tomorrow.” This is the famous prisoner’s dilemma: It would be better for them to remain silent. However, the incentive for each of them individually is to confess, as they cannot rely upon one another. Now, what does this have to do with corruption in public contracting? Think of five firms competing for a lucrative contract with government, in which there have been rumors of corruption in similar processes before. Each firm is facing the question: Shall I compete for the contract based on quality and price, or shall I try to secretly influence the decision to favor my bid?

Juanita Olaya

Juanita Olaya is a Lawyer with close to 20 years of experience in the areas of development, governance, anticorruption, public and international finance, procurement, civil society participation and capacity building.

Some things can actually be addressed collectively. A company can sit together with its clients or with its competitors to change the ground rules. These “collective action processes” or “integrity pacts” however you want to call them, have worked well in various instances of specific public procurement procedures and some other times even in setting industrywide agreed upon rules of the game. Important is that these processes are monitored and facilitated by independent parties, who also give the assurance that the agreement is not violating any anti-trust regulations. The new airport in Berlin Schönefeld has been built using successfully integrity pact processes with its suppliers and contractors. •

Frédéric Boehm

In order to get a public contract, the temptation is strong to try a shortcut.

But such behavior is myopic and may backfire. Often, the same manager who gains contracts through corruption for the firm ends up using his corrupt know-how against the firm, e.g. diverting funds for his desperately needed new swimming-pool. Also, corrupt deals are risky: You cannot run to a judge if the deal fails. Intermediaries may behave opportunistically, promise you something they cannot deliver, and then run away with the front payment. Firms may also expose themselves to extortion and blackmailing afterwards. And they should consider that having a corrupt reputation may actually lead public officials to ask for bribes upfront!

Frédéric Boehm is a Professor of Economics at Universidad del Norte, strongly interested in corruption in all its aspects and fields.

So there are reasons for firms to work on overcoming this dilemma. •

Thinking out of the box Corruption and Country Development

A Vicious Circle

Since the mid-1990s, development organizations such as the IMF and World Bank have pushed the idea of “fighting corruption” as a critical component for economic and political development in lesser developed countries. But what is in fact the relationship between public sector corruption and poverty? If we take a look empirically at some of the most recently available data for wealth (GDP per capita, “Purchasing Power Parity” (PPP), 2008) and corruption (Transparency International’s “Corruption Perception Index” (CPI), 2009) we find that there is a remarkably strong correlation between the two measures.

For example, of the 50 most corrupt countries according to the CPI, only four have a GDP per capita above the world average – Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela, Russia and Libya.

Of the 34 countries in the world with a GDP per capita over $20,000 USD, only five are even in the bottom 70th percentile of the CPI rankings (Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Trinidad and Tobago, Greece and Italy). Thus the data shows that poorer countries are often perceived to be more corrupt, wealthier countries are perceived to be less corrupt (an obvious exception is Italy, but that is for another article).

But why is corruption negatively related with economic development? Two main, inter-related sets of mechanisms have been presented;

Nicholas Charron is a Research Fellow at the Quality of Government Institute and an assistant professor within the department of political science at the University of Gothenburg.

one, how corruption distorts markets and two, how corruption damages political institutions and governance.

On the market side, corruption is an extra hurdle to new firms coming into a marketplace. Paying bribes for permits and licenses can be costly and puts a disproportionate burden on the engine of economic growth – small businesses, which are less likely to have the extra resources to pay kick-backs over the usual taxes compared with big businesses. This dynamic deters many potential firms from entering the marketplace and leads to greater opportunities for monopolies, hindering competition and distorting prices. Corruption also deters foreign investment, as firms are less likely to invest capital in corrupt environments due to the increased level of uncertainty regarding future costs of coercion and the enforcement of contracts in a court of law.

On the governance side, corruption serves essentially as a tax on the general public – money which otherwise would have gone into the public treasury to be used for investments in schools, infrastructure and health care for example instead goes into the pocket of a corrupt bureaucrat or politician. With resources being syphoned off by bribery, there is less investment in human capital, leading to greater socio-economic inequalities in a society. This in turn creates less trust in public institutions and results in less participation in any sort of political process, which leads to less accountability of leaders. All of these factors contribute to what is called a “vicious cycle”– which results in less economic development and overall poverty.•

Nicholas Charron

Thinking out of the box International Anti-Corruption

A New Kind of Tsunami

Recently a prominent member of the Commission on Corporate Responsibility and Anti-Corruption of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) complained about what he perceived as a “tsumani” of anticorruption documents regularly flooding his desk. Maybe it’s too strong an image, but still a fair indication about inflation of anti-corruption initiatives.

The fight against corruption, now pervades all corners of public and corporate governance. A raising number of international organizations want to get a grip on this evil, once dubbed a “cancer”.

In this avalanche of documents, there are many international conventions, but I like to pick out here specifically those which require all economic agents’ attention and set the standard for ethics and compliance in international business.

How efficient are those conventions?

All in all, an impressive list of international instruments, but the question is: do they bear any fruit? Are we in a position to say that corruption is decreasing or disappearing? The answer to this is in the hands of the national bureaucracies and the enterprises. Are the former willing to stop soliciting bribes and the latter ready not to offer anymore undue advantages? This requires more than just legal provisions.•

In retrospect, two events stand out as particularly important in changing the view on corruption. First, the United States pressure on European governments for introduction of legislation similar to the US anti-corruption law, their Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

Second, a speech by World Bank President Wolfenshon in 1996 on “the cancer of corruption,” seems to have had a significant effect in reducing a diplomatic barrier for many development agencies around the globe.

François Vincke

Member of the Brussels Bar, Chair of the ICC Social Responsibility and Anti-Corruption Commission

Good Tools

Two anti-corruption conventions with international impact are: OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials International Business Transactions expects contracting states to criminalize the offer or promise an undue pecuniary or other advantages to a foreign public official in an international commercial context. It does not cover facilitation payments, since they do not constitute payments made to obtain or retain business or other improper advantage. This tolerance of facilitation payments is open to abuse. After consistent criticism from academics and organizations OECD’s 2009 Recommendations require states to review their policies in respect to these.

Indira Carr

is Professor of Law at the University of Surrey. She led a very successful UK Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project on Corruption in International Business.

The UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in comparison is comprehensive in covering corruption in its various forms from bribery and trading in influence to embezzlement, investigation and prevention measures. Its innovative section is recovery of assets obtained through corrupt activity. The recent Arab Spring underlines the importance of repatriating a state’s wealth stolen by its leaders back to its people. Implementation of a convention is a major problem. In this regard the OECD’s approach to monitoring is highly commendable. A recent success story of this process is the enactment of the updated UK Bribery Act in 2010.•

Furthermore, while anticorruption initiatives started with frustration over corrupt governments, the new rules reach primarily the bribing side of the game. Internationally, we have to address corrupt governments much more firmly, with heavy conditionality on accountability on aid and lending, and without much view to the commercial or political values of collaborating with a corrupt regime. Corruption is one of the biggest obstacles to development and we have to stand steady in the fight against it.

Tina Søreide, Economist at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI),

Norway

Some countries seem to avoid the new international rules and prefer to let their firms operate internationally with no risk of being sanctioned at home, leading to a higher burden on firms that do respect the rules.

Thinking out of the box Corruption in the Private Sector

Say “No”

With the legal frameworks being put in place, including the UK Bribery Act 2010, employees who may previously have felt pressured to behave unethically, are in a position to ask questions and push back and are now protected by law.

This focus on eliminating the scourge is vital for business to succeed. Corrupt businesses are bad businesses, with inferior products, inferior employees and no moral compass to guide the future leaders that every company is fighting to hire. I was particularly impressed by a recent candidate who chose to work for my company because of the focus on ethics that he found on the parent company’s website.

In my view, there is no alternative to continuing to speak out against unethical behavior. Executives have a responsibility to support and protect their employees from unethical pressures and to ensure that commercial relationships are ethical and transparent.

The rewards are great. An honest company, focused on its products and customers is more likely to succeed long term than any that tries to win by “cheating”. The level playing field will ensure that the fittest companies, not the most corrupt, survive.

What employee would prefer to work for a company that is under investigation, rather than one of pristine reputation? Many who work for the News of the World newspaper or its parent company, News International, must have been asking themselves that question in recent weeks.

Paul SamengoTurner

Director Finance & Administration, UCEA Region, Otis Elevator Company

An Improper Performance

Corruption is an improper performance. It is now widely accepted that bribery at large undermines democracy and the rule of law because it damages social and economic development. Business interest in combating corruption is twofold: firstly, because at stake is the principle of free and fair competition which is distorted or it is even void by malpractice; secondly, due to the exposure of corporations to liability for failure to prevent a bribe being paid on an organization’s behalf, as recently introduced by many national and international laws.

Attitudes of Europeans toward corruption during any economic crisis becomes more thorny. Agents and marketers are put under additional stress and corruption tends to become a facilitation tool. Three out of four Europeans express the view that corruption is a major problem in their country; an increasing percentage one year later, in comparison to a previous review conducted in autumn 2007 by the same European Commission Eurobarometer.

Rosario Imperiali

Rosario Imperiali has acquired professional experience as a lawyer, academic, and journalist. He worked as chief legal researcher and executive in the legal department of IBM

With this backdrop it is of no surprise that the EU citizens’ trust in public institutions at any level, is low. More than half of the respondents believes that corruption amongst politicians and officials responsible for awarding public tenders and building permits, is widespread.

Most Europeans agree that tougher penalties and more successful prosecutions are needed to combat corruption which – according to estimates – would annually cost Europe something like 120 billion Euro.

My message to anyone working in the private sector who is asked to do something that appears to be unethical, is say “no”. In so doing, you are showing the leadership companies need in this new environment and protecting you and your company’s hard-earned reputations.•

(The article continues on page 41)

By SIMON CASEY. In order to understand the motivating factors of whistleblowing and some of the psychological reasons behind such action, I have categorized them into 3 different groups.

USA

Altruistic Whistleblower. They function on higher levels of moral reasoning. They strongly believe that exposing the wrong doing is morally justifiable when the wrong exposed is very serious. The fear of losing one’s job or facing a demotion are not strong enough deterrents to compromise their beliefs. In fact, they have the ability to demonstrate independent thinking. Therefore, they believe that their observations will be taken into account and corrective measures will be implemented by the organization itself.

Whistleblowing is one of the most effective means for continuously monitoring individuals and to ensure managers follow procedures.

Illustration by Goñi Montes, Decatur,

The

Editorial Whistleblowers

By BERNARD LUSKIN

Whistleblowing is a Tricky Business

In 1864, the US Congress passed the “False Claims Act” that was first signed into law by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. The act allowed an individual to file suit on behalf of the United States against anyone committing fraud impacting the federal government1. This is an example of an early vehicle that provided a whistleblower some protection and encouraged them to report sensitive information.

The record of many whistleblowers is reflected in the reporting of dishonest or fraudulent acts within their organizations or businesses. There are also people who blow the whistle on other individuals or organizations in which they do not work but are given incentives to report and expose illegal, dishonest or socially unacceptable acts. US Qui Tam rules also encourage whistleblowers to report issues while rewarding them with a percentage of money recovered by the government as an outcome of a legal case.

WHAT PERSONALITY TYPE ENABLES A PERSON TO WILLINGLY REPORT A FELLOW EMPLOYEE, SUPERIOR, INDIVIDUAL OR GOVERNMENT AGENCY KNOWING THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES?

Some people would call them courageous or even heroes in instances that uncover and expose an injustice. However, one risk is that a whistleblower may become a target for retaliation. So,

there must be a genetic risk propensity in the brain wiring of the whistleblower. Included in the risk is the possibility of a negative stigma, such as “Tattletale.”

This possibility requires a willingness to confront adversity.

Whistleblowers show up in the news often and capture our collective attention.

Movies or news reports cover their lives. The most recent example is the independent movie The Whistleblower which is being released now and may be nominated for an Oscar. Other examples of famous public whistleblowers include Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Jeffrey Wigand and the tobacco industry, Karen Silkwood and the nuclear industry, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins who exposed Enron2 and Julian Assange, the whistleblower who created an organization and website called WikiLeaks, dedicated to uncovering confidential government information (WikiLeaks allegedly received its information from US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is still in jail pending trial).

While the notable whistleblowers identified above, with the exception of Assange and Manning, have each been vindicated and, in fact, praised for their commitment to uncover the truth, a contentious situation related to Assange and Manning is still resolving itself.

In addition, there is anger in some cir-

The Passive Whistleblower. These people are often found in key positions of companies. They tend to be strong willed high achievers with high levels of self-esteem. In terms of personality they tend to have strong personal values and are extremely loyal. However, when and if an organization engages in prolonged wrong doings, such as, questionable safety procedures or contract practices, the passive whistleblower will reach a point where they will overcome their fears and anxieties and be more driven by anger and determination that is consistent with their

cles that the information made public has caused collateral damage and placed many in harm’s way.

On the other hand, there are those who are thrilled that WikiLeaks shed light on the reported double standards of world powers and look at WikiLeaks as “important as the Freedom of Information Act3.” The results are inconclusive at the moment and the motivation of the leakers are debatable.

Julian Assange is a highly visible public figure and was the runner up for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year with readers voting 1,249,425 times for the Australian-born self-proclaimed crusader of truth and reform4. He has a strong opinion of right and wrong and possesses the dedication to continue releasing controversial information.

IS JULIAN ASSANGE A “WHISTLEBLOWER” OR IS HE A JOURNALIST WHO HAS CREATED A FORUM FOR WHISTLEBLOWERS?

Assange has not personally blown the whistle, yet he has published confidential papers that others have obtained and have given to Assange for his publication.

Is he a heroic figure, a shrewd businessman or a thrill seeking exhibitionist? He may be a Pied Piper of whistleblowing, a Rupert Murdoch of the new journalism or something else? Because of the controversial nature of Assange’s

values. The Self-interested Whistleblower. Most of this whistleblowing is not driven by altruistic points of view. The self-interested whistleblowers unlike the other 2 groups do not necessarily rely on morality or ethical values. They very seldom feel any sense of organizational loyalty or connection. Their action is primarily the result of their emotional reaction to given situations. They tend to be opportunistic, emotionally unstable, vindictive, and quick to anger, with low self-esteem and a tendency to justify their actions.

A Whistleblower can be an individual who outs or opines practices or actions that are illegal, dishonest or violate the whistleblower's sense of morality or ethics. There are many new protections to guard the messenger in order to prevent the whistleblower from ending up as the victim.

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case, it is hard to classify him with a standard whistleblower’s psychological profile but I do list some general insights.

My years as a psychotherapist lead me to offer the following information about the traits of a typical whistleblower:

Whistleblowers

• are driven by altruism.

• can overcome insecurity through exhibitionism in order to release information.

• are generally moralistic, becoming committed and even obsessed about a personal belief.

• have a propensity to rely on moral theories that emphasize rights.

• are strong willed.

• are stubbornly committed and uncom promising.

• are willing to go against social conventions.

• rely on their own attitudes and beliefs.

• come from a mindset.

In most cases, society determines the right and wrong of social issues. Illegal or criminal exposure takes whistleblowing to another level. However, in my experience, altruism, a personally defined morality, rigidity and strong will, a willingness to counter social conventions and rely on one’s own beliefs, are the general characteristics of an individual with a propensity to expose controversial events and information. There are many lists of personality types that may apply. Some lists include an idealist, protector, visionary, enforcer, and do-gooder.

In the public arena, there have been a number of high profile whistleblowers in recent years and many share a number of the personality characteristics I have described. No doubt, the psychological profile of a whistleblower captures the public’s imagination and is helpful to know for both industry and government. It is therefore important to understand this personality regardless of a person’s or institution’s opinion on the action of whistleblowing itself.

Touro University Worldwide online master’s degrees include various disciplines and courses that investigate the psychology of whistleblowers and other psychological profiles, which impact Human Resource issues and business in general.•

The

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Recognition Successfully Balancing

By JENNIFER C. LOFTUS

Competing Organizational Needs

Organizations focused on success typically have a number of activities on-going at any one time of varying project lengths, requiring differing investments of financial and human resources. Result: projects may appear to conflict and potentially hamper the organization’s success.

HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONS ENSURE THAT THEIR IMMEDIATE AND LONGTERM INITIATIVES MUTUALLY SUPPORT THEIR OVERALL STRATEGIES?

Planning and communication are both essential to ensuring the needs of the short run do not overpower those of the long run, and vice versa. Successful organizations first start with a well-delineated strategic plan. Ideally, an organization will examine the following:

1. What the organization currently does well (Strengths),

2. Wher e the organization has room for improvement (Weaknesses),

3. Opportunities in the exter nal market on which the organization can capitalize, and

4. Thr eats in the external environment, over which the organization may have little control, which could hamper organizational success.

All tactical implementation steps, or short and long-term goals, flow from and relate directly back to the strategic plan. If an organizational initiative does not link to the strategic plan, management must immediately question why the organization is undertaking the initiative and take action accordingly.

FOCUS ON STRATEGIC PLAN

Detailed communications regarding an organization’s strategic plan are essential to ensure all employees understand where the organization is headed and the path it will follow to get there. Directly linking individual employee activities and projects to the strategically aligned short and long-term goals provides further reinforcement. Additionally, through these communications, employees may recognize potential conflicts or roadblocks not considered by the strategic planning team. Faster iden-

tification allows for swifter resolution and realignment.

INCENTIVE PLAN

Organizations may use an incentive plan as a tactical implementation tool to support goal achievement. A carefully structured incentive plan can simultaneously reward employees for short-term achievements and progress towards long-term goals. Consider the organization that wants to increase net income without decreasing customer satisfaction levels. In the organization’s incentive plan, employees may receive payouts each year upon attainment of annual net income goals, subject to adjustment for a decrease in customer satisfaction scores.

At the end of the long-term period, say three years, employees can receive an additional incentive payout for attaining the long-term customer satisfaction goal.

The case. A New York City-based service organization with employees across the Us was experiencing high workers’ compensation costs from employee workplace injuries. The nature of the firm’s work made employee safety a critical concern, particularly for skilled and unskilled laborers.

• The SWOT Result. The recent strategic planning and SWOT analysis identified cost control as a weakness and important focus for the future.

• The strategic plan. To convey the strategic goal of “cost control” to employees in terms that resonated with their jobs, the organization instituted a quarterly safety incentive.

• The Plan. During each quarter, management shared current injury statistics with employees through continuous communication. All employees at a specific location would receive a bonus of $50 – $100 for each quarter without injuries or workers’ compensation claims. The payouts from the incentive plan were far less than the savings the firm enjoyed by reducing its workers’ compensation claims.

Competing priorities are a given in our world. In today’s business climate, it is easy to focus on the short-term, to the potential detriment of the long-term. Successful organizations balance these competing needs through strategic planning and goal setting, continuous communication, and supportive tools. By keeping an eye on the next three months, as well as the next three years, organizations ensure an environment supportive of success.•

Illustration by Agata Janus, Warsaw, Poland

Training Be Creative

By EMMANUEL MAINDRON

Training New Generation

Training. What is it ? Boring when you are sitting in front of a table listening to someone for 3 days, or dreaming concepts, which are always rejected by your boss !

We can say that training in a big room where someone is telling you how to become a seller in 2 days thanks to 10 principles is over. Now we are moving to the next training generation. Interactive, entertaining, adaptable and focused on each individual.

MORE AND MORE INDEPENDENT WORKERS

Every country in the world has a huge variety of training companies and freelance people in order to help you to be THE BEST. There are more and more workers (HRD, Consultants, Directors) who leave their jobs in order to become independent trainers.

TRAINING IS CHANGING: NEW CONCEPTS & MATERIALS

Ten years ago the needs in training were different. People were asking about training for a new software or training about how to improve themselves for selling a new product and the new rules in accountability… Today, everything is different.

Your company tries to open your mind, to show you new situations, new challenges… your company tries to give you a global training, not only a product or job training.

Even if most trainings are about your job or about how to improve yourself in your current position, it’s interesting to underline the important growth of personal improvement training. They are coaches, HRD, consultants, sportsmen, actors… and they come to your company to apply other specialties (such as emergency rescue, music, theatre, sports…) that you don’t know, in order to show you the links with your job and to be more efficient in your management!!!

They try to open your mind to other worlds and to help yourself in your daily tasks.

COMPANIES WHO WILL SURVIVE IN THE FUTURE ARE THE ONES WHO ENCOURAGE CREATIVITY TODAY Maurice

Zeldman

Lots of companies hesitate to take into consideration creative training. Training can be about laughter (you can read our article about laughter in our last issue), about how to manage the risk thanks to Emergency Rescue Specialist, about performance (some sportsmen are specialists of the topic). Even if the start of these kind of training is slow the MNC are more and more interested by that and they start to allow a budget for this new original concept.

• Stephen Bunard. Creator of the network Coaching&Com has been working for ten years on the topic «how to speak in public to help themselves to find their own way of communication (words, attitudes …)». According to him the needs in training and coaching are changing. CEOs know that actually, with the new media, they need to speak with total openness. Public opinion is more and more aware about the truth.

He is coaching some executive managers to help them explore how to speak. According to Stephen Bunard, it’s important to speak the truth and to

Lots of companies hesitate to take into consideration creative training.

communicate with honesty. The goal is to work on the message, on your body position (thanks to synergology) «The times where everything was undercontrol are over ! » We need to coach to control our words and what we do.

• Luc Teyssier, Luc Teyssier, CEO at Pygmalion Communication, organizes

training and coaching sessions (individual & groups). He’s doing his job by using an approach based on behavior. For him an actor plays a character in a good way when he adopts his accent, his way of walking… He does the same with his «students» to give them the «key» to their way of being. He gives us an example. Some employees didn’t understand that some colleagues can see them in a different way that they would like to be per-

ceived. Thanks to this approach they can understand better that their body (or words) can give to other people a meaning that can be interpreted in a different way by others. According to Luc Teyssier our body is an instrument that we need to know.

EVERY PROBLEM HAS A TRAINING ANSWER !

Actually we can notice some creativity on short and often one-shot trainings. Companies use the words «conference», «team-building» but step by step training professionnals create programs for all kind of companies. Doing an oral presentation is impossible for you? Doesn’t matter.

On Internet you can find a training with an actor and for a week you will do exercices with him (and other people with the same problem) to learn how to speak to your colleagues. You don’t succeed in your management because no one takes you seriously enough?

Don’t worry, there’s a training. A cook (often retired) will bring you in a kitchen during an entire week and you will learn with him how to manage people with stress and authority. So, in a word, concept and content are actually linked in a training. It’s necessary to find new concept to the training in order to obtain, in addition to knowledge, aptitudes and experiences. And that’s sure a classic lesson to learn Excel is easy and you can take it, but a classic lesson to learn how to move, how to speak … is complicated!!! Employees are looking for new experiences, new feelings, they want to discover new fields, things that they never do… They need to be surprised and entertained, as if they were watching television.

TRAINING NEW GENERATION

But this evolution is normal. If you take «Marketing» as an example. This topic has, in a first time, considered the consumer has ‘passive’ by giving him information about a product. It was focused on the product not on the consumer. Actually, companies are focused on the consumer. The client is «consumer-actor». He interacts with the compa-

nies and marketing people need to be creative to seduce them and to create needs… It’s the same for training. Employees are the heart of the company. They want to draw their own professional path. We are spending a big part of our life inside the company. In this way people are asking more and more things to the companies. They want to obtain consideration, they want more than «just a job». They want to share feelings, moments, experiences… So here we are in the new generation training. The one where the employees are in the heart of the training. Training needs to be focused on them, designed for them, and give them new sensations. Training needs to consider them as men/women and not just as employees.

COACHING IN THE WORLD

Coaching concept was born in USA and Canada. Created for companies, coaching is actually applied to the daily life in USA. You can have a coach to help you go shopping, do sports… In this way USA are still in the 3rd generation of training.

Personal training (the one where you train yourself for your personal life). In Europe we are just in the second generation. Companies are moving from old trainings to this new kind of coaching. United Kingdom, according to ICF (International Coach Federation) has been developing this training since 2002. Actually, coaching represent 30 – 40% of the training budget of companies in UK. In Russia, this market is growing really fastly, 20% by year! This evolution can let us think that the Eastern Europe countries will be a huge market for coaching. According to the website: DualExpat.com “Asia, where lives 60% of the world population, has just 10% of the planet coaches, an opportunity for this profession. At the opposite, in Australia there is 1 coach for 7500 inhabitants (most significant ratio in the world).”

COACHING IN THE FUTURE

Companies are becoming ecologic, social, humanitarian. Training will move in a new concept. It could offer, in the

next decades, to go to other countries to help people, to clean beaches, to learn how environment is important… It already exists but it’s one shot operation and not considered as training. Companies are the most important actors in our lives because they will help us discover ourselves thanks to experiences and activities that we will never do otherwise. •

Illustration by Jan Feindt, Pardes Hanna - Karkur, Israel

Coaching Crisis Mangement

SCANDALS

The business world is littered with such disasters, many of them very recent. Just a year ago the global conglomerate BP became the poster boy for how NOT to respond to a natural catastrophe when one of its rigs blew up in the Gulf of Mexico and began spewing oil at a phenomenal rate into the pristine seawater. The floundering response of BP, caught as it was between unpreparedness both for the disaster and the media spotlight which shone on it, was to costs CEO Tony Hayward his job. It almost cost him more than that; he and his family needed round-the-clock police protection at the height of the disaster following death threats.

Another more recent scandal is that which has engulded the British newspaper arm of global media giant News Corporation. While the endgame still has to be played out, with charges pending against many senior executives and police officers who took bribes from a newspaper, the handling of the crisis has been nothing short of atrocious.

EVEN “EXPERTS” CAN BE WRONG

One might think that a newspaper company, skilled in the arts of communications, might have been better able to control information and how to portray its best side. But ever since accusations were levelled against the News of the World newspaper that its journalists had hacked into the mobile telephones of celebrities, the parents of child murder victims and the relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the organization went into denial mode.

First it said that only one “rogue reporter” was involved. Then it could not explain away cash payments totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to celebrities

to keep quiet. Then, as advertisers began pulling away from the “toxic” brand, the boss Rupert Murdoch took the drastic decision in July 2011 to axe the thing altogether - this despite revenue streams of close to 300 million dollars a year!

HOW CAN WE PUT “A PATCH” ON THE ERRORS?

So if we accept the premise that managers make mistakes, the next question must surely be: how do we minimize them and begin once again to restore public trust in a company and its products?

Mike Leidig, the British owner of the Central European News Media agency in Vienna, is a man well versed in trying to clean up the image of clients who range from banks to computer websites and charities.

“I remember a few years back,” he said, “when a well-known Austrian bank was having enormous image difficulties following a scandal involving board bonuses at a time when it was calling in loans

[W bernsteincrisismanagement.com burson-marsteller.com cen.at lewispr.com prfirms.org]

By ALLAN HALL

When a ship parks in front of your house it means that there’s a problem in sight. Not all crises can be spotted immediately. The ones generated by natural events have the “good asset” of making a lot of “noise”. If teams are well organized they intervene and resolve the situation, just as the Japanese did, a few months ago. When teams are not organized, or they do not realize they are in a crisis (as it happened in the case of BP last year in the Gulf of Mexico) it all results in a disaster within a disaster.

01 Firefighters after evacuating a community center in Japan. Photo by Ko Sasaki

02 Ship stuck after earthquake. Photo by Toshiki Senoue

Cold-Blooded and Quick Crisis Management. Two words that strike fear into the hearts of bosses all over the world when events spin out of control and begin to devour reputations, people and the corporate bottom line.

from charities and putting the squeeze on small business who couldn’t get credit.”

I had performed some PR training sessions for the bank and they came to me and my specialists to try to turn public opinion around. They wanted some airy-fairy stuff about corporate charities they supported, about how hard working their managers had been - and they wanted an attack on the media, blaming it for unfair reporting.

“

I said go ahead: tell a news organization how bad they are...and then watch as the press REALLY gears up to rip into your organization and the people who run it. “My advice was the advice I give all cli-

ents; be proactive. Go on the offensive. In this case it meant a review of certain bonuses promised, a reduction of the biggest ones with payments made to charity of the difference and the pledge that in future, all bonuses would only be linked to productivity.

“Within a week the negative headlines dried up. Within two months a stock price that had fallen by seven percent at the start of the crisis was back to its normal level. And the bank is thriving to this day.

“You know, this is not rocket science. But so much of business management technique in the world is to be aggressive,

bullish, take-no-prisoners, that the suits in charge of corporate images often forget that sugar is so much more palatable than vinegar!”

WHEN DOES A SIMPLE ERROR BECOME A CRISIS?

Jonathan Bernstein of Bernstein Crisis Management Inc. in America defines a crisis as “any situation that is threatening or could threaten to harm people or property, seriously interrupt business, damage reputation and/or negatively impact share value.”

The author of several books on crisis management, said; “All organizations

are vulnerable to crises. You can’t serve any population without being subjected to situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, sudden changes in ownership or management, and other volatile situations on which your stakeholders — and the media that serves them — often focus.

“The cheapest way to turn experience into future profits is to learn from others’ mistakes. In an era of 24-hour TV and Web coverage, damage to a reputation can occur almost instantaneously. For years after a debacle takes place, it can remain etched in public memory thanks to poor crisis public relations, while a successful effort can make the scandal soon forgotten. When time is limited and every move by a corporation or an individual faces close scrutiny, crisis PR specialists come to the rescue to restore faith in a brand or name.”

WHAT REALLY WORKS WHEN A CEO IS HIT BY A CRISIS?

Kathy Cripps, president of the Council of Public Relations Firms in New York City, said, “CEOs have come to understand the importance of crises and protecting their reputation. I think with that understanding companies can act more quickly when problems or potential problems arise.” So what works in putting wrong right?

PROBLEMS

DO NOT RESOLVE THEMSELVES

David Brown is a crisis management expert at Lewis PR, a London based company with offices around the world including San Francisco and Singapore. Winner of the Small Agency of the Year award in 2009 and a finalist in the SC Magazine Europe PR Company of the Year awards the same year, David said the day of “hiding in the sand and hoping trouble will go away will no longer work.”

He says that companies in trouble could do a lot worse than to emulate the actions of Sir Richard Branson, the highprofile, high-energy boss of the Virgin empire which encompasses music, media and transport.

In 2007 an elderly woman died and five other passengers were seriously hurt in a Virgin train derailment in Cumbria. Several carriages were left on their side after a Virgin London to Glasgow service crashed at Grayrigg, near Kendal. Within minutes the train, the Virgin logo and the scene of carnage was rolling out on news channels around the world as the walking wounded staggered around the wreckage.

“Branson was staring at a potential PR nightmare,” said David, a former national newspaper journalist in Britain. But what he did next defused much of the potential for disaster.

“Many executives would have hidden in their boardrooms.” They would have wheeled out an army of highly-paid PRs, which he could clearly afford. But Richard Branson, who is more closely identified with his brand than perhaps any other executive with any other global company, took a different track.

Donning an anorak and Wellington boots he turned up at the scene of the disaster. He hailed the courage of the train driver and conveyed his sadness to the family of the deceased victim, Margaret “Peggy” Masson, 84, from Glasgow, Scotland.

He offered support to the family of Mrs. Masson and made sure carers and Virgin company employees were at her funeral. His concern prompted praise from the clergyman who led her funeral service.

In the days following the crash he refused no media interview, he dodged no difficult questions. Coming at a time when the British Ministry of Defence was under fire for its PR concerning plane crashes in Iraq and Afghanistan, he earned exemplary praise.

Mr. Brown said, “In contrast to the nearhysterical paranoid secrecy of our chain of command whenever a military aircraft is involved in a crash, Sir Richard Branson was on the scene, and the manner in which he fielded the questions from the press was nothing short of exemplary. Key actors were named less than 12 hours after the fact, and the whole mood of the coverage on the TV news was supportive, sympathetic and informative. “This is the lesson that corporations must learn; to be human, not faceless, to be humble, not arrogant, to be bold, not scared. We are all human, even tycoons, and it is a lesson that Rupert Murdoch, for example, may have learned too little, too late, to save his global empire.” •

03, 04 Photo by Noboru Takayama, Courtesy of Zen Foto

1In 1982 crisis management was born with the Tylenoltampering case, when seven people died in American from ingesting poisoned tablets. PR firm Burson-Marsteller was hired by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson to repair its reputation. Burson-Marsteller advised recalling the medication and halting all advertising. An immediate press campaign by Johnson & Johnson followed informing the public about the poisoned capsules and warning them not to use any Tylenol product. Company executives were instructed to not obfuscate or deny the scope of the problem but instead cooperate with the media in getting the story out so as to ensure everyone heard about the poisoning.

An immediate recall of all Tylenol capsule products on store shelves (at a cost of more than $100 million to Johnson & Johnson) was instigated. An offer to immediately swap out all Tylenol capsules with Tylenol tablets was made, a series of forthright statements by Tylenol upper management expressing their shock and pain over the deaths was issued and an extensive PR announcement of the introduction of new Tylenol products in tamperproof packaging, coupled with an extensive series of promotional programs offering the new products at reduced prices via price discounts, coupons, and so on, began.

The result of Johnson & Johnson’s classic campaign rescued the product from the marketing grave. During the crisis Tylenol had seen its share of the market drop from 37 percent to 0 percent. A few months after the poisonings, Tylenol was back up to 24 percent market share and today still reigns as the leading brand of this popular painkiller.

Moral: Be proactive.

2In 1995 the Four Weddings and a Funeral star Hugh Grant - then, as now, one of the most bankable celebrities in Hollywood - got caught using the services of a street prostitute in Los Angeles. His face as a felon shot around the world and he risked being consigned to the celluloid dustbin forever. But Grant fought back. Instead of hiding, he went on to a series of chat shows. He spoke about his shame openly. He portrayed himself as a man in a weak moment instead of hiding. True, he had to put up with the nudges and the winks, the paparazzi outside his door for weeks on end, but the openness strategy worked. As Bernstein says in his guide about how to make a crisis worse, “Make the press your enemy and you are finished.” And as the Business Insider website said; “Grant did not refuse interviews, nor did he

defiantly cancel appearances... Instead, he apologized on shows like Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and CNN’s Larry King Live. The gist? ‘I’m very sorry,’ Hugh simply said. “The result? The public forgave him. He went on to develop his incredibly successful acting career, and few people even mention the incident anymore. ”

Moral: Be courageous.

3

British Airways was at the sharp end of some of the most stinging criticism in its history when it boasted high-tech Terminal Five as the future of painless international air travel.

But when it opened in March 2008 there were chaotic scenes. Instead of being met with a hightech, hassle-free travel experience, passengers were faced with overcrowding, delays, cancellations,

ill-trained staff and baggage chaos. British Airways - which has exclusive use of the terminalwas forced to warn passengers that one in five flights from Heathrow’s Terminal 5 were likely to be cancelled the day following the opening after it struggled to rectify the operational nightmare. It was a major embarrassment for BA, airport operator BAA, and the government, which all hailed the Lord Rogers-designed building as state-of-the-art.

CEO of BA, Willie Walsh, decided to blame no-one but himself. “I apologize to everyone and anyone.” The frank approach worked. Within a matter of weeks the faults had been ironed out, the tourists were moving swiftly, BA’s share price stabilized and everyone had virtually forgotten about the initial problems.

Moral: Be humble.

Don’t be afraid: react! Following are several examples of where PR went into overdrive to perform near- miracles in brand protection.

05 Cat Troubles. Photo by Teun Hocks, Courtesy of Torch Gallery

Performance Job Rotation

By PALLE ELLEMANN KNUDSEN

Do Not Stop at First Glance

Great leaders understand their organizations vertically and horizontally. Vertically, they understand from a business perspective what goes on in the “machine room” of the company and what buyers of the product or service want. From an organizational perspective, great leaders understand what it is like to work on the lower levels of the organization and what the key drivers for motivation are for employees.

Horizontally, great leaders understand all corners of the organization and how different functions and departments are connected in order to foster a dynamic and collaborative culture.

A traditional career pattern, can build a vertical competency when a leader works his or her way up from “the bottom” of an organization. It often gives credibility to a leader, if he or she has been “one of them” (although some people will claim that leaders quickly forget what it is like to work on the “floor”).

JOB ROTATION BUILDS

HORIZONTAL UNDERSTANDING

It is more challenging to build insight and understanding of the organization horizontally, because it requires a lateral approach to career building. In many cases neither employee nor company pay much attention to the horizontal perspective, because the employee is so focused on specializing and developing core competences within one field. In the lower levels of organizations the horizontal perspective is not really valued.

Some companies are addressing this challenge by building job rotation into their talent programs to ensure that the future leaders have broader experience with the organization before they

are pushed up to top level positions. A company like American Express has created a Global Finance Rotation program for the most talented MBA/Master’s graduates in the company. The participants in the program are recruited internally as well as externally and placed into rotation to explore different Finance roles and functions. This highprofile development program is designed to create future Senior Finance leaders. Assignments are available in various countries, and offer continued exposure to the American Express Finance leadership team.

The global construction company Skanska has a similar rotation program, where junior employees over a 24-month period are given the opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge of the company by working in several areas of the business (Safety, Project Accounting, Project Controls, Project Engineering, Assisting Superintendent, Marketing/Business Development & Preconstruction).

“This is a formal program that goes far beyond moving employees through different areas of our corporate structure. Each employee in the program is under the instruction and guidance of senior personnel during the program and is assigned a mentor who keeps in regular contact with the participant,” says Heidi Burkett, HR manager at Skanska USA Building. In addition, the highest level of management will follow each employee’s progress in order to develop people in the shortest practical time into capable, productive managers, well versed in all aspects of the construction business.

The company gains a loyalty from the employee by having such an opportunity. The expanded knowledge helps

Leading with a horizontal perspective and vertical understanding

the participants become future leaders of Skanska and reinforces a pipeline of key talent. For whatever position the participant falls in after the program is completed, there is a greater understanding and empathy in appreciating the many roles that exist within the organization. From the employee’s perspective, they get to interact early in their career with many senior managers and different management styles, which helps mold the employee in creating their future business philosophy.

Heidi Burkett stresses that “many of the company’s senior managers and corporate officers started from entry level positions within Skanska, corporate predecessors or one of our subsidiaries, and are effective due to their particular abilities as shaped by the training and leadership of their seniors in the company.”

“This is a formal program that goes far beyond moving employees through different areas of our corporate structure”

BUILDING HORIZONTAL PERSPECTIVE INTO YOUR CULTURE

Job rotation programs tend to be designed for top talents and are thereby limited to a few people. Some companies have developed other practices to reach out more broadly and build a horizontal perspective into the culture and mindset of the company. The Norwegian video technology company Tandberg has since the early days been very aware of fostering a horizontal perspective within the organization. The organizational structure is extremely flat and people have very high level job descriptions. On the contrary, people are encouraged to do what they feel

Understand what goes on in different departments and how they are interconnected. Understand what goes on and what it is like to work on the “floor”.

is right for the business. They should try out new things and “ask for forgiveness rather than permission.” Events and trainings are designed to make people from all parts of the organization connect and their own video technology allows people to be instantly “face-toface” connected at any time.

Before the organization became too big, all employees – not just the sales reps - attended the same sales training and all employees went together to the largest technology fair in Europe. The company still gathers newly hired people from all over the world and all different departments to the same new hire three day training sessions in Oslo – receptionists, sales reps and country managers all together.

The same practices of gathering peo-

ple from all parts of the business to the same events, trainings and new hire orientation is also in place in another recognized Best Workplace, Admiral Group. The UK based car insurance company Admiral Group is the only large company to be recognized ten years in a row as one of the Best Workplaces in Europe. With the fast growth of the organization, Admiral has realized that it needs more systems to make sure that people move around in the company and build the horizontal understanding that is necessary to lead.

Part of the strategy for building horizontal understanding and keeping people with the organization is to have a proactive talent spotting program. HR works closely with operation managers to be constantly focusing on talent

spotting and encourage people to move to another department, if that is what it takes to help them grow and develop themselves. “Obviously, it is difficult for a team to lose a talent, but it is much better that we keep the talent within the organization and make sure the person is continuing to grow and be happy working for Admiral,” says People Services Manager Ceri Assiratti

The talent spotting program also identifies people who have the potential to do more than what their existing job can give them. Some of these people may be invited to take part in a socalled business dilemma group, where talented people from different parts of the business regularly meet to work on a real business dilemma and try to come up with a solution. There is no

The photographer David Drebin focuses on capturing the cinematic versions of ordinary life with the use of composition and color. His background in advertising and interest in psychology leads him to strive for an emotional connection between the subject and the viewers. He seeks to capture the truth of the scene.

Photo by David Drebin, Courtesy of Torch Gallery — 01 Dancing

specific timeline for the task, because the company wants the group to really get to the bottom of the dilemma. When there is a recommendation for a solution, it is presented to the top level of the company.

“When you sit with staff you never fail to learn something new about the business”

KEEPING A SHORT DISTANCE FROM TOP TO BOTTOM

Admiral Group certainly also takes the vertical perspective into account, when it comes to building managers and top leaders. The vast majority of their managers and executives are recruited internally and all managers and executives are trained to have an “inverted triangle” mindset, which is that managers need to focus on supporting the people working in their team instead of having people reporting to them. The hierarchical pyramid is in other words inverted and requires a totally different approach to management than traditional management models.

Senior Managers are on a rotation to work weekends and sit with the call center employees taking weekendshifts, a practice that includes the CEO Henry Engelhardt, who emphasizes the benefits of the interactions with the staff because “when you sit with staff you never fail to learn something new about the business.” When Admiral Group expands into a new market, the new country manager starts out by working 7-8 months in the headquarters, where he or she tries out all functions of the business including selling car insurance on the phone or receiving claims from customers.

Other great workplaces have similar practices, such as Belgian shoe retailer Schoenen Torfs, where the CEO Wouter Torfs often joins the team in one of his 61 stores on Saturdays and services customers like any other sales person in the store. This practice is helping him to keep a very close relationship with employees like it has always been the tradition in the old family-company, where he is third generation manage-

ment. Similarly important, it is giving him better insight to what customers want, better than what the sales figures can give him. This is crucial information, when he decides what shoes to order for the next season.

Great leaders like Henry Engelhardt and Wouter Torfs are role models for the leadership behavior they want to foster in Admiral Group and Schoenen Torfs. Despite not working themselves up from the bottom, they do show a particular vertical understanding. While role modeling from the top leaders is important for fostering a particular culture in the organization, it is equally important how Admiral Group, Schoenen Torfs, Tandberg, American Express and Skanska build systems and practices that give employees the opportunities and encourage them to build a strong insight and connection to the entire organization. •

David Drebin’s

images are a good metaphor for the article title “do not stop at first glance.” The first view leads to the stereotype. Then after that you create a deeper emotional connection between the subject and the viewer. The truth of the scene lies beneath the dynamic surface (the first impact as we have said) but with subsequent views it allows us to see things that escaped our first glance, caught by other interests. As Palle Ellemann suggests, leaders are invited to do a thorough analysis of the careers of people heading in the same direction.

Planning a career intelligently, does not stop at the first glance, even if it gives you a curious image return.

Event SHRM Annual Meeting

By LAURA GRAY

Future Trends for the US Workforce

The SHRM conference in Las Vegas was surrounded by the best and brightest professionals in the HRM field, which fortunately allowed us to steal a few minutes with a few of them. They all had insightful comments to make about the current job market in the US including where they expect to see future growth.

UNEMPLOYMENT: OUTSOURCING AND ALTERNATIVE WORK ARRANGEMENTS

In US, the current rate of unemployment is 9.2%, this is a small decrease from the all time high of over 10% in 2010, but it is still a far cry from just 5 years ago when unemployment was 4.6%. One must take this with a grain of salt though because this is a national figure, and certain states are worse off, seeing double-digit unemployment. Then if you dig even further it becomes apparent that some industries and sectors were hit harder.

Veterans, African Americans, people with disabilities and blue-collar workers have unemployment of nearly double the national rate.

“Companies are trying to reduce operational costs as much as possible, and this involves reducing payroll benefits, and shifting to alternative work arrangements – such as outsourcing and greater utilization of independent contractors,” pointed out Joshua Barger, HR Manager at Game Theory, LLC.

Micheal Smith, CEO and President of ConSova Corporation, reaffirmed this thought saying “Employers are a little reluctant to increase their hiring, decrease their inventory or offer more services simply because of what happened in the financial crisis.”

JOB SHORTAGES: CONSTRUCTION AND MANUFACTURING

There are some sectors that are feeling the “hard period”, worst than others. Jon Velie, who is an Attorney at Velie Law Firm, stated “the shortages are mostly construction, as a lot of houses are off the market now and they are just sitting there vacant...and also manufacturing has gone down steadily over the years.”

Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resource at CareerBuilders.com presented the same thoughts “construction and manufacturing are the sectors that have the biggest hurdles.”

Together with the mentioned sectors, “the industry with the biggest losses” informed Rathin Sinha, President and Founder of America’s Job Exchange, “is the financial sector, which crashed.”

“Basically,” he emphasized, “in this recession job losses have been in areas where there are less specific skills and professional skills required.”

Vince Rosauer, Regional General Manager California and Oregon at Graebel also informed us that “the car industry is suffering, and the city of Detroit, a big car producing city, is actually one of the most depressed places in the United States.” The government sector, is also down “about 450.000 jobs since the recession hit in September of 2008 and between March-May this year alone it is down 73.000 jobs, which is definitely far and above the other verticals that have been hit,” listed off Ginny Gomez, Vice President of Product Management at LexisNexis.

GROWTH SEEN IN TECHNOLOGY AND HEALTH CARE

Luckily, there are industries that are still prospering in the current market, leaving some hope for the future including

[W lexisnexis.com mckinsey.com/mgi shrm.org velielaw.com virgin.com zappos.com]

Making connections in the glow of the Strip

SHRM is the largest association in the world dedicated to the management of human resources. Each year they organize a conference in the USA. In 2011, the selected location was the Nevada’s sin city, Las Vegas.

The 63rd Annual SHRM Conference & Exhibition from June 23rd to June 27th took place in “fabulous Las Vegas.” For 4 days, more that 14,000 HRM professionals came together to exchange ideas, innovations and best practices in the field.

The conference was comprised of over 200 sessions with general and keynote speakers who represented the biggest names in HRM, the Masters Series, mega sessions, and the largest exhibition of HR-related products.

The conference was also a meeting point for different cultures. The aim of SHRM was to provide a community for those working in HR sector all over the world. In conjunction with the working portions, professionals were able to enjoy the city and were encouraged to network in a more informal manner via organized activities, such as a Keith Urban concert, sightseeing to places like the Zappos.com headquarters, museum visits, business lunches and relaxation stations. All of these were meant to facilitate a more personal connection.

Lessons from the “Big Names”

The 2011 panel of keynote speakers were distinguished and famous figures from the business world.

Entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson,

The current state of the US Labor Market may finally be improving but it still has a long way to go.

started off the conference on Sunday, followed by the media mogul Arianna Huffington on Monday, the CEO of Zappos.com Tony Hsieh on Tuesday and finished with actor Michael J. Fox on Wednesday morning.

entrepreneur if everything was a success,” which is why he preaches that in order to have a successful company, one must find the right people and give them the “freedom to make mistakes.”

same thing we value in life,” she said during her speech.

Happiness is the key to my success

The secret of my success

Founder of Virgin Group, Richard Branson received his knighthood in 1998 for his “services to entrepreneurship.” He has held up this honor by continuing to pave the way for entrepreneurs with his own success, which includes opening Virgin Records and his more recent adventure Virgin Galactic (the first galactic commercial space line). However, he makes a point of stating, “you wouldn’t be a proper

The importance of trust Arianna Huffington introduced herself on the stage, with her strong, proud Greek accent, that she has managed to conserve even after so many years in the US. Arianna is the President and Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post Media Group, were she has made a strong name for herself and she considers social media an important instrument to help people to interact. “The things we value online – trust, authenticity, empathy, and giving back – are the

She went on to explain that despite all her success over the years, it was not until five months ago that she realized just how important HRM was when the Huffington Post merged with AOL. Now she’s not sure how she lived without that support. Human resource management is about trust, which she defines as “the idea that we are there to support one another,” and with this trust comes balance. An office cannot work effectively without trust or balance. She also had a similar view to Sir Richard Branson, that you cannot be a leader without “being willing to take risks and being willing to fail.”

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com Inc., arrived at the Las Vegas convention center on his “Delivering Happiness” bus, which is the same one used to promote his book around the States. When Tony was in college, he started his first business, selling pizzas to his fellow students. In 1996, he launched the online advertising company LinkExchange that taught him the importance of HRM especially after the difficulties he faced there. In fact, he sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million after being completely disillusioned by his workforce and dreading coming into work and facing his employees. Fortunately, he was able to learn from his previous mistakes and when he started Zappos.com, an online shoe retail [W americasjobexchange.com careerbuilders.com consova.com cpiworld.com gametheory.com graebel.com huffingtonpost.com

Find your right way

Digital Signage is the ultimate solution for managing interior space. Image a dynamic environment, where everyone within the organization is well-oriented, well-informed and where visitors are made to feel welcome. Imagine a building where people find their way around, independently and without explanation. Digital Signage is used every day in companies, hotels, school and hospitals all over the world.

From table to Monolith. eFlex (wall and Table), Wall Sign (10,4”, 15”, 32” and 40”), digital communication (6”, 10”, 15”, 32”, 40” and 46”), and Monolith (15”, 32” and 40”). ISO 9001:2008, Quality Management System, ISO 14001:2004, Environmental Management System, Certified by Certiqualityone hundred years at customer service

technology, which was unanimously Many companies have been rethinking the way they do business and are implementing new software solutions organizationally to remedy inefficient processes and ensure a constant sharing of knowledge and developing web solutions for the ease ” said Velie. This increased use of new technologies in order to create a more efficient workplace has kept the technology industry going. , Vice President of Marketing with Career Partners International (CPI) The world of work is changing here in the States… A lot of the jobs that have gone away throughout this recession will never come back,” in his people probably have to learn new skills and learn how to work differently as we continue to move forward

Technology is not the only profitable if there’s one positive story over the last few years, it’s the health care industry and health care sector which have had a significant amount of growth, month on month on month on month,” shared Haefner, “And that’s not just doctors and nurses and PAs, but it’s also going to be those individuals who work within the administration of a hospital or doctor’s office, so there are a lot of skill sets that are in demand for that health care sector.” This equals good news for the job market, because the sector has a wide range of positions.

THE FUTURE: CROSS TRAINING, MULTIPLE SKILLS, AGILITY AND MULTIPLE ROLES

In spite of all the uncertainty that the future may hold for the American market, we asked these professionals to give their opinions on what lays ahead.

Due to all of our interviewees’ different backgrounds we were able to show the most realistic market situation.

Barger felt that the workforce was already beginning to shift and react to the unemployment crisis. He stated “we will see an evolution of the workforce being cross trained and having multiple skill sets to increase organizational skills.

Employees that have multiple skill sets

and a greater agility within organizations are going to be the ones that are protected, as they can be shifted to a different department or task with relative ease. There will be a fierce competition for the best and brightest talent who can play multiple roles if necessary.”

The workforce is becoming more global. With today’s technological advances it is easier to stay in touch with clients and employees around the world. Whether technology is pushing the world more global, or if companies becoming more global are forcing technology to advance is uncertain, but Rathin Sinha, did state how “work is more global and we don’t need to hire people in a specific location. Wherever talent is, companies will go there to get that talent. It is not localized anymore.” Smith made a similar point adding, “Employers are going to have to embrace technology and find creative ways to have people continue to operate and cooperate without having to be under the same roof.”

Another important trend that Sinha acknowledges is “people with higher skills and talents will become freelancers. As we’ve said, work is a relationship between supply and demand of talent, so the people with a lot of talent will supply

outlet, he thought long and hard about what type of company culture he wanted to create for his new venture. In his opinion, his ultimate success is rooted in having happy employees, because it is impossible to provide exceptional customer service, something Zappos.com prides itself on, if his employees are unhappy. All new employees go through a rigorous training process and are even offered money to quit upfront if they are not satisfied. Hsieh also acknowledges that this strategy may not work at other companies but the message is the same, “every company should have values it can actually commit to. In the end, it’s all about delivering happiness, whether it’s customers or employees.”

02

their talent to a lot of companies. In my opinion, freelancers, I think their time has come.”

Ginny Gomez, during her interview mentioned a research study done by the McKinsey Global Institute (June 2011) and presented the following observations: “One thing they talked about is that it could take until 2016 to replace the 7 million jobs that were lost. So you are talking about a long time, and people are expecting a protracted recovery. This fact didn’t surprise me as much, what did surprise me was there are 6 verticals that they are expecting to account for as much as 85% of our growth during the recovery, and that is health care, business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.” This study leaves hope for the future of the market, with 6 different sectors looking to produce growth in the next few years. •

Attachment & Pride What Your People are Really Worth to Your Company

By IAN BERRY

The Priceless Value of Fully Valued Employees

Human beings are not commodities. There is no price tag for a human life. Truly value your employees by taking these seven actions and you will receive a return on investment that will not just increase the worth of your company, more importantly you will increase your own self-worth.

All organizations exist for fundamentally the same reason: to deliver the value to all their stakeholders that they demand, desire, and feel they deserve; what I call, must-haves, should-haves, and nice-to-haves. Organizations thriving in the modern world are delivering all three.

Delivery of such value presents a challenge for most organizations because employees, the primary deliverers of value to other stakeholders, feel undervalued. The consequence is that employees do not deliver the value to others that they can and must.

There are seven simple, yet profound actions, we must take to ensure our employees feel valued and therefore perform at optimum levels on a consistent basis.

1 Know precisely what your stakeholders actually want

When was the last time you asked all your stakeholders what they actually want from you?

If it’s been more than six months since you asked your stakeholders what they want from you in terms of the musthaves, should-haves, and nice-to-haves, that would mean they will continue to exchange value with you (you provide what they want and they provide you with something in exchange), then it is likely that you are leaving thousands of dollars of profits on the table.

If you are not engaged in continual and conscious conversations with your employees about the value they want from you, then it is likely that they are not as fully engaged as they could be and therefore not delivering required value to others.

2 Turn values on the wall into virtues in the hall

Unless the values we articulate on our walls and in our annual reports are verbs, that is they are behaviors that demonstrate we mean what we say, then they are actually demotivators for people. Values must be virtues or they are just meaningless words.

3 See people as they could be, rather than as they are

My first mentor had a great philosophy, which I later discovered was popularized by Goethe, the great German philosopher:

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. (Goethe)

Stop seeing your employees as they are. Start seeing people as they could be. Create a culture that encourages people to visualize possibility and that enables them to turn possibility into reality.

4 Let the imagination genie out of the bottle

Sir Ken Robinson, a must see and hear speaker, is one of the world’s leading educators. In many of his speeches he says we don’t just have a natural resources crisis, we also have a human resources crisis. He also says imagination is the most distinctive feature of human nature.

Remembering Work Style talking

Work Style Talking was an event from the magazine in April 2011 where the readers pondered about the future of work with a particular focus on work identity. We established a common perspective from personal emotions, rules, architecture, environment and organization. These are the feeling expressed most strongly by the TALK participants.

The workplace of the future should not allow the identity of the individual to be distorted when comparing work with personal identity.

The two photo stories that we have chosen to illustrate the article by Ian Berry reflect the two dimensions to their fullest extremes.

On one page man is pulled from the water, loaded like a mule routed on a path of stress and even roughed up while working.

On the next page, man is shown at his most private and intimate moments. The middle road is reachable by following the advice of Ian Berry.

Through the disquieting ambiguity Eldon Garnet creates allegory with words, images, sound and time. Through the use of tools such as humor and the modern iconic images like businessmen or slogans he attempts to break the standard mold of thinking.

Photo 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 by Eldon Garnet, Courtesy of Torch Gallery

One of the reasons we do indeed have a human resources crisis, is that our workplaces are often not the kind of places where imagination is allowed to thrive. We seem to have a focus on knowledge and have ignored Einstein’s famous edict: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

When imagination is allowed to flourish, inspiration follows, as does insight and then ideas. An idea successfully implemented is innovation, particularly if the implementation changes what’s normal.

If you aren’t really innovating in your organization, and you must if you want to thrive, it is likely that imagination is not being allowed to flourish. How we solve problems and meet our challenges is a great way to ensure that people’s imagination is alive and well.

A typical scenario is this: We recognize a problem, and solve it. What has happened 9 times out of 10 is that all we have done is reinstated the status quo and haven’t really removed the cause of the problem in the first place!

Every problem and challenge we have is a gift. It is an opportunity for innovation, to change what’s normal.

Please look at all your problems and challenges with new eyes. See them as opportunities to let your let your imagination loose. Encourage everyone around you to do the same. You will have opened the door to inspiration, insight and ideas, the essentials that precede authentic innovation.

5 Involve your employees in setting strategy

Why is it that most strategies fail to get executed? My answer is that it’s because our employees, the primary executors of our strategy, have not yet bought into or do not yet own our strategy. I define strategy as: the reference points from which we make all the key decisions about exchanging value.

In my conference and in-house meeting presentations I ask people in small groups to create no more than six words to describe their strategy. I have been delighted, moved, and inspired by the profound ‘six word strategies’ that people create.

When I visit organizations prior to being engaged for a project I walk the factory floors or office halls and chat with people about what needs to change and how they believe the changes can be made. It never cease to amaze me that people know what to do, they

have just never been asked. How would you go about asking your employees for their input? In what ways can you involve them in the setting of your strategy?

6 Ensure all employees have their own execution plan

Following on from engaging your employees in the setting of your strategy, ensure that a conversation is held with every employee that accomplishes the documentation of what is worth celebrating about their performance and what they believe needs to be better. Then help each individual to create a personal and business performance possibility plan that overviews their personal and business goals and how they will be achieved for the next 90 days. Help people to do this in ways that will mean they keep doing what is worth celebrating, as well as make improvements in the areas they have indicated.

Use the document created as a management tool to have the following conversations with people on a regular basis.

first of all: be quiet and pay attention Ask How are things going?

4 When you get a positive response

Ask How does that make you feel? Then say, Great, Brilliant or whatever is appropriate.

Then ask Any other areas I can help you with?

6 When you get a negative response

What do human beings value the most?

My answer would be, to be loved, valued, and fulfilled. Appreciating people and being appreciated ourselves is a key.

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated, said William James.

I designed what I call "The Double A Technique" to help people appreciate other people and to teach others to be accountable. The technique invokes a central philosophy I hold that we are better off to ask questions of other people than to give them our answers. •

Ask What happened? Then Ask What do you need to do to get back on track?

Then Ask Is there anything I can do to help you?

Finally, Ask Anything else?

On a regular basis meet with people informally.

David Hillard was born in 1964 and lives in Boston. Fragments of life’s scenes in the images reproduced on the page to right, are the story of ten years of meetings, friendships, loves and memories. Photos 06, 07, 08 by David Hilliard, Courtesy La Galerie Particulière.

7 Engage frequently in andappreciationaccountability conversations

Data Transfer Corruption Impact Corporate Business

Corruption is an Improper Performance

Human resources managers play a great role in shaping the compliance program and disseminating the company’s policy based on ethics and anti-corruption behavior amongst their fellow employees.

PRIVATE CORRUPTION IN EU

The Council Framework Decision 2003/568/JHA of July 2003 is the legal instrument through which the European Union combats corruption in the private sector. The framework needed to be adopted by the Member States by July 2005. Individuals, under both profiles as active (corrupting a person) and passive corruptors (demanding an undue advantage), are liable to a maximum penalty of at least one to three years imprisonment.

CORPORATE LIABILITY

The aim of the framework is to involve the liability, not only of individual corruptors but also of companies, of all sizes and sectors, for failing to prevent bribery on their behalf and for their benefit, committed by any employee or company representative. This implies that a commercial organization should put in place adequate anti-bribery procedures which, realistically, might be quite different in small or medium sized organizations from those that may be right for a large multinational.

ROAD MAP

Corruption must be fought by companies in good faith. This implies that top-level management is committed to preventing bribery, fostering a coherent culture inside the company. Bribery threats to organizations vary across business sectors, business partners, transactions and jurisdictions, for this reason they should be managed through the adoption of a risk-based approach. It may be that, as a result of the introduction of the private corruption offence, companies will review their policies – for instance – on hospitality and promotional, customer travel, political

contributions, charitable donations and sponsorships, facilitation payments or other similar business expenditure as part of the selection and implementation of bribery prevention procedures. Breaching the policy for employees and managers causes predetermined disciplinary consequences. In order to mitigate identified bribery risks the organization applies due diligence procedures which may include enquiries, indirect investigations, or general research on proposed associated persons. Staff communication and training ensure that bribery prevention policies and procedures are embedded and understood throughout the organization. Monitoring and reviews, at last, make improvements where necessary and complete the corporate model designed to prevent bribery.

By so doing the company may prove that it had adequate procedures in place to prevent corruption despite a particular case of bribery that may – nevertheless – have taken place.

CASE STUDIES

Few examples show how potential bribery risk might be present even within operations deemed as normal business activities. Consider the circumstance that the organization relies on consultants whose expenditures sometimes involve cash transactions and the consequent, inner difficulty of their monitoring. This situation can be a source of facilitation payment or other risk of bribery: here the risk stands on the company’s reliance on agents or third parties which need to be

By ROSARIO IMPERIALI

Few examples show how potential bribery risk might be present even within operations deemed as normal business activities.

handled with adequate procedures. In addition, imagine a firm which is used to organize periodic events providing entertainment and quality dining as an expression of appreciation of its main loyal customers. Internal, transparent guidance and adequate procedures, as well as training and staff supervision should ensure proportionate, reasonable and bona fide hospitality and promotional expenditures. Business expenditures aimed at improving the image of an organization, at fostering relations or at presenting products or services, are a fundamental part of doing business. In these contexts, the boundary line between a legitimate operation and a case of corruption, is drawn by the connection (inference) between the advantage given and the intention to influence and secure a deal or a business benefit.•

Illustration by David Johnson, Windham, Connecticut

Communication New Face of Branding

By LUCA BRUNONI

The Mantra of Empoloyer Branding

Just like products, which have to be made appealing in order to win over customers and beat the competition, companies will need to present themselves as caring, topnotch employers if they intend to put under contract the crème de la crème the work market has to offer.

Employer branding means utilizing methods and strategies in order to attract – and retain – talented and skilled employees, and in order to build a reputation for offering appealing conditions and a pleasant working atmosphere.

EMPLOYER BRANDING ONLINE

In an era of iPads, smart phones and non-stop internet access, it is not surprising that corporate websites play an important role in the making or breaking of a company’s EVP (Employee Value Proposition).

Eric Sylvers, head of Employer Branding at Lundquist, maintains that websites are “the most strategic tools for Employer Branding” because “everybody [visits them] before deciding whether to apply” for a position. Based on this conviction Lundquist launched, in 2010, the first “Employer Branding Online Awards”, ranking the world’s “100 strongest brands”. The initiative is an important one not only because it brings to the foreground the importance of Employer Branding in today’s market, but also because it raises the bar for the companies’ efforts in the field.

But an informative, user friendly website is merely the surface of a strong Employer Branding strategy.

According to Samuel Barrows, co-author of the book The Employer Brand – Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work, Employer Branding is really a “package of economic, social, human attributes associated with employment and identified with the employing company”, as well as an “exercise in bringing the same care and coherence expected by customers to the employees.”

Deutsche Telekom Employer Branding

Deutsche Telekom is attracting a great deal of attention with its employer image campaign, which specifically addresses new target audiences. This communication is based on an employer value proposition, clearly defined in line with the brand positioning and internal guidelines in collaboration with Interbrand. In addtion to implementing the employer value proposition in communication campaigns, it is essential that all programs and offers be aligned consistently in order to have a credible image on the market – a must for employer branding. This approach has proven successful

for Telekom so far. Since the brand has been clearly positioned on the job market, its reputation has improved among students and graduates. The brand has become more popular among economists, engineers and IT specialists alike, reaching 12th place in the ranking of the top 100 employers. When asked to rate the best career websites of 100 major German companies, participants ranked Telekom number 2 behind Bertelsmann.

01, 02, 03, 04 Images are part of the employer brand film 2011 developed by Interbrand. Courtesy of Interbrand.

A NEW “LEVEL” OF RELATIONSHIP

Any Employer Branding strategy starts, therefore, with a new understanding of the relationship between employee and employer. Nimai Swaroop, who has helped Royal Dutch Shell (first ranked in Lundquist’s 2010 awards) develop a “single Employer Brand across the group”, believes that “People remain [a company’s] greatest asset”: “we focus huge efforts on personal development of staff by creating a win-win partnership with employees in identifying their development needs and building their careers.”

BIG IS BEST?

Companies have also discovered the importance of a strong Employer Brand in the context of the expansion into foreign markets. Klaus Maier, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz China, is convinced that “it’s the people who create a great culture and brand while also providing the company with the energy to live a sustainable long life”, and states that Mercedes has therefore made it a priority to “hire the best people and become the best employer”. At first view, Employer Branding may appear to be a concept belonging exclusively to big enterprises and their five star HR departments; Samuel Barrows however insists that this is not the case: “small businesses do of course have an individual reputation for the working experience they offer. They will have to cope with managing that experience, recruiting and motivating their teams, and will have to worry about how their business stands out versus their competitors. While they may not realize it in the mass of daily pressures, they will need the insights, the planning and the implementation which an Employer Branding process can provide.”

The growing influence of Employer Branding is going to inevitably shift the employees’ expectations concerning the content and form of job offerings. Companies not attentive to these developments will from now on be at risk of sticking out from the competition – for the wrong reasons. •

By NIGEL PHILLIPS

Good Technology

Cloud computing is actually an umbrella term for a number of trends; they all involve the internet and its potential to simplify the way we use computers and extend their capabilities.

Technology is often not used in the ways it was originally intended. Text messaging on mobile phones was essentially a by-product, but now most people find it indispensable. The law of unintended consequences means the medium may be the message, but technology shifts and adapts in unpredictable ways. The only thing we can be sure of, it’s shapeshifting quicker than ever.

APPLE

The current undisputed king of technology is Apple, which has just posted record profits. Its sales of the iPhone and iPad more than doubled this year, producing a net income for 2011, second quarter, of $7.13bn and revenues of $28.6bn. In these three months, Apple sold more than 20 million iPhones and 9.25 million iPads. Apple has succeeded in producing attractive, aspirational and relatively affordable gadgets, that are testament to the enduring power of the brand.

Mobiles are usurping other devices since all mobiles have a camera, a clock and a calculator. Watch sales, for example, have plummeted. You would imagine professional photographers would always carry a camera, but that is not actually the case.

WE ARE ALL (POTENTIALLY) JOURNALISTS

Teru Kuwayama and Balazs Gardi are war photographers, who used an iPhone and an application, called Hipstamatic, to take a series of photos in Afghanistan. The app allows iPhone users to take digital ‘Polaroids’. The two used it when embedded with a battalion of US marines. Kuwayama said, “We didn’t go out there expecting to use Hipstamatic. We had several different cameras, lenses and video recorders.” They settled on it because of

its retro aesthetic and because the iPhone “was the ideal, rugged piece of gear for southern Afghanistan.” With its simple touch-screen, it did not trap dust like larger cameras can; handy in a desert location.

This was Gardi’s second Afghan mission and he said, “Before, I would have three cameras hanging off me. Using just the iPhone allowed me to move much more easily.” The lack of a long lens forced them to get close to their subjects, resulting in an intimate series of portraits of Afghan civilians and US servicemen.

The two were part of a journalistic endeavor called Basetrack, which tries to bypass mainstream media and provide a personal news source for friends and family of serving marines. Kuwayama said, “The iPhone is this ubiquitous thing that everyone has got in their pocket; it fitted with our idea of de-mystifying journalism.”

Would the pair use the iPhone again? “Not as a phone – it never even had a sim card,” says Gardi, “But I’ve used it as my prime camera ever since.”

LOOKING FOR APPLE’S ALTERNATIVES

Michael Saylor is the chief executive of business software group, MicroStrategy.

At the recent Social Media Marketing and icommerce summit, in Monte Carlo, he said the iPad is heading for a monopoly in the tablet market.

Samsung, Dell and HTC have all built tablets using the Google-led Android system. Saylor said, “Consumers are redefining the smartphone and tablet market.

While the Android coalition has had significant success in persuading consumers there is an alternative to the iPhone, in the tablet market, the iPad is the only mass-market success story.” Saylor said, unless the Android coali-

iPad 2 is a beautiful executive toy that will continue to sell and dominate the technological landscape for some time to come.

tion gained traction, “Apple will have a monopoly, like Windows enjoyed with the PC,” he added, the tablet market is at a precarious state in development. Once you factor in corporations adopting iPads, there could be a tipping point in the market.”

He was at the summit to demonstrate a number of new software platforms for brands, including a new cloud-based service, Gateway for Facebook. The platform sits on top of Facebook’s social graph, to enable brands to deliver CRM marketing, sales, loyalty and mobile applications directly to consumers.

CLOUD COMPUTING FOR COMPANIES

‘Cloud computing’ is a very popular term currently and is said to be the future of IT and of business.

The cloud is really the internet and cloud computing means putting more of your material out there and less on own-run PCs or servers. The idea is to outsource the maintenance burden of servers and applications and harness the benefits of being able to access data from anywhere, with internet access.

Some larger companies want cloud computing benefits, but without running any possible risks of trusting their data to third parties. They can create their own cloud-like infrastructure, with a private cloud. A public cloud refers to providers like Amazon, Google and salesforce. com, whose shared services are available to all. A hybrid cloud would use public and private services.

HACKER ALERT

There are, however, reasons for caution. Sony recently admitted hackers had stolen personal information, possibly credit card details, of many of the 77 million users of its online gaming and enter-

tainments networks. Amazon suffered a lengthy breakdown of one of its giant server farms, which it rents out. These two events raise the question of whether customers can trust the essential concept of the cloud, that you can buy computing services from the internet, like gas or water from a utility. Companies and individuals need to be aware of the risks of being too reliant on a single supplier. Consumers should also ensure they do not use the same passwords on multiple online systems.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

35% of Americans own a smartphone, with inbuilt broadband access, which means the way we access the internet is rapidly changing. If we access it via tightly controlled and regulated networks, it will be the giant companies who force innovation at their own pace and repel new arrivals. This goes against the founding democratic principles of the internet, which is increasingly being used as a business tool. People, including Nokia, were unprepared for the speed of the growth of the smartphone, and they are definitely the future.

WHY NOT JUST BUY A LAPTOP?

The iPad2 (£500) looks great and you can synchronize it with an iTunes account, which basically turns it into a giant iPod, but it’s too big to be a handy MP3 player. If you have signed up for a monthly mobile phone contract you can get the internet anywhere in the world, but roaming charges abroad will be prohibitive. This makes it like an iPhone, but you can’t send texts and you will look ridiculous using it as a phone.

As a journalist, I would need to buy a separate keyboard to make the most of it and to write articles and I’d need to purchase an app called Pages which would enable me to do everything I can do on a laptop, except slower. So the question is; why not just buy a laptop? Also, the iPad does not run Flash player, so content from thousands of sites is unavailable. Essentially, the iPad 2 is a hybrid of an oversized iPod and an under-performing laptop and I want one. •

Really Apple competitive products.

Technology writers would, until recently, have always advised someone looking for a smartphone, to get an iPhone, but Apple now has some proper competition, with the (01) Samsung Galaxy S2, being the iPhone 4’s main rival. It is elegant in design, has a great interface and offers features unavailable elsewhere. The S2 (£700) has full HD video recording, a 4.3” screen, great speed and is an Android phone, with new apps such as WiFi Direct, which means it can connect to other devices. If you have a Samsung TV, it will function as a remote control. The (02) Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (£270) has introduced Playstation gaming to the mobile, the (03) Motorola Defy (£230) is robust and splashproof and its (04) Atrix (£350) plugs into its own laptop-style dock. The (05) LG Optimus 3D (£650) offers 3D content without the need to wear glasses. The (06) HTC Sensation HD7 (£700) is the company’s flagship Android device and the (07) HD7 (c.£420) runs Windows phone, which is due to be updated later in the year. Finally, the (08) Blackberry Torch (£600) features both a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard. But the (09) Apple iPhone 4 (£500) still rules the roost. It is a beautiful design and, with its enormous apps store, it offers a world of entertainment and functionality. Apple has succeeded in making its products both useable and inspirational and the upcoming iCloud update will mean, for example, that photos can be automatically uploaded and shared across your Apple devices.

Change management Living in a Castle in France

Let Me Tell You About My New Life

At first it was difficult for my boss to understand my reasons for leaving, but then after telling him about our plan to change our lives he was very understanding and helped me leave in the best way possible.

We just left the Alps and our plane begins to descend towards Bordeaux, a vast plain of vineyards replaces the view of mountains and the earth has become a lot of small rectangles in various shades of green. Daniel playing taxi driver holds up a sign with my name written on it in big capital letters and smiles. I know twenty-two words in French, he knows only seven in English. He asks me if I’ve ever tried leeches, and says they are exceptional and happily laughs at my confused expression, did I understand correctly? The language of hand gestures fills the fifty kilometers that separate us from the Castle.

The powerful car quietly pulls into the courtyard of white pebbles, where Isabelle Jehanno greets me as a friend. In front of the Castle the Dordogne River flows placidly loaded with clay and a little further upstream Mount Bergerac, the Village of Cyrano. I feel I have been thrown into an ancient world made of smiles and handshakes, silence and work, hard work. My room at the Courtebotte Castle is called “Concert” it is forty-five square meters dominated by a large stone fireplace, a high window close to the ceiling and a canopy bed. I wash away the weariness of travel and think, “In a carriage or by horseback that trip would have taken a month from Italy, allowing predators...” Time passes and someone calls from downstairs for lunch, it’s almost two o’clock in the afternoon and it is very hot. A couple of friends coming from Paris sit at our table, and with Isabelle is little Margot and the inseparable cat. We chat for a little bit, and already there is a closeness between us; the French cuisine, the fine bottle of wine from Bordeaux and the naturalness of the diners put me completely at ease.

It is over her coffee that Isabelle begins to

alstom.com auberge-saint-jean.fr b-well.it

tell her story:

“I lived in Paris and worked many years in an International Transport Company, Alstom; working twelve, thirteen hour days, I was ambitious and completely dedicated to work. My days passed quickly, I went to the office early in the morning and came back home late at night, and I was asked to work more and more. One day I happened to be buying cosmetics in a beauty salon in Paris when I won a prize: a weekend trip to the area including the Courtebotte Castle.We came one winter day my husband and I, and met the owner who was nearing retirement and wanted to sell the castle and business. And so began our great adventure.”

How much did the Castle cost?

ij The castle, which was already an accommodation facility, cost 1,100,000 euros, then we spent another 500,000 in renovations and new furniture. Currently we are refitting other areas in order to expand and make the space more comfortable. That is a substantial figure, did you have enough money or did you apply for a loan?

ij We are not rich, we asked for a bank loan. First we designed and implemented the planning of actual expenses and revenues of the Guest House Project, considering the sale of our house, then we looked for a bank that would finance us. It wasn’t easy, the first two banks denied us loans taking a few months to respond to us, the third, Credit Agricole in Libourne, believed in our project and lent us the money. Within a week we sold our house and moved to the Castle. What made you change your life?

ij First I needed to spend more time with my children and with my husband; I wanted to have a job that would let me, that understood family time. In addition my life in Paris was becoming too stress-

Isabelle takes care of everything, managing the business, hosting guests, instructing the workers and the kitchen, and is a wife and mother of three.

01 Isabelle Jehanno, Owner of the Courtebotte Castle

02 Courtebotte Castle, the side overlooking the Dordogne River

03 Bathroom, one of the renovated rooms

04 Dining Room, with a large fireplace, mirrors and fine designer lamps

05 Bedroom, with the recently renovated bathroom as described in the caption for photo 3

06 Spiral staircase, maintained in its original form and materials even after recent reconstructions

On the following page

07 The Dordogne, estuary near Bordeaux that reaches beyond the castle

08 Thomas and Manuela, owners of L’Auberge Saint Jean

09, 10 Nature, for walks near the Castle

11 Entrance to Saint-Jean-de-Blaignac

12 Boat on the Dordogne River

13 Claudio Bergonzi

Text and Photos by ROBERTO BENZI

Thomas and Manuela opened their restaurant in 2010. They were also “fleeing” from Paris in search of a healthier life made up of a more natural rhythm and cost. They came around the same time that Isabelle and Pascal moved to Courtebotte Castle. Thomas already had a lot of experience [working in restaurants] having worked in France, the UK, Australia, and in particular in Paris with chefs the likes of Thierry Marx, Eric Martin and Guy Frechon.The inn seats 25 people, offers fine and genuine cuisine, the style is very elegant and the prices are affordable for everyone. The best dishes are pigeon and their desserts and the wines are all French mainly from the Bordeaux region. The restaurant is minutes from the Courtebotte Castle and Isabelle and Thomas work together in a partnership that has become a friendship.

ful and I was looking for a new rhythm for a healthier life.

How old were you when you made this decision?

ij 44

What were the reactions of your children, your family members and your friends?

ij Valentine and Margot, my two younger children were willing, Clement, the oldest who was studying at University, said we were crazy. My parents supported me, understanding my current needs and desires. There was no problem with my friends, friendship is not afraid of distance, and they come and visit frequently and spend wonderful days with our children.

Did you have any experience running a hotel, restaurant or anything like that?

ij No, not at all. I worked in other things. What types of clients do you have and what services do you offer?

ij Most of our guests are foreign, I would say 70% English, German, Swiss, Australian, Russian, some Americans, and the rest are French. The Castle is a Guest House, there is a large private park and a pool, the target is high, we offer quality service in a family environment in which our clients feel at home. We can arrange cultural and/or gastronomical excursions, we also offer dinner by reservation and can accommodate families and groups for longer stays.

What kinds of communication/marketing do you use to spread the word about your business throughout the world?

ij We are active on the web with our site and we’re in the “Châteaux & Hôtel Collection” guide. We also have an excellent relationship with the Tourism Office in St. Emilion, which is a few kilometers from here and is a renowned tourist destination.

You opened about a year ago, how is everything going?

ij I would say well, we have lots of guests, who are a lot of work, but I’m happy and enjoy being with my family.

In the castle, can you expect to find a ghost...?

ij (Smiling) I don’t think so, I’ve never seen one. The Castle was built by Henry IV, and little is known about it. I know it has had many owners through the centuries but not ghost stories. The strangest thing I heard was last year when an elderly woman passing by here stopped and told me that the castle had belonged to her ancestors.

Do you feel like you made the right choice? Are you happy?

ij Yes, I am happy. I work quietly and spend my days with my family. As you can feel, the atmosphere here is quiet,

dominated by a sense of nature and beauty. My guests are happy, and my happiness comes from their joy. •

Claudio Bergonzi, Claudio Bergonzi is 54 years old, 30 of which spent in the graphic design, communication and education industry at one of the best Institutes in Milan, and is now the owner of the B-Well Fitness center. Claudio, what were the main reasons for this change of path?

cb I lost my motivation in my old job. I have always had a passion for fitness and sports in general despite having gone through a series of injuries during karate, football and other sports. After every accident I wanted to be back in shape in order to start exercising again. I slowly developed a deep interest in rehabilitation and I would go to seminars, do internships and study the human body, the muscle groups and functions, by myself. So I got a degree as a Fitness Trainer and I specialized as a Personal Trainer.

So, we could say that sport injuries were an engine that pushed you to this new activity?

cb Within a year I closed my studio, found 2 partners and an appropriate location and we opened “B-Well”. What was the investment involved in this?

cb For the gym equipment we invested 35,000 Euro, whereas the osteopathy, physiotherapy and Tecar therapy studios cost us 40,000 Euro.

I realized my own dream in my city

Saint-Jean-de-Blaignac

Spain

France

Bordeaux Saint-Émilion

Legal Fixing the US Real Estate Market

By MATTHEW SEMINARA

The Real Estate Limbo

Three years after the market collapse in the US and vacant storefronts abound as tenants argue rent is unaffordable, millions of homeowners are under water, stuck owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, foreclosure rates are at unprecedented levels, and many potential buyers continue to remain in limbo.

BUYERS WANTED

First, with so many potential buyers still on the sidelines, let’s finally get them in the game. The US government should continue to incentivize purchases with tax credits and lower mortgage interest rates. For example, first-time homebuyers who purchased new homes in 2009 (subject to certain criteria) were eligible for a maximum tax credit of $8,000 which did not have to be repaid. These programs should not simply apply to first-time homebuyers but all homebuyers and should continue for the foreseeable future until the market can fully stabilize.

THE CHANCE OF TAX DEDUCTIONS

Second as the deficit reduction mantra on Capitol Hill picks up steam once again, so too does the opportunity for Washington pundits to talk about eliminating the tax break on mortgage interest in its effort to reduce the federal budget. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the White House’s deficit commission is calling for $1.1 trillion in cuts. Each year, approximately 40 million tax payers claim the mortgage interest deduction. Congress further estimates that between 2009 and 2013, the federal government will lose $600 billion in revenue as a result. In 2009 alone, the tax break cost the federal government $80 billion. Under current tax laws, homeowners are permitted to deduct the interest paid on their monthly mortgage payments on their income taxes. Ironically, these same Washington insiders also believe Congress wouldn’t dare attempt to eliminate this tax incentive anytime soon since the real estate and mortgage industries are in such dire straits to begin with. Tax incentives help spur the real estate market by allowing

[W cbre.com savills.co.uk wsj.com]

so many Americans to own and build wealth in their homes. Thus, eliminating or modifying the mortgage interest tax deduction is simply not the answer. In fact, tax incentives should be prioritized in an effort to avoid market shock by aiding in the revitalization of the US real estate market.

OBTAINING MORTGAGE FINANCING CONTINUES TO BE PROBLEMATICAL

While current exchange rates continue to hover at all time lows, lowering them will inevitably make them irresistible to buyers. Lower interest rates combined with longer loan periods should also be offered by most lenders to homeowners who cannot afford to pay their current mortgage. This is simply not the market for lenders to get cute with borrowers. Loan modifications can help churn the market for the better. Besides, if we get out of this mess, the hope is that the subprime lending disaster is behind us and both institutional and private lenders can return to stricter standards, profitable loans, and healthy balance sheets. Further, obtaining mortgage financing continues to be problematical at both the commercial and residential level. The major issues involve lender bureaucracy in processing mortgage commitments, building issues, and unreliable appraisals. Clearly, lenders must avoid risky investments and subsequent losses at all costs. Therefore, lenders should still comb through pay stubs, bank statements, financial statements, credit scores, and tax returns and only accept the best borrowers. Considering the easier and flexible lending standards over time helped to contribute to this market collapse in the first place. But fewer companies and individuals can obtain financing today because they

Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, which is considered to be the world’s most prestigious retail location has a current retail vacancy rate of 7.5%.

Expatriate and real estate

Nowadays the age range is much higher, expats are normally aged 35-45.

Borja Sierra is the CEO for Continental Europe at Savills a leading global real estate service provider. Companies usually tend to help expats incorporating a number of items on the package as Mr. Sierra explains, ”Expat life packages often include moving costs, schooling, health and house, however some of these packages have been narrowed down because over a period of time the number of people who are prepared to move outside of their country on the market has been rising." Nowadays the age range is much higher, expats are normally aged 35-45 which makes it much more difficult to move considering that at that age people probably have bigger families, so are in need of bigger houses, and also if you have to move kids of certain ages things become more complicated. He also explains that today expats move to a foreign country to gain personal and professional experience that will allow them to continue travelling and earn more money. As Mr. Sierra states,”they are looking to move to foreign countries as an opportunity to gain experience, professional experience that would allow them, unless they decided to go back their country, to continue travelling around the world and learning new experiences and earning more money.”

cannot qualify for a loan or even scrape up the higher down payment requirements now necessary, even considering the lower across the board prices. As a result, the people and businesses that need to sell and obtain financing simply cannot do so.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF THIS MOMENT IS TO NEGOTIATE WITH THE HOME OWNER

Third, housing prices and rent must remain as low as sellers and landlords can stomach to help weather the storm and stabilize an ever so decreasing investor confidence. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and may not have hit rock bottom yet. According to the Wall Street Journal, the commercial vacancy rate between January 2008 and September 2010 increased from 12.6% to 17.6% nationwide. Thus, sellers and landlords shouldn’t dare try to push their luck with greedy requests designed to push prices higher than are currently justified. In the commercial leasing context, while all terms of a lease are negotiable, negotiating power depends largely on whether the real estate market is hot or cold. If plenty of space is available, that means tenants can win many concessions from overzealous landlords. Landlords must understand and acknowledge this ever so increasing tenant-leverage in this tight real estate market. Landlords should duly note that a tenant with a prosperous business means a good tenant for the landlord’s bottom line. Even the most novice tenant should be aware that more commercial space is available than is being rented or bought, which drives the cost of rent down. Any attempts by overzealous landlords to pass along as much of the operating expenses of running a building to tenants (rather than charging fixed increase as they did in the past) should be avoided.

JUMBO LOANS

Fourth, tremendous loans should unequivocally not be back in vogue. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that all-time low interest rates are again driving back potential home buyers to large mortgages at a pace unseen since the housing boom of 2001-05. Jumbo loans (those larger than $417,000.00) present far too great a risk to an unstabilized real estate market. Although the difference between the rates on a jumbo mortgage and a conforming loan is at its narrowest spread of 0.43 percentage points since 2007, the overwhelming threat of more foreclosures should

help steer the biggest lenders and most borrowers into diametrically opposite directions.

Finally, the easiest way to help fix the real estate market is to decrease the unemployment rate that’s still hovering at approximately 10% with sustainable job creation since most people purchase homes when they’re employed. Significant tax credits for businesses that hire more employees could also help aid in jumpstarting the economy.

There are no quick gimmicky fixes to a US real estate market that is entwined with so many complex issues. What these five proposals conclude is incremental change grounded in revitalizing the real estate market by allowing it to return to a state where the vast majority of those who would like to buy do not face overwhelming barriers to ownership, and the people who currently own and would like to sell are able to do so efficiently, effectively, and hopefully at a profit. •

Hong Kong China

More local talent is being discovered in the real estate market, making expatriates less needed.

Helmut Weih, real estate manager for CBRE, started out in Germany and has since spent 5 years in the US and 3 years in China where he currently resides. He stated, “about 90% of key positions in the company are taken by local talent and only 10% are expatriates because you don’t need more than that. You can find good people locally now.” Today’s expatriate will see the willingness and capabilities of employers to provide packages has declined over the last few years. This is not about cost control, but simply supply and demand of talent. There are less expatriate positions and more people are willing to go abroad.

Illustration by Senem Oezdogan, New York City, USA

Culture integration Bullying Collateral Effects

By SRINI PILLAY

A Review of Work-Related Suicide

Suicide within companies is a lethal outcome that is potentially preventable. Early detection and management is critical. To do this, having a finger on the emotional pulse of an organization is important, as is the ability to know how to handle stressful situations and when and whom to refer to when stress is out of control.

While a suicide affects the victim and the victim’s family, it can also have a profound impact on the wellbeing of the company. Given the current global economy, extreme stress is very likely. As I pointed out in my other book: “Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders” stress impacts the brains of all workers, and can impact productivity and company profits. Educating staff with the help of an expert executive coach about stress management can be very helpful. In addition to this, having an increased awareness of this problem and a practical action plan may prove to be vital to the success of any company.

Work-related stress is at an all-time high in our society today. Factors that may lead to such stress include overworking, bullying, unemployment and job insecurity. The impact of stress is varied – ranging from little to no impact to severe unhappiness and burnout. In extreme cases such stress at work may also lead to suicide. The link between work-related stress and suicide appears to know no geographical boundaries, having been documented now in Japan, England and Wales, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Lithuania and several other countries. Furthermore, the types of work in which stress may lead to suicide also vary considerably ranging from people who work at all levels of corporations to medical doctors, veterinary workers, dentists, migrant workers and police officers. In some instances, such as the example of France Telecom where more than 30 suicides have plagued the company since 2008, the connections between work-related stress and suicide have seemed to be more obvious whereas in others the

situation may receive less public attention despite being a growing concern. In this article, we will examine the following questions:

1. What goes on in the mind of someone who reaches the point of wanting to kill himself or herself?

2. Do men and women differ and why?

3. What are some of the things that you need to consider if you are stressed, suicidal or a victim of bullying?

4. How can HR Directors communicate this information internally and externally?

WHAT ARE THE BASIC SET OF EMOTIONS THAT OCCUR IN PEOPLE WHO FEEL SUICIDAL?

Feeling suicidal rarely occurs “out of the blue.” It is usually preceded by significant stressors that make a person feel out of control or stuck. When these stressors escalate, this stuckness may lead to feelings of desperation, hopelessness, rage, anxiety, abandonment, loneliness, guilt, humiliation, and self-hatred. As I mention in my book Life Unlocked: 7 Rev-

olutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, these feelings may be either conscious or unconscious. Together with depression, people may experience disturbances in sleep and appetite, reduced energy and concentration, decreased interest in day-to-day activities at work, prominent guilt feelings, and a general feeling of being slowed down or too agitated together with suicidal feelings. People who are anxious may start to worry excessively, become easily labile or angry, start to feel panicky or even start to obsess more about what they have to do to the point of them slowing down. Sometimes, suicidality occurs in workers who feel bored or devalued. When they do not feel recognized or appreciated for the work that they do, their happiness and satisfaction start to wane and suicidal thoughts may increase as life starts to feel as if it has no purpose.

Alice B. is a bank teller who came to see me for depression. In the course of telling me about her depression, she revealed that she was in fact suicidal. When I explored this further, it turned out that she was so bored by her job that she dreaded waking up every day to get to it. She was becoming more and more disgruntled and had reached the point where she felt that life had no meaning any more – she was a mere automaton. Adam A. had a similar feeling about his work in sales. Every day, he prepared himself for a day of rejection and annoyance in having to meet his quota. When he walked into my office one day, he simply said, “I can’t do this anymore. When I was little, it was not my dream to grow up to be someone who made cold calls every day to try to sell something he isn’t even really interested in. And there is nowhere else for me to go.” It is this stuckness and lack of meaning that starts the ball rolling toward suicide.

A recent article that studied the cases of suicide in France Telecom showed that human beings need some form of recognition for the work that they do, and when this recognition is lacking, it starts to erode the meaning of life and work, leading to a threat to their psychological integrity. According to The Huffington Post, as of March 2010, at least 9 workers at iPhone and iPad manufacturing Foxconn factories in China had killed themselves along with many others who appeared to have survived attempts. Andrew Leonard, a writer for salon.com summarized his feelings on this, “I don’t know about you, but if I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, plug-

ging circuit boards into Apple gadgets that sell for more than I might make in a month, and I looked out the window and saw nets being installed to keep coworkers from dashing their brains out on the streets below, I’d start to feel a little depressed.” This emphasizes the facts that exhaustion and repetitive work may pose a risk to workers as well and when wages are insufficient to pay debts, a recent study showed that the rate of suicidal ideation increases too.

ARE MEN AND WOMEN AFFECTED DIFFERENTLY?

Men and women differ in complex ways when it comes to suicide. Some studies show that men tend to choose more lethal means to kill themselves than wom-

men, 1.7% women), with a statistically significantly greater gender difference in France. Similar differences have been found between Korean and Japanese men and women (increased gender difference in Japan) as well as Arab-Americans (AA) compared to non-ethnic white American men and women (lower rates in AA men and women but even lower for AA men).

What this tells us is that we cannot generalize about whether men are more likely to kill themselves than women, that culture plays a role, but also that many other factors impact whether a person will kill themselves outside of gender. From a psychological standpoint, one view is that men tend to externalize their stress whereas women tend to internalize this. Anger in men and self-destruction in women may therefore be the first response, but the data show that eventually, this may even out depending on other factors. The result of suicide within companies may therefore occur in any vulnerable person regardless of gender.

en do but who kills themselves depends on more than just gender. For example, one study showed that female physicians are more likely to kill themselves while other studies point to other factors that need to be considered.

A study of Chinese youth, for example, showed that female suicide victims especially without mental disorders tended to act on impulsivity and used nonviolent means such as pesticide consumption for suicide. Another study showed that males choose firearms, hanging, strangulation, suffocation and jumping as suicide methods whereas females choose similar methods but not firearms as the most frequent methods of suicide. Furthermore, gender-related suicide rates also vary by culture. For example, lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts was 3.4% in France (1.1% men, 5.4% women) and 1.5% in Spain (1.2%

WHAT HAPPENS WITHIN COMPANIES THAT LEADS TO SUICIDE?

Any of the stressful factors mentioned above may contribute to suicide within a corporation, but one of the common situations that leads to this outcome is workplace bullying.

Jon Weiner, an account executive at Capstrat shares that a recent survey by Workplace Options, a leading global provider of work-life benefits and employee support services, reveals that nearly half (47%) of workers have witnessed, or know someone who has been a vic-

Illustrations by Shinichi Imanaka, Hyogo, Japan

tim of workplace bullying. Furthermore, 31% of respondents say they have personally been a victim of bullying in the office. Moreover, in this survey, more than 90% of respondents believe workplace bullying can cause feelings of frustration and hopelessness, panic or anxiety about going to work, and physical symptoms such as an inability to sleep or loss of appetite. According to the survey, half of respondents do not think their employers take appropriate measures to discourage and reprimand bullies, or are unsure if any measures are taken. It is this hopelessness that can lead to suicide, and rather than wait for this extreme situation, employers would be wise to take appropriate steps to address this.

BUT WHO EXACTLY IS VULNERABLE TO BULLYING?

New Jersey employment attorney and conflict resolution expert Sheila O’SheaCriscione shares that a recent CareerBuilder survey shows that segments most likely to report feeling bullied were women workers aged 55 or older (29%) and workers aged 24 or younger (29%). In addition, women reported a higher incidence of being treated unfairly at the office (34% of women vs. 22% men) and 28% of workers reported the situation but a majority (62%) said no action was taken. The fact that women are more likely to experience bullying is significant as women are generally also more vulnerable to depression and anxiety. In fact, women are almost twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than men. Since both depression and anxiety are associated with suicide, this places women especially at risk for suicide. In fact, it is not just the rate of illness but the actual impact of the illness that is greater in women than men.

WHAT CAN YOU DO IF YOU ARE A VICTIM OF BULLYING OR AT RISK FOR SUICIDE?

If you are acutely suicidal, a hospital emergency room is your best option to receive the care you need. If you are starting to get frustrated, there are other options to consider.

Asher Adelman, who was a victim of workplace bullying, created and launched eBossWatch, the nation’s leading career resource that enables people to anonymously rate their bosses and avoid workplace bullies. This provides some form of catharsis and also allows people to see if their problem is shared

and understood by others.

Roberta Matuson, the former HR Careers Expert for Monster and a Leadership Expert for Bostonworks.com, is also the author of Suddenly In Charge: Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around. In response to how she thinks people should deal with begin bullied at work to the point of feeling stuck, she states, “…you have to call these people out on their behavior. In most situations, they will being shocked that someone has had the nerve to strike back. They will then find another target. Of course there are also those situations where the bully is the owner and she has no intentions of changing her behavior. You have to reconcile with yourself how much you are willing to put up with. I usually advise people to immediately seek other employment as these situations can scar people for life.” While this would be ideal, for many people, leaving their current employment is not an option. In fact, this is precisely what creates the feeling of stuckness that can lead to suicide.

Bert Alicia, is a licensed psychologist and Vice President of EAP and Work/ Life Services at Health Advocate Inc. Health Advocate, which is an advocacy and assistance company that helps people navigate the healthcare system. Bert confirms that harassment is one of the top trainings requested today by organizations: “One of the main reasons organizations want this training in workplace bullying is to decrease their potential liability. If they can show the courts that they have a policy in place and have provided the necessary training and awareness to management they minimize their financial risk by ’making a good faith effort.’ A policy in and of itself is not enough. HR has dropped the ball because many HR departments are being ‘squeezed today’ because of tough economic times and that creates problems because they have a short staff with multiple projects and sometimes this issue (which is usually brought up by an employee as ‘feeling disrespected’) is not at the top of their pile and then gets pushed downward as more HR issues come up.” Since this appears to be a specific vulnerability for HR, having a well-described and semi-automated procedure in place could considerably help HR not to drop the ball due to other immediate and pressing priorities. •

Ed Foulke, senior lawyer, partner with Fisher and Phillips and former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA recommends the following:

1

To minimize stress-inducing behavior, HR should have a policy against harassment in place.

2

They should also have a mechanism to prevent the ‘publishing of false statements’ that may have the potential to lead to shame and subsequent suicide. 3

They should have a zerotolerance policy if harassment is present.

4They should have a mechanism in place for workers to be able to confidentially report their complaints.

5

They should encourage and train people to report to supervisors. 6

HR needs to have a quick response plan in place. 7

All workers need to be aware of the disciplinary consequences of acts that lead to malicious harm.

8

Upper management has to show support for these policies in words and actions – HR should mediate this.

9

HR should have resources for investigation and follow-through. This can be tied into a code of conduct, vision or values statement.

For the above to be smoothly executed, HR would need to do more than simply have a passive procedure in place. Early detection of suicide would be best, so looking out for workers who have any of the symptoms mentioned above, interviewing those workers, providing support where necessary (e.g. referral to a professional or EAP service), and followingup would be critical within the company.

[W laborlawyers.com osha.gov salon.com srinipillay.com workplaceoptions.com]

How should HR respond when suicide is an issue?

People Unusual Job

By PAOLA BETTINELLI

The Art of Inking

Nerves of steel, huge creativity and an understanding nature are a must to interpret people’s desires, turn them into images and make them suit the body so that people can be proud of them for life.

In New York City, tattoos were actually banned in 1961, only gaining back their legality in 1997. Now the “big apple” hosts numerous aspiring tattoo artists who open their own businesses there.

Jeremy Garret, one of the city’s best tattoo artists said, “I had no intentions of becoming a tattooist. I had gone to art school to pursue a career in comic design and illustration. When I was in college I had friends who wanted me to tattoo them. I was scared to death. Tattooing was illegal in NYC when I started. But before I knew it I found myself in a career.”

In Japan, they gained back their legality a little earlier, around World War II, but people with tattoos were still singled out because only criminals were marked with them in their history. It wasn’t until recently that it was seen as a real career. Takami Horitoshi, owner of The Knockover Decorate Tattoo Shop in Jonago, Japan explained, “When I was very young I saw a Japanese tattoo artist at work and I was so impressed that I decided that I wanted to become a tattoo artist.”

No matter where in the world they are, the story tends to be similar. People begin tattooing as more of a hobby than a career. Ching, owner of East Tattoo Studio, Kaohsiung, Taiwan added, “I was totally fascinated and felt curious about tattooing. So I started doing some self-studies and explorations myself. A while later, I was kind of confident that I could do a good job in that area if I ever had the chance.”

Mauro Coppoletta, owner of The Family Business Tattoo, which is considered one of the best in London, stated, “I was studying law at the time and I just got involved with tattooing because

I loved it so much.

I wasn’t actually a previous artist when I was at school.

I can’t claim that I was drawing since I was born. It’s been hard work ever since.”

TRAINING AND GAINING

Despite many varying opinions on the profession, all artists will agree on one thing. The only thing you really need to do this job is a strong passion for it. This may be the same for any other job, but the difference is that there is no set path for a career in tattooing. It doesn’t matter if you study art or law, there are no certifications or courses, all you need is passion and practice. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, there are no formal schools or courses. There are a few with some instructors established, but no reputable ones,” said Mauro.

The best way to learn is to spend all of your free time drawing and to knock at a studio’s door asking for an apprenticeship, hoping that someone will be keen to share his secrets with you. It is

also easier than you would think to find someone who would be willing to offer his or her skin for you to practice on. “As soon as you say you want to tattoo, or that you are a tattoo artist, people want tattoos,” assured Mauro. But Jeremy added, “It’s not a good idea to let someone tattoo you unless they are licensed, have done or are doing a proper apprenticeship and have their mentor observing the process who is willing to take over and correct any problems should they arise.” Beginners will sometimes use oranges, pig skin, fake skin and, of course, their own skin to practice.

To become autonomous and open, if you want to, your own business, the masters recommend a period from 2 to 5 years working in other studios, but of course it depends on individual tattooist.

“I was 16 when I started offering to do tattoos for money and at 23 I opened my own shop,” said Takami. Opening your own business means more money, but also more expendi-

tures for machines, ink and sterilizing devices. Beginners usually work for less money or for nothing at all. In the long run, money is normally not the main reason for choosing this profession anyway. Jesse Neese, owner of Nuclear Ink Custom Tattoo in Omaha, Nebraska, charges $125 per hour for the actually tattooing. He offers his skills as an artist for free, which includes all of the design and prep work. As he pointed out, “I could make more money doing other things like selling oil paintings, but I do this for the love of it. I love people and if I charged for the design, I would feel like I need to rush. If you create a design you take seriously enough to put on your body, the artist should take it seriously enough to do it right.”

FROM CANVAS TO SKIN

Not all tattooists are self-taught. A passion for drawing in general can be the starting point, but everyone discovers their passion for tattoos for different reasons. As Jeremy observed, “Artists like to have their work seen and appreciated and it’s the ultimate form of flattery when a collector asks to have your work etched into their flesh.”

That is why many of them were painters first. They attend an art academy, they learn the basics of drawing, and only after that do they decide to move from their canvas to skin.

They all agree that an art school is useful to improve drawing skills, yet not necessary. Although, Glennda McGann, Assistant Dean of Development and External Affairs at the Herron School of Art and Design, commented, “As someone looking for the right tattoo artist, I would seek a person who has a depth of knowledge in the visual arts, including art history, because that knowledge would certainly inform the execution of the work.” Even if art academies don’t dedicate any courses to tattooing, among the academics there seems to be a common view of the profession as a respectable art form, “which can be copyrighted and marketed just like any other illustrative art. All considerations of visual aesthetics apply: composition, design, use of color, drafts-

manship, etc.,” as Michael Savas, Chair of Illustration at Laguna College of Art and Design stated. After all, nobody can really give a definition of art, explained Thomas Lawson Dean of the School of Art, at The California Institute of the Arts, “It is a mistake to judge art, or think about art, in relation to the materials or methods used to make it.”

A PIRATE’S WORLD

Another good tip, albeit less academic, for finding inspiration and acquiring new skills is attending conventions. They take place all over the world and there are numerous ones throughout the year. Lots of tattooists after their apprenticeship start traveling the world, attending conventions, and tattooing anywhere, without having a base or

studio. As Mauro accurately described, “Its a bit of a pirate’s world. A lot of people, the most successful ones, learned on their own and then traveled the world, asking advice from others.” Conventions are also a great occasion to promote one’s own work and gain more exposure. Like Mr. Ching pointed out, “It is more of two-way communication. I get to learn various ideas, skills, and styles, while my work is revealed to large amounts of people.”

So behind all those painted bodies and a look that is not traditionally synonymous with professionals, real artists are hidden who never stop studying how to turn your desires into reality and who take the responsibility to make them be part of you for all of your life.•

Illustration by Yihsin Wu, Taipei, Taiwan

Principle and Values Action and Learning

Open Organizations: Innovate Sustainably

GROW LISTENING

I have always been attracted towards organizations that combine action and reflection to manage their creativity processes. There are several examples worldwide that can consistently showcase how a company can be successful when it evolves by listening to consumers and by observing how products and services are used in real life situations.

The structure of these organizations, their leadership styles, their fact-finding and knowledge creation methodologies are all governed by the vision that cooperation is a conditio sine qua non for sustainable growth.

Although cooperation is generally considered necessary, I believe that we still need to ask ourselves what cooperation does mean today. Our answer to this question is also a way to develop a meaningful answer to the question that Work Style asked me, namely: “how can our organizations keep a “balance” in a constantly changing world?”

ROAD MAP TO MANAGE INNOVATIONS

Although I have always been interested in the advancements of management theories and organization studies, my work is only indirectly concerned with the topic of how to govern the complexity of an organization.

In my opinion complexity and continuous change are the two main conditions that any organization today is immersed in: change is everywhere, it is fast and it adds to the complexity. Reflective and learning organizations are therefore continuously faced with the challenge to elaborate a cohesive vision that will help to understand what are the adjacent possibilities for them to fine tune their products and services to the continuously

evolving behaviors and cultures. This is a very demanding challenge. In particular, the most difficult tasks for the vast majority of the companies we have been working with are: first, to understand when their vision and strategy need to be modified; second, to establish how to make this vision actionable and third, to design a map of opportunities according to a shared calendar that should harmonize the vast arrays of relationships that characterize a learning company.

SHARING IDEAS AND BEHAVIORS

My company motto is “putting people first” and its rationale is that technology is easy to innovate, whereas we also believe that it is much more difficult to help behaviors and values to innovate in a way that reflects the vision of a sustainable growth and of a responsible society. In other words, cultural changes are very difficult to be pursued without a continuous interchange between the company and the customer basis. In this perspective, to cooperate means to expand the

By MICHELE VISCIÒLA

The only sustainable way for an organization to keep its equilibrium in a continuously changing world is to open the internal creativity processes to external contributions.

boundaries of an organization so to foster any possible mutual influence between its internal and external worlds. This is what makes the real big difference between a vital organizational culture and an opportunistic one. That is not a simple difference. It requires companies to acquire a Darwinian attitude and assimilate all the lessons that the theory of evolution has still to teach us. Opportunistic behaviors can still provide organizations and companies with survival options, but cooperation will instead guarantee considerable advantage over those competitors who still behave opportunistically.

THE DARWIN LESSON

When the cultural selection between the external and the internal parts of an organization becomes an appreciable evolutionary force, it sets in motion a process of product-service-culture co-evolution: the best combination for a company to stay alive, sustain its growth, innovate and play a responsible role in society. In

Reflective and learning organizations are continuously faced with the challenge to elaborate a cohesive vision that will help them understand what possibilities exist for them to fine tune their products/services to ever changing behaviors and cultures.

order to support such co-evolution, it is possible to use a variety of methodologies, ranging from participatory design workshops to shadowing and observational techniques. The tools and practices of ethnometodology deserve a particular mention because they keep the internal components of an organization in close touch with its external ones at all times. My recommendation is to always keep alive the dialogue between the two parts, especially when the organization has achieved a recognized success in its market. This will help contrast the “innovation dilemma”, that is the natural tendency for any organization to keep its stability and to avoid the risks associated to changes in the market. My concluding point is that disruptive innovations may take place only after a series of continuous frugal innovations have deepened their roots in the culture. Frugal innovations are essential for evolution, as well as more disruptive ones: for them both open organizations are necessary.•

A lesson from Tati on reassembling a bicycle yourself

One of the open-ended questions taken from Work Style Talking we are trying to close is “how can our organizations keep a ‘balance’ in a constantly changing world?”

Michele Visciòla’s answer can be found in opening oneself to the strategic and creative collaboration, between company and market. Visciòla suggests your company keep an open mind in order to make the processes more collaborative.

The artist Martin Denker challenges perceptions by producing works that are seemingly endless amounts of layers. The goal is to force the viewer to search deeper to understand what the work is trying to say. He feels that in the communication age the abstraction of images leads to a better understanding of our minds.

01 Medicine Square Garden (Paris Hilton Syndrome). Photo by Martin Denker, Courtesy of Torch Galleries

02 Photo by Robert Doisneau, Tati’s Bike, 1949 © Atelier Robert Doisneau

The Château de Malbrouch decided for its new exhibit to show the works of an exceptional photographer, Robert Doisneau (1912-1994). The exhibit shows work from his entire career. Over 300 pieces are featured.

Joining the Company War on Talent is Back

By MARTHA TINTIN

The Battle for the Best

It makes great sense that there would be a geographic war for talent. There are at least three battlegrounds for waging war for talent: human capital, brand capital and financial capital.

Rick Brandt, president of TalentQuest’s consulting services admits that when looking at where companies are deliberately settling, financial capital is a significant driver, and if the specific areas have an elevated number of inhabitants, some of who are skilled workers, it is even better, he explains, “Where companies are strategically locating financial capital is certainly in play” and adds, “If the geography has depth of population, this is a distinct and competitive advantage.” According to Rick Brandt it all seems connected, finding and keeping the best talents is also a matter of brand capital. In order to pursue this battle companies must plan to address these areas, as he unfolds, “A company must have a brand that people are drawn toward, but also develop employee value proposition.” Companies must also find new ways to help people develop their workforce skills and human capital, beyond static classroom training and because of the impending knowledge drain with the population shift, companies that are creating knowledge transfer and orderly succession are on the high ground in the talent wars.

SECTORS ON THE HUNT

It seems that the most active sectors in talent research vary from market to market, Aurea Imai, Managing Director of Boyden Brazil explains, “We are working hard with the industrial sector: oil and gas, agribusiness, life sciences, automotive, electronics.” The industrial sector seems to be strong in other countries such as Turkey. Özlem Ergün, president of Boyden Turkey explains, “In Turkey the activity is mainly in retail, industrial, manufacturing, energy and telecommunications.” Some [W boyden.com iloverewards.com talentquest.com]

of these sectors combine with the market in South Africa as Fay Voysey Smit, Managing Partner at Boyden South Africa reveals, “The resources and industrial sector are the most active in Sub Saharan Africa, although we are also seeing renewed activity in the retail sector across the region.” The situation seems to differ in the United States, as Jeanne Branthover, Managing Director at Boyden New York explains, “Much of our business comes from the Global Financial Services industry where we see consistent demand in Private Wealth Management and Private Banking as institutions seek the certainty of fee-based revenues.” Financial Services, however are not the only main sector in the country, they also see formidable demand for digital marketing and content creation, with the inevitable advent of Web 2.0 and social media. “From a functional standpoint there is a lot of demand for experienced Human Resources executives who can serve as true business partners with line managers,” says Brenthover. In Hong Kong things seem to roll just as in the US as Brian Renwick, Managing Partner of Boyden China confirms that the most active sectors are Financial Services and also HR. The Italian market is still slightly stiff as Anders Lindholm, CEO and partner of Boyden Italy explains, “Currently, overall things in Italy are still quite stagnant.”

SKILLS WILL TAKE YOU FAR

The most widespread skills requested are strong leadership, flexibility, dynamism and communication. In the US companies also seek business development, risk and crisis management and also employee development. In South Africa executives have to be innovative, forward thinking, but at the same time keep a firm focus on bottom lines. In Brazil, things get more practical, full proficiency in English is a must and fluency in a third language is an extra bonus. Language skills are highly valued even in Turkey, where a second European language is appreciated and fluency in Russian specifically is a great plus. In Turkey it is also important to have gained international experience and to be easily adaptable to change.

WINNING THE WAR

According to Ms. Ergün, “A company must win the war by attracting talent who fit the culture today and tomorrow and also by communicating openly.” She also insists that it is enough to do a tiny thing wrong to make a forced retreat. The same advice is given by Mr. Lindholm, who strongly believes that being transparent and finding talents that fit the company’s atmosphere are key to success. In the Brazilian market it is essential that companies who want to hire the best talents follow 3 steps as Ms. Imai explains, “Companies have to

Founded in 1946. Boyden global executive search was the first firm to focus entirely on retained executive search. The company covers the globe with over 70 offices in more than 40 countries, led by resident professionals adept at working in a global economy. In addition, Boyden works with clients seeking advice regarding their Boards.

Özlem Ergün

President

1) present career development perspectives, the possibility of an international career is attractive to professionals; 2) establish processes to provide recognition and visibility of the professional; and 3) compensation and benefits have to be aligned to the market.” On the other hand to lose talent is as simple as not giving professionals the autonomy they require, not having a good corporative environment or being unable to communicate effectively. Ms. Smit gives another interesting insight on how it is possible to win the war for talent as she claims, “Human Resources needs should be considered across the short, medium and longer term and should inform a strategy that determines which skills currently existing within the organization can be utilized and developed to deliver the strategy, and which new skills need to be sourced externally,” and also adds, “Many large global organizations have Talent Directors in place who are responsible for managing the talent across the organization, usually on a global basis.”

TALENTS MUST STAY

Once talents are hired, they must be retained. It is key to success to provide a fostering environment for employees to grow in. “Plan personal and technical development programs, compensate fairly and competitively, measure growth,” says Ms. Ergün In the Italian market depending on levels it is all about training and job rotation as Mr. Lindholm shares, “At junior level, I believe it’s about giving them well rounded training, training programs and onthe-job training when they are in their early years, then maybe having the opportunity to do a job rotation program so that they can try not just one specif-

ic function, but try others as well.” Organizations that implement impressive strategies of talent management are consistently in touch with the skills and capabilities of the people inhabiting its facilities, “career mapping is undertaken to empower individuals to manage their careers through the organization and personal development plans are put in place, which will generally include education, training, mentoring and coaching,” says Ms. Smit.

MEETING THE CHALLENGES

In Brazil, challenges are currently related to salaries, “we are facing a salary bubble, as the demand is higher than the offer, companies are paying higher salaries and increasing their benefits in order to retain their talents,” Ms. Imai says and continues,” As a result, there is a gap between professional qualification and compensation paid.” The salary bubble is also causing young professionals to fast forward in their careers, since companies are becoming more flexible on the requisites to promote those professionals, and this results in having underqualified people occupying management positions.“ It is evident that there are many non-prepared professionals assuming management positions,” Ms. Imai explains.

“The last decade has witnessed serious erosion in trust that needs to be rebuilt,” says Ms. Branthover, therefore in the USA the most significant challenge for businesses is to convince their people that the company does value and appreciate their workforce and it will do everything to develop their careers.

In Turkey, there are many challenges, from keeping up with current and future trends, to adapting to change, and on how quickly it occurs.“Don’t sleep!

When you wake up, the game is over,” says Ms. Ergün and she adds, “Learn about Generation Y, they are entering the workforce and they have to be managed differently, motivation here is the key.”•

Razor Suleman, CEO & Founder of I Love Rewards, a service company which designs, implements and manages employee recognition programs.

Generation X and Generation Y employees currently represent 51% of the workforce. “Statistics show that the typical member of these generations will have 10 jobs by the age of 38, and stay an average of 1.5 years with their employer” says Suleman and continues,”This shockingly low length of tenure statistic has employers re-evaluating their recruiting and engagement strategies, companies not only have to differentiate themselves from their competition, but they must actively engage their top talent.”

However he also acknowledges that it makes sense that many think that the war is actually between cities considering that Millennials are very career focused, driven and motivated. For the majority of them traveling becomes a priority and not just in terms of being relocated, many actually seek it. “Nearly 50 percent of college graduates in 2011 said they would apply directly on a company’s website for a job, meaning that they’re looking in all cities for the companies and brands that most appeal to them,” he says and, ”Therefore, a robust social media presence and implementation of HR Technologies are paramount to recruiting and retaining top talent.”

of Boyden Turkey

Jeanne Branthoverly Managing Director of Boyden New York

Fay Voysey Smit Managing Partner of Boyden South Africa

Brian Renwick Managing Partner Boyden China

Aurea Imai Managing Director of Boyden Brazil

Anders Lindholm CEO and Partner of Boyden Italy

Movers and shakers THE CHARACTERS IN THE STRIP CARTOON have been placed in their new position by Bojden, a global executive search firm.

Private Eye Design Ideas

[

5th HI-MACS® Design Contest

This year’s HI-MACS® Design Contest is focused on Urban Furniture. Of the five hundred projects, a selection was made based on specific selection criteria: usability, commercial marketability, creativity, aesthetics, innovation and of course the use of HI-MACS® properties. Four top projects were selected from each category, professional and student, bringing the total to 8 finalists for the 2011 contest. The 8 finalists will be exhibited at a dedicated HI-MACS® stand at the 100% Design show - being held in London from 22 to 25 September 2011.

[W himacs.eu]

]

Professional)

Image 01, 02

Daniel’s project stemmed from a desire to provide a cleaner, more energy efficient world. These original static bike-like objects will be placed in public areas allowing people to recharge their mobile devices at any time. The front has a USB connector where a mobile device can be plugged in and it will charge as you cycle. Daniel studied Design at State Academy in Stuttgart and Economy at Reutligen University and is now based in Stuttgart, Germany with his own company Inogram. He is focused in new technologies and new materials to create more sustainable products.

[W inogram.de]

[S Urban bench] Designer Verónica Martinez - Madrid, Spain (Category Professional)

Image 03, 04

Verónica was inspired by the shapes found in the world around her, such as storm clouds or a double helix of DNA when creating her design. The S curve provides an aesthetically pleasing bench that can hold a number of people at once. This practical design can be placed both outdoors in parks or on streets and indoors in airports or hotels. Verónica has her BA in Interior Design from the Escola de Disseny i Art Eina and a BA in Fine Arts specializing in Product and Graphic design. She has worked in Barcelona and England as a freelance designer and has now moved back to Madrid where she opened a new studio. [W veromartinez.com]

E-Moke

Designer Daniel Abendroth - Stuttgart, Germany (Category

Lagos, Chicago, Sofia

The Work Style Shop

Visit our store workstyleshop. com

Buy from our new collection of T-shirts with the best illustrations published in 2010 and 2011 and the book Talking the result of Work Style Talking.

We have involved 8 top managers and directors from the Best Workplaces 2011 in Italy, as models for our T-shirts. In fact, they are the best representatives of company values, emotions, identity and philosophy. On the T-shirts there are different illustrations taken from the Work Style magazine archive of images. Pictures on the T-shirts represent issues related

Lagos Nigeria Abrianna Bossman

USA Rosemary Haefner

Sofia Bulgaria Stilian Shishkov

Abrianna Bossman

Abrianna (1976) spent most of her life in Nigeria. Born in England, she moved to Lagos when she was two. She always felt that growing up in Africa, where as she puts it, “the community raises a child,” she was instilled with values that kept her grounded and focused as she pursued her University studies back in England. She pursued an initial career in IT in England working for Oracle. Then she moved back to Nigeria and took a job at Accenture, where she realized her true passion was people. She went back to school in England and got a Master’s degree in HRM.

After her Master’s she joined British American Tobacco in Nigeria working in their HR department.

She loves being back, because she is close to her family and she feels most comfortable there. “I don’t have any kids yet, hopefully soon,” she admits, and she and her husband look forward to raising them in Nigeria, and bringing them up with the same values they learned.

In her spare time she enjoys watching movies, dressmaking and traveling, although she hasn’t had much chance for the last one in Nigeria. From England, “you can just get a ticket to Greece or France or anywhere.” She also enjoys giving back to the community. In England she volunteered with MenCap, an organization that helps the mentally challenged. She took great pleasure in learning about their every day struggles and the things we take for granted and she was able to see things from a whole new perspective.

There’s a stigma that Nigeria is unsafe. Abrianna does not see that. Having lived and worked there she will tell you it is no different than any other city. •

When you are in London, you can easily get mugged. It’s about being cautious of your surroundings, knowing the terrain, and abiding by the dos and don’ts of the society.

Fashion advice from the stylist

Abrianna is a beautiful manager with glowing skin. I decided to highlight this, choosing for her blue, black and red clothes and accessories, with a great light palate thanks to the beautiful Bluespirit earrings. A long, electric blue coat by 28.5 is perfect for her if paired with a black dress, a pair of black pumps, leather gloves and a chignon hairstyle that highlight the blue earrings.

Shoes

Paul and Betty décolleté (350 €)

Pochette Il Bisonte (33 €)

Gloves Dsquared (338 €) Dress Madegrè (179 €)

Private Eye Fashion Ideas

Rosemary Haefner

Rosemary (1971) stumbled into a job in HR by accident after a previous job fell through. She continued to work in the field for the rest of her career at many different companies including Agency.com, Eagle River Interactive, RCN Telecommunications and McGladrey & Pullen. All of her positions were in companies that were experiencing extreme changes like growing or shrinking, mergers or buy outs, which is how she likes it best; messy and chaotic. As her first job was supposed to be in teaching, it’s not surprising to find that her favorite part about HR is that she still gets to teach and learn informally every day. She has continued to volunteer regularly in and out of work for the past 20 years. Two of her biggest volunteer projects include the Millennium Promise, which assists the UN Millennium Goal to end poverty, and Big Shoulders, which helps under-resourced students in the Chicago area by providing funding and mentoring to them for education. She has also used her professional skills to assist throughout the years with resume review, writing assistance, job search workshops and preparation for interviews.

She grew up in Buffalo, New York with six brothers and sisters, which she claims was a hearty experience. Now she states, although somewhat hesitantly, that she is from Chicago having lived there for the majority of her life. Never married but in a long-term committed relationship she describes her other half as her “partner in crime.” They compliment each other in life and enjoy outdoor activities like biking and hiking together.

“That’s me in a nutshell. Go, go, go. I like to stay active. The challenge for me is to try and find time to reflect. So traveling and things I do in my personal time, running or biking, they help fill that need for me not to get caught up in the organized chaos in my life and kind of reflect on everything.”•

Outside of work she takes great pleasure in running and volunteering. She was even able to combine those two passions with a program that taught young girls how to run as an after-school mentoring program.

Fashion advice from the stylist

Rosemary is a brunette HR manager who inspires me with her elegance and class. That’s why I choose for her an entire wardrobe of brown and beige clothes and accessories. A pair of basic, rigorous jeans that fit well with her slim silhouette and precious accessories like the Tiffany bracelet and the leather watch. A pair of jeans like these are perfect for the day, to pair with sporty ankle boots and a big bag. For cocktails with colleagues at night just add a pair of stunning Valentino pumps and a Roger Vivier pochette to be perfect!

Shoes Valentino décolleté (559 €)

Chic-Scarf Claudia Giannini (65 €)

Private Eye Fashion Ideas

Stilian Shishkov

Stilian has a very hectic life, with business taking up the majority of his time and his company recently expanding to Serbia and Russia.

Stilian (1972) born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, has always been a sports fan. That’s why his career and sports have always been connected. He started his education in Bulgaria at the National Sports Academy “Vassil Levski” studying Football. This was followed by four years in South Carolina at Lander University studying marketing. After a year working at the Internet company Ultrabrowser Inc., Stilian joined the Atlanta Silverbacks Park team to support local football. He remained in the United States through the beginnings of his career. In a way, he feels that all of these experiences unconsciously led to his next career move, the creation of sportal. After returning to Bulgaria in 2008, Stilian and his friend started an online sports news portal. It was just for fun between two sports fans. This site eventually grew into his business MSK Group, the largest media group in Bulgaria, with 40 different portals. Despite being quite busy from running the company, Stilian is happy with his success. “I am very fortunate to travel all over the world for my work.” His trips not only include Eastern European countries, but also much of Western Europe including the UK and many trips to the United States. Outside of the office, Stilian still enjoys sports a lot. He loves to play and watch. This past time is now only second to playing with his newborn girl, with whom he wishes he could spend more time.•

Fashion advice from the stylist

Stilian is a sporty man, and like all sports addicts, he needs very comfy and practical, but also fashionable accessories. A designed backpack to wear during his trips on the Lancia bicycle, two pairs of cool sneakers (black and white) to be comfortable during sport sessions, and a special belt by Daniele Alessandrine that becomes a tie in the evening after playing. Smart and fashionable!

Ideas for Free Time

Inception,

The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter (2011, UK Edition Published by William Heinemann)

Louis Mulcahy Russet Fruit Bowl

Virgin Atlantic

Caravelle Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

King Sitric Fish Restaurant, Howth, Dublin, Ireland

Weekend break, anywhere in Ireland

Hanna02

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

Inception01

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

Canon SX230 HS (incredibly powerful)

Korean Air

Shangri-La’s Rasa Ria Resort, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

The Bay, Mo Tat Wan, Lamma Island, Hong Kong

Garmin Forerunner 405CX Sport Watch with GPS and heart rate monitor

A painting I made in 1994 (Exploding Sun)

American Airlines Hotel Sofitel, Manhattan, New York

La Tagliata: top of the mountain restaurant, Positano, Italy

Nothing is as romantic as fashioning a piece of jewelry for your man

Cinema Paradiso

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

F-one kites and surf boards04

TAM Brazilian Airline

The Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, Scotland05

Anchor & Hope Gastropub, London, England

Hot air balloon ride

San Donato, Val di Comino, Italy. Early morning walk, coffee, afternoon by the pool, evening barbeque on the terrace

Domaine La Mereuille, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, 2009

Following the ancient Silk Road in Kashgar Prefecture, Xinjiang Province, Northeast China Tokaji Aszu 3 Puttonyos, Grof Degenfeld Winery, Hungary, 2006

Trunk Bay, St John’s Island USVI Carribean

Jericoacoara, Brazil

Santa Ana Eco (organic) Malbec, 2009 03

Chateauneuf-du-Pape Grand Tinel, 2006

Bob Lee — Communications Director, EMEA Great Place to Work®, Dublin (Ireland), Diana Danyi — Co-founder of Global Citizen HK, London (UK), Marsha Broniszewski — Key Account Manager at Infinite Speakers Agency, Pittsburgh (US), William Johnson — Managing Director Great Place to Work® Institute, London (UK). * for one’s spouse or significant “other”

Bridesmaids

Bob Diana Marsha William

Private Eye The Movie Horrible Bosses

For Nick, Kurt and Dale, the only thing that would make the daily grind more tolerable would be to grind their intolerable bosses into dust. Quitting is not an option, so, with the benefit of a fewtoo-many drinks and some dubious advice from a hustling ex-con, the three friends devise a convoluted and seemingly foolproof plan to rid themselves of their respective employers…permanently. There’s only one problem: even the best laid plans are only as foolproof as the brains behind them.

By Marco della Fonte: In the movie

Louise Michel, in a factory experiencing difficulties during one night machines, offices and the managing director disappear. Employees are offered 2.000 Euro gratuity for their 40 years spent working in the factory. But Louise, a raving employee, suggests to use the money to hire a hitman to kill the boss! Unanimous consent is found! She’s in charge of finding the hired killer. She will end up choosing the most pathetic killer of their generation: Michel. In Louise Michel and Horrible Bosses, daily events are told ironically as a metaphor to face way deeper real problems.

Philip

01 Dale (Charlie Day) is being harassed by his boss Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston).

02 Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) is arguing with his boss Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell).

03 Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), Nick's (Jason Bateman) boss, doesn't seem to take him very seriously. Behind the scenes:

04 Director Gordon about working with New Line Cinema, “I’ve always been trying to find something to work on with them and when I read the script, I laughed so hard I cried, and that doesn’t happen. You get these scripts that you just don’t connect with and with this one, I mean hat’s off to these guys.”

05 Larry, Curly and Moe, or as Jason Sudeikis pointed out, “it was actually Carrie, Miranda and Samantha,” gearing up for their scene with the intense and insanely funny Jamie Foxx

Director: “Horrible Bosses” is directed by Seth Gordon. Seth made his narrative feature film debut with Four Christmases. Gordon also directed the critically acclaimed documentary film The King of Kong.

[W horriblebossesmovie.warnerbros.com]

“I don’t care how much we hate our bosses. We’re not murderers.” (Dale) “You’ve never heard of justifiable homicide? It would be immoral NOT to kill them.”(Kurt)

A New Line Cinema presentation of a Rat Entertainment Production, “Horrible Bosses” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Characters Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis star as the three hapless workers, with Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, and Kevin Spacey, as their unbearable bosses.

Review by Carasoo I knew there was something wrong with the prescriptions from my dentist friend

and I understand why my friend Matteo’s father sold the company before he died. I also learned that when my other friend is being an asshole, it is because he is an asshole. Lastly, my much wiser friend informed me that when they try to stick you, stand still or you might get hurt.

Sakura o sakura I ask you Please don`t bloom So sad to see I shiver Sakura don`t bloom I beg you

Sakura o sakura I beseech you If you do bloom So sad to see I shiver Cry, sakura, cry

Sakura o sakura Shine sakura shine

Images of Tohoku Exhibition, produced by Zen Foto Gallery, Tanka poem by Kazuo Kamata, Photograph by Mark Pearson

Book Selection Exciting New Releases

• Brian Tracy

Full Engagement!

• Doug Russell

Succeeding in the Project Management

• R. William Holland

Cracking the New Job Market

• Tony Beshara.

Unbeatable Resumes

• John Bradberry

6 Secrets to Startup Success

• Ruma Bose and Lou Faust

Mother Teresa, CEO

Tom Devine and Tarek Maassarani

The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide

• Wendy Axelrod & Jeannie Coyle

Make Talent Your Business J. Sugerman, M. Scullard, and E. Wilhelm

The 8 Dimensions of Leadership

• Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze

Walk Out Walk On

• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

The Progress Principle

• Robert Steven Kaplan What to Ask the Person in the Mirror

• Sylvia A. Hewlett and Ripa Rashid

Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets

• Ooi Kee Beng

Serving a New Nation

• Hooman Peimani

The Challenge of Energy Security in the 21st Centur y

• Jayati Bhattacharya

Beyond the Myth

• Daniel Diermeier

Reputation Rules

• Brenda Hampel and Erika Lamont

Perfect Phrases for New Employee Orientation and Onboarding

• Robert Lucas

Please Every Customer

Ron Stone

The Real Value of Training

• Anil K. Khandelwal

Dare to Lead

• Oswalk A. J. Mascarenhas

Business Transformation Strategies

• Pritam Singh and Asha Bhandarker

In Search of Change Maestros

• Adrian Furnham and John Taylor

Bad Apples

• Susan Cartwright and Cary Cooper

Innovations in Stress and Health

• Marianne Coleman Women at the Top

• Sarah Rutherford

Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures

Ben Dattner is the founder of Dattner Consulting, a workplace consulting firm that helps corporate and non-profit organizations sort through their credit and blame issues in order to enhance individual, team and organizational performance. Dattner is also an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where he teaches Organizational Development. [W dattnerconsulting.com]

The Blame Game

By Ben Dattner

Free Press

pp 256 pages $26.00

Rupert Scofield is President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 21 countries serving 750,000 of the world’s poorest with $350 million micro loans. Scofield’s writing career began at the age of ten with a short story, “The Last Request”. The story dealt with a boy who spends summer break with his vampire uncle in Bulgaria. Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World. [W rupertscofield.com]

Justin Menkes is an acclaimed author and leading expert in executive assessment. A consultant for the influential executive search firm Spencer Stuart, he and his colleagues advise the boards of the world’s leading companies on their choice of CEO. He authored The Wall Street Journal bestseller “Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have”. [W www.spencerstuart.com]

The Social Entrepreneur’s Handbook

By Rupert Scofield McGraw-Hill pp.272 $28.00

Illustrations by Hanna Melin, London, UK

Better Under Pressure by Justin Menkes

Harvard Business Review Press pp 286 £19.99

The Blame Game

How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure

By Ben Dattner

twsm From your experience(s), how can having a bad employee dynamic (people who take false credit or play the blame game) influence a company’s success?

bd Just like the economic credit cycle, “credit” cycles within organizations can either lead to growth or contraction in the level of “trade” and collaboration between individuals, teams, departments, and divisions. People at any level of any kind of organization struggle when the dynamics of blame take over, and contagious negative influences cause people to become more focused on casting or denying blame for problems than on fixing them. In other words, there is a direct correlation between how people give one another credit (or blame) and whether the pie expands or contracts as everyone tries to claim his or her own slice.

twsm Can the constant behavior of blaming others unfairly become selfdefeating and/or damaging for your colleagues? Why?

bd There is much research evidence that people who blame others too

much or too often are more likely to derail in their careers. Although it may be tempting in the short term to take too much credit, and not take any blame, this prevents learning and success over the long term. First of all, if you are too biased and self serving when it comes to credit and blame, you are much less likely to develop a true picture of your own talents, knowledge and capabilities. If you lack accurate self-awareness, you will not be able to build on your true strengths and remedy your areas for development. Secondly, if you develop a reputation among colleagues for being too self-serving when it comes to credit and blame, they will soon come to resent you, will stop collaborating with you, and will withhold the “discretionary” assistance that you will need in order to achieve success in a collaborative manner.

twsm During your research what types of cases of companies being compromised by blaming games did you find?

bd In my book, I tell the story of a chain of retail stores where a team

was in charge of selecting locations for new stores to open. However, when the team fell behind schedule, it became more focused on blaming and scapegoating one individual member of the team than on getting its work done. When individuals, teams and organizations get caught up in the blame game, they focus more on finger pointing than on problem solving. Ultimately, this contagious negative dynamic impacts everyone in the organization and creates a negative, self-fulfilling cultural pattern.

twsm How important is the role of the leader in avoiding creating bad dynamics among the staff?

bd Leaders don’t just manage organizations, they also manage cultures and hidden economies of credit and blame. Patterns of credit and blame in a workplace can either foster organizational growth, evolution and learning or cause companies to stagnate and devolve into dysfunctional politics and finger pointing. Leaders at all levels set the tone for how credit and blame get assigned within an organization, and they do

so knowingly or unknowingly, and for better or for worse. Great bosses create and sustain teams and organizations in which “credit” expands, meaning that people are willing to exert discretionary effort on behalf of others, with the good faith expectation that these positive and proactive moves will be acknowledged and reciprocated. Successful organizations and leaders leverage credit and blame in a positive manner by fostering commitment, cohesion and trust among the members of the organization. •

Tracy presents a new method of management that can lead to high financial profits for a company. The key is ROE, which stands for “return on energy” physical, mental and emotional. He explains managers are motivated and influenced by the same things other people are, they already know everything they need to know to unlock the potential of the people around them. They just need to apply it. Using this method, managers can maximize the company’s outcome and have a workplace that makes a difference in the lives of their employees.

$19.95]

This book presents the best way to survive the Project Management Jungle, which is Russell’s trademarked system of TACTILE Management (Transparency, Accountability, Communication, Trust, Integrity, Leadership and Execution results), a people-based approach and promotes teamwork. Project managers also need to understand the expectations of key stakeholders. Basically this means balancing the “Triple Expectations Pyramid” which balances the expectations of the customers, management and team with the schedule, cost and performance requirements.

Brian Tracy. Full Engagement! Inspire, Motivate, and Bring Out the Best in Your People [Amacom, pp 256, $22.00]

Doug Russell. Succeeding in the Project Management Jungle. How to Manage the People Side of Projects [Amacom, pp 272,

The Social Entrepreneur’s Handbook How to Start, Build, and Run a Business That Improves the World

By Rupert Scofield

twsm What are the main challenges in managing a non-profit organization?

rs Financial and human resources. Financially non-profits struggle. My book describes how to overcome these challenges. There are many ways to fund a non-profit; donations; grants and contracts; and service charges on the loans. In FINCA, our internal revenues, which come from interest and fees on our micro-loans, cover 100% of our operating costs. New funds can go into expanding our outreach. For HR, it’s hard to find employees because of salary. Instead use the mission. Many of our employees are from the private sector and earned much more before, but they came to FINCA because they wanted help the world. They get satisfaction from seeing the people we lend to getting past tremendous struggles and improving their lives.

twsm Why dedicate your life to working in the non-profit and microfinance sectors?

rs I joined the Peace Corps out of college and went to Guatemala to make small 50-dollar loans to local

farmers. They had tiny plots of land to grow food and really lived on a dollar a day. I was impressed that the loans we gave them greatly increased their yields two to three times allowing the farmers and their families to eat better and have a little left to buy clothes and medicine. This form of foreign aid was inexpensive and hugely effective in helping the people. I bonded with them and never recovered from that experience. When I went home I tried working, but I never felt as needed as I did before. I decided to devote my life to a larger version of the same project and help people in similar conditions all over the world.

twsm Does a social enterprise feel the effects of the economic fluctuation?

rs We had a financial crisis and FINCA is in the financial services industry, which saw older financial institutions like Lehman Brothers go under, but we came out OK. We saw our income drop a bit because people weren’t borrowing as much and we had some defaults but nothing like the

sub prime market. It helped that we weren’t lending to people who wanted to buy a house with no income. We were lending to poor people who were hard working and needed the money for survival. They were flexible and creative and if they saw their business failing they simple switched to another activity and would still earn money. We were affected but nothing like the big financial institutions, we are a basic lender using micro-enterprises. •

Tony Beshara takes 38 years of experience as a placement and recruitment specialist and converts it into an effective tool for you. His book will take you through the steps of how to write an effective resume. No longer will the reader be agonized by the daunting task of resume and cover letter writing. Beshara makes it simple by explaining exactly what hiring managers are looking for in potential candidates. This book provides valuable information including how to organize your layout, how to write an effective cover letter and how to use Internet tools to your advantage. He inserts dozens of examples resumes from all fields and industries in all disciplines work.

R. William Holland. Cracking the New Job Market. The 7 Rules for Getting Hired in Any Economy [Amacon, pp 256, $17.95]

Holland explains what employers really want and need from potential employees. It is all about value creation. A job seeker needs to be able to prove his potential value to prospective employers. This book provides you with the best strategy including how to pick out valuable key words in descriptions, how to network and how to negotiate wages. You will be guided through making important career choices and how to keep active even when unemployed. This is a must have for anyone looking to start a career, switch careers, or move into the international marketplace.

Tony Beshara. Unbeatable Resumes America’s Top Recruiter Reveals What REALLY Gets You Hired [Amacom, pp 304, $16.95]

John Bradberry.

6 Secrets to Startup Success

How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business [Amacom, pp 256, $21.95]

In Bradberry’s book, he examines the pattern behind the failure of entrepreneurs. He identifies it, as something they should all be aware of, the passion trap. The entrepreneur’s passion is a double-edged sword that can either lead to their success or their downfall. An entrepreneur must be cautious that their passion doesn’t blind them to reality. The book examines six principles to help control these passions including being attached to a market, not an idea; executing with focused flexibility; and cultivating the integrity of communication.

Book Selection

Better Under Pressure How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others

by Justin Menkes

twsm Do you see any new leaders emerging in the market now?

jm I do, I see some very promising CEOs coming up. Unfortunately, it’s awkward for me to pick just one when I feature 25 in my book. I think they are all impressive.

twsm Can you briefly explain the 3 cornerstone attributes that great leaders possess?

jm The qualities that make someone an exceptional leader under pressure are realistic

optimism: the ability to see threats for what they really are without losing a deep-rooted confidence that these challenges can be met; subservience to purpose: the ability to define work as something bigger than just a paycheck; and finding order in chaos: the capacity to find ever changing puzzles invigorating.

twsm How can a person learn to transform adrenaline and pressure into something positive for business?

jm It is all about preparation. The untrained mind becomes flooded and unable to think when under threat. The well-trained mind

becomes more focused and sharp. Adrenaline is a critically important tool for human beings, but they must first be taught how to use it.

twsm Your book is all about these 3 attributes that make a great leader. Must someone be born with these traits, or can they be taught?

jm We are born with a hard-wired desire to learn and find something that gives us a sense of purpose. But we are also born with a set of experiences that counter our pursuit of gratification and accomplishment. In the end we need to be taught that these set backs are inevitable and actually useful on the path to accomplishment. These three attributes are what one needs to use to help today’s workforce find a purpose and really give their all. It’s not about someone trying for a long time. It’s about getting them to give you the very best effort for you at the time despite on-going and recurring duress. And these three attributes are how you help human beings tap into their hardwired desire to do so, to try, to really push.•

[Berrett-Koehler, pp 288, $19.95]

This book was written by the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which is a whistleblower advocacy firm set up in 1977. They wrote it to inform whistleblowers about their legal rights. This book is the first book to explain exactly what rights a whistleblower has and how they can make a difference without worry of retaliation. It outlines their legal rights including twelve new laws since 2000. The authors strive to encourage whistle blowing in order to avoid serious economic crimes that can have a negative effect on society. Don’t let fear keep you from speaking up.

$21.95]

This is not a standard leadership book or a religious novel instead it is a chance to focus in on the 8 basic principles that ultimately lead to Mother Teresa’s success in business. These principles are as follows: dream it simple, say it strong; dealing with the Devil to get to Angels; Wait! Then pick your moment; embrace the power of doubt; the joy of discipline; communicate in a language people understand; pay attention to the janitor; and the power of silence.

[Berrett-Koehle, pp 240, $22.95]

Many companies despite their efforts to hire the best talent struggle to maintain and develop that talent. McKinsey, who was known for its phrase the “War for Talent” ended up saying the investment was “insufficient, superficial, and wasteful.”

Managers never feel they have the time or skills to truly develop a workforce. This book explores the methods of the “Exceptional Development Managers” in companies such as Adidas, Microsoft, Siemens, Merck, Corning and Kraft and how by using simple integrated practices in day-to-day work, they can improve businesses and employees. The key is to be deliberate, resourceful and continuous.

Ruma Bose and Lou Faust. Mother Teresa, CEO: Unexpected Principles for Practical Leadership [Berrett-Koehler, pp 150,

Tom Devine and Tarek Maassarani. The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide: Comprehensive manual by the Government Accountability Project

Wendy Axelrod & Jeannie Coyle. Make Talent Your Business How Exceptional Managers Develop People while Getting Results

Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm. The 8 Dimensions of Leadership. DiSC Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader [Berrett-Koehler, pp 288, $22.95]

The eight dimensions of leadership is a strategy based on the different personality types of managers: pioneering, energizing, affirming, inclusive, humble, deliberate, resolute and commanding. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each personality type a manager can be become a more effective leader incorporating certain strategies that fit them best. Although leadership skills are generally perceived as inherent this book helps any leader grow and improve in addition to helping those who don’t see themselves as leaders improve their management skills.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. The Progress Principle. Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement, And Creativity At Work

[Harvard Business, pp 272, $25.00]

Amabile and Kramer describe how great inner work life which is defined as positive emotions, strong internal motivation, and favorable perceptions about collegues and the work itself, can be the key to an innovative, productive, engaged and committed workforce. Readers will discover, that small wins can have a strong effect on performance as well as small setbacks having disproportionately negative effects. Managers can benefit from the strategies of maintaining virtuous circles and stopping vicious ones.

Sylvia A. Hewlett and Ripa Rashid. Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets. Why Women Are the Solution [Harvard Business, pp 288, $35.00]

Fifty-five percent of college graduates around the world are female and two-thirds of highly qualified women in emerging nations consider themselves very ambitious, which is double the rate of their American peers. The book opens the readers’ eyes to employment opportunities in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the United Arab Emirates. These women are not the typical western stereotype or oppressed victims; instead they are well-prepared and talented workers. Unfortunately, due to the cultures in which they live, there is a struggle to pursue their most ambitious career goals. Hewlett and Rashid show how major multinational enterprises have taken advantage of the huge opportunity for women in the workplace by implementing innovative programs for retaining and accelerating female talent in BRIC/UAE.

the late 1970s, and the drug addiction epidemic in that same latter period. His one condition for taking on public positions was that he should not be paid. It was exactly this independent trait that made him so highly effective. This book tells his amazing life story, taking us into a surprising world where the qualities that make a good entrepreneur are exactly what make a good public servant … as long as he remains unbound by the bureaucracy.

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze. Walk Out Walk On. A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now

[Berrett-Koehler, pp 288, $24.95]

Wheatley and Frieze discuss the increasingly complex problems in the world and the shrinking solutions to them. How can solutions be created for these difficulties faced today? Their strategy is “Walk Out Walk On.” In the book they interview individuals in seven communities around the world who walked out of limited beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create prospering communities. These community leaders have figured out how to work with what they’re given. The reader will be taken on a journey that will lead them from Columbus, Ohio all the way to Johannesburg, South Africa.

Robert Steven Kaplan. What to Ask the Person in the Mirror. Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential [Harvard Business, pp 288, $26.95]

Many believe that good leaders are born, but Kaplan shows in his book that good leaders can be made as well. It is all about self-evaluation and embracing periods of confusion, self-doubt, and discouragement and learning from them. The book is based on Kaplan’s own experience as a business executive and he takes the reader through seven key areas of inquiry that every leader must consider to manage their organization. Those inquiries include vision and priorities, managing your time, giving and getting feedback, succession planning and delegation, evaluation and alignment, the leader as a role model and reaching your potential.

Ooi Kee Beng. Serving a New Nation. Baey Lian Peck’s Singapore Story [ISEAS, pp 141, S$39.90/US$36.90]

The story of Dr Baey Lian Peck should be well known, but it is not. The innovativeness of Dr Baey did not only make him a very wealthy man before he was forty, it also made him an indispensable actor in the implementation of urgently constructed national policies. He was picked to solve pressing problems such as skyrocketing inflation in the early 1970s, the crisis in prisoner ward in

Hooman

[ISEAS, pp 178, S$49.90/US$42.90]

The Challenge of Energy Security in the 21st Century: Trends of Significance seeks to inform all those concerned about energy security, whether national, regional or international bodies, of certain factors, which must be taken into consideration in developing their energy security policies and pursuing their respective objectives. Towards that end, this book reveals certain significant trends of importance to the major energy-producing and energy-consuming regions. Through its unique analysis, it sheds light on how such trends will affect the energy security policies of all the producers and consumers of energy, large and small, in one form or another, in the foreseeable future.

Jayati Bhattacharya. Beyond the Myth. Indian Business Communities in Singapore [ISEAS, pp 371, S$69.90/US$59.90]

This book is a macro-study of Indian business communities in Singapore through different phases of their growth

Peimani. The Challenge of Energy Security in the 21st Century. Trends of Significance

since colonial times. It goes beyond the conventional labor-history approach to study Indian immigrants to Southeast Asia, both in terms of themselves and their connections with the people's movements. It looks at how Indian business communities negotiated with others in the environments in which they found themselves and adapted to them in novel ways. The complexities and overlapping interests of different groups of traders and businessmen form an interesting study of various aspects of these trading bodies, their methods of operation and their trade links, both within and outside Singapore.

New Employee Orientation and Onboarding is the latest in the Perfect Phrases Series along with Perfect Phrases for Executive Presentations, Real Estate Agents & Brokers, and Employee Development Plans. Every company knows how difficult it can be to get new employees running in their organization. This book will take you through the best language for meet and greet meetings, defining company culture, collecting feedback and onboarding a diverse workforce along with hundreds of other new employee situations. Help new employees transition with ease and start in their new roles quickly and effectively.

[McGraw-Hill, pp 272, $50.00]

Ron Stone, training ROI expert, presents his 11-step process for qualitatively and quantitatively measuring the value of training. In the present financial crisis and recession, managers are forced to show higher results with lower budgets, so when investing in a new business initiative, there must be quantifiable proof of its effectiveness. His book will bring ROI under strict scrutiny by teaching the reader to collect critical performance data, analyze results and adjust for causal influence and sustained impact, along with many other ROI measuring designs. This training program is flexible and easily refocuses to fit your business strategy even if it changes constantly.

theories and models for revitalizing companies in the face of global recession. It discusses cutting-edge concepts, constructs, paradigms, theories, models, and cases of corporate strategic leadership for bringing about transformation and innovation in companies. Each chapter in the book is appended with transformation exercises that further explicate the concepts.

Daniel Diermeier. Reputation Rules. Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset [McGraw-Hill, pp 256, £21.99]

It is commonly believed that good reputation follows good business practices, but in reality it takes more than just common sense and doing the right thing. The management of a company’s reputation must be constant, since in today’s world of 24-hour media coverage a corporate reputation can be destroyed in seconds. Diermeier has based this book on more than a decade of research and using real case studies such as BP, Greenpeace and PayPal he provides frameworks, strategies, and processes to change a company’s focus toward better reputation management.

Robert Lucas. Please Every Customer. Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures

[McGraw-Hill, pp 304, $20.00]

Business has moved to a global environment, which makes customer service more difficult than ever with differences in values, age, abilities and other factors. Please Every Customer provides the best methods for communicating with different cultures in order to provide exceptional customer service. Learn to overcome differences of language, recognize and accommodate customer needs, make positive first impressions, gain trust, listen “actively” and much more. The world is changing and so must customer service.

Anil K. Khandelwal. Dare to Lead. The Transformation of Bank of Baroda [Sage Publications, pp 444, £39.99] Khandelwal, former CEO of Bank of Baroda (BOB) in India, tells the story of his three-year tenure in the position and how he helped move the 97-year-old bank into the 21st century of technology and customer satisfaction. His book provides a framework for undertaking transformation in large, geographically dispersed public sector enterprises. He shows that large-scale transformation can occur successfully if the CEO shows the proper courage and determination to change the status quo.

Pritam Singh and Asha Bhandarker. In Search of Change Maestros. [Sage Publications, pp 532, £47.50]

In Search of Change Maestros documents the contributions of seven great Indian wealth creators and institution builders who had the vision and fortitude to create world-class Indian corporations. The authors have skillfully synthesized indepth interviews, questionnaires, and anthropological analysis to afford the reader a glimpse into the intimate world-view of these Change Maestros and to show them what makes these leaders great.

Work

[Palgrave Macmillan, pp 320, £26.00]

Brenda Hampel and Erika Lamont. Perfect Phrases for New Employee Orientation and Onboarding. Hundreds of ready-to-use phrases to train and retain your top talent [McGraw-Hill, pp 176, $12.00]

Ron Stone.

The Real Value of Training. Measuring and Anazlyzing Business Outcomes and the Quality of ROI

Oswalk A. J. Mascarenhas. Business Transformation Strategies. The Strategic Leader as Innovation Manager [Sage Publications, pp 668, £14.99] A resource for industry professionals and consultants, this book on corporate strategy lays down the

Bad behavior must be managed in a workplace to minimize the damage that negative and destructive employees can have on an organization, especially in a tough economic climate. In their book, Furnham and Taylor examine the problems a company can face and how to resolve these issues in order to work towards a positive outcome.

Adrian Furnham and John Taylor. Bad Apples. Identify, Prevent and Manage Negative Behavior at

Susan Cartwright and Cary Cooper. Innovations in Stress and Health.

[Palgrave Macmillan, pp 256, £26.00]

In the past few years, there has been an increasing concentration on workplace initiatives to reduce stress and improve individual resilience. This volume brings chief medical officers, leading health professionals and academics to present their views on innovations in the field of stress and health.

talking

Visit our online store: workstyleshop.com Order the book Talking

Marianne Coleman. Women at the Top. Challenges, Choices and Change [Palgrave Macmillan, pp 288, £60.00]

The authentic voices of sixty successful women identify the challenges that they have faced in their careers and the ways in which they have overcome them.

The main subject of the book is a look at the future identity of work. The general theme has been developed by 135 professionals coming from different sectors (psychology, architecture, identity and privacy, organization and environment care) who have actively contributed to it. The result has been divided into four sections: photography (5 photographers’ interpretation), the drafts (of the participants and of the 5 illustrators), the texts (of 5 storytellers and of the Talk moderators) and 5 filmmakers’ interpretation included in the attached

DVD. In the book you will find also the description of the locations that hosted the various workshops, a presentation of our partners, the illustration of the T-shirt project as well as some statistical data. The collaborators and the people who took part in the event come from 23 countries in the US, Europe and Asia. The staff made of the best international professionals, the easy-to-read journalistic style and the clear straightforward topics make this book a very good way to get some clues on how the business world is going to change.

Sarah Rutherford. Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures. Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organizational Cultures

[Palgrave Macmillan, pp 256, £26.00]

Rutherford presents an approach for effecting real change by analyzing the role of organizational cultures in marginalizing women workers. Based on academic research, case studies and interviews, the author presents a new model for changing organizational culture.

Attached to the book you will find a DVD (Trailer of the pre-Talk works, Trailer of the authorial videos, 5 authorial videos, 5 Talks backstage, 5 Talks Soundtracks).

In this box some pictures from the book. Below two screenshots from the video of Esam Al-Dabagh. Above, an illustration by Goñi Montes.

“Talking” is a book that tells how the work changes. It is the outcome of the discussions on 5 topics: identity, emotions, architecture, environment and organization.

Work Style

illustrators, 5 photographers, 5 filmmakers and 5 storytellers from all over the world to tell the business world. 135 people to define the identity of the workplace of the future, discussing on: identity, emotions, architecture, environment and organization.

130 photographs, 60 drawings, a DVD with 5 original unpublished videos about work.

Where to Work City Guides

Thessaloniki

A merging point between the mythical legendary past and an exciting and full present. Thessaloniki possesses the rare and precious privilege to be a modern city that has not forgotten its history. The standard of living, numerous universities and important business sectors have attracted a lot of young people to come live, work and have fun. These are the same reasons that the number of foreigners settling down in Thessaloniki has grown in the last few years. Ancient Thessaloniki had a sizeable Jewish community and was an early center for Christianity. On his second missionary journey, the Apostle Paul preached in the city’s synagogue, which was the main synagogue in that part of Macedonia, and laid the foundation of a church. After being conquered by many people –Roman, Saracens, Norman – the city

remained in Ottoman hands until 1912. At that time it was extremely multicultural: of its 130,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the century, around 60,000 were Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had fled Spain and Portugal after 1492 and Turks, Greeks,

Ask for the previous guides:

Turin, São Paolo, Kuala Lumpur, Denver, Ekaterinburg, Marseille.

Lagos

Lagos history is as rich as its inhabitants. The first settlers on the island were a small Yoruba group who used to live just beyond the Lagoon along the River Ogun and were ruled by a King. The original name was Eko and only after the Portuguese explorers visited the Island did the village take the name Lagos that means Lakes. The years of colonization were tough, as in other part of the African continent. By 1861 Lagos was officially a British protectorate and in 1906, Lagos was joined with the British protectorate of Southern Nigeria, and, in 1914, when Southern and Northern Nigeria were amalgamated, it became part of the small coastal Colony of Nigeria.

In 1954 most of the colony was merged with the rest of Nigeria, but Lagos was made a separate federal territory. From the late 19th century to independence in 1960, Lagos was the center of the Nigerian nationalist movement. From independence until 1991, Lagos was the capital of Nigeria.

But Lagos does not look back, instead is firmly pointing to a promising and great future. The new leadership is driving the city to modern urbanization, developing new systems of security and social services, fostering attention and care for citizens and visitors as well. Many laws have been introduced in the last decades in order to get control of the city and cope with the main problems, such as

Bulgarians and Albanians made up the remainder of the population. The great number of museums help unlock the beauty hidden in any stone or building of the city. The long beaches and forests are the natural completion to this unbelievable setting. Despite the recent crisis that has hit Greece, Thessaloniki can boast about its flourish commerce and its excellence in certain business sectors. Being one of the most important cultural centers for the island and paying a great deal of attention to the young people and their education is the key for recovering from these hard times and working to build a solid future. And that is exactly what Thessaloniki is doing.

100 Work Cities

poverty, pollution and crime. The city quickly turned into a megalopolis of eight million people with important industries and businesses permanently settled there. The quality of life is improving more and more; the busy nightlife and the breathtaking beauty of Lagos surroundings foster the curiosity of both citizens and foreigners. Culture and education have become a crucial challenge too; the universities shape brilliant future professionists, while museums, concert halls and theaters feed the soul of middle and upper class. There is still a lot to do, but what Lagos and its citizens seem to have already achieved is the most important thing: they can look at their own town with different eyes, full of promises and hope.

The one hundred cities where to work in the next decade is a project by Work Style Company

Illustration by Eelco Van den Berg

Text by Giulia De Florio.

Greece Thessaloniki

Nigeria Lagos Zambia

Where to Work Country Guide Greece

The Enduring Paradox

Greece finds itself engulfed in a financial crisis that has exposed decades-long tax evasion and a bloated civil service. Businesses have also been saddled with hefty taxes to help pay off not one, but two international bailouts. But as the most successful companies show, there is life after debt.

As news editor of a weekly newspaper in Greece, I found myself in the plush and manicured offices of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation on the afternoon of June 29. Taking center stage was the acclaimed Italian architect Renzo Piano who, to the sound of classical music, was eloquently and calmly recounting the inspiration behind his plans for the state-of-the-art opera house and national library to be built on what is currently wasteland just north of the port of Piraeus. The 570 million euro project, he explained, is being funded exclusively by the foundation set up by the Niarchos ship-owning family and will be unveiled in 2015.

Around half an hour – and two metro

Europe

stops – later, I surfaced in central Athens’ Syntagma Square where all hell was breaking loose. Riot police were hurling tear gas grenades at swarms of screaming protesters, who had gathered to let the politicians know what they thought of the latest round of

By THRASY PETROPOULOS

Greece

Thessaloniki Fanari Arta

Thasos Myrina Lefkada

For the three decades since it joined the then European Economic Community, Greece has often been referred to as a poor country inhabited by rich people. Though the Niarchos family are hardly representative of the wider population (even by ship-owning standards, they constitute the super elite), there is truth that low basic salaries are often

Argostoli

Mesolongi

Karditza

Preveza Amaliada Pygros

3,000 Islands

Trikala Larisa Volos Lamia Tripoli

Igoumenitsa Ionnina Alyros Chalkida Patra

Nefpaktos Sparti

That make up 15% of the territory Tourists/year 17.5 million contributing 15% to the nation's GDP Population 10.7 million

Athina

Ermoupoli

Paros

Gyteio

Voies

Agrinio Irakleio

Naxos

Chios

austerity measures being discussed that very moment in parliament only a matter of meters away. That evening, Greece was the leading story on most news programs around the world. Two very different images, both very much part of Greece – and a perfect example of the country’s enduring paradox.

the people from the city. For the fishermen of the region their boat is also their home and they live in conditions that are seen as difficult and obscure by others. As the prawn comes out to hunt food very early in the morning, the fisherman have to be ready by sunrise in order to catch

them and save some time to spend with their families.

01 Going to work

02 Checking the opportunities

03 Tools of the trade

counterbalanced by the amount of cash swirling around the black economy. The country’s vital statistics make gloomy reading: by the end of the year the projections are for unemployment to have passed 17% and the economy to have shrunk by 3.7%, and the national debt is over 360 billion euros and - most worryingly - is running at more than 150% of GDP. There is, however, another side to the coin.

Despite the much publicized violence on the streets and long sequence of public and private sector strikes that have disrupted airport and transport services for more than a year since the country secured the first of two international bailouts, more than four million tourists arrived in Greece up to July. The turbulence across North Africa and recent bombings in Turkey have seemingly played into Greece’s hand. And although tourists are holding on to their wallets more tightly than ever, it is a clear message that the doom and gloom scenarios should be placed at an exaggerated end of the scale.

Within the business and commerce community there is justified concern that the tax-heavy austerity measures are suffocating chances of growth. But there is also a recognition that reforms are absolutely necessary and a quiet confidence that the well-run, honest businesses will endure.

A survival of the fittest, if you like. Or perhaps: a survival of the leanest.•

In Greece, a country with 200,000 km of coasts and a Mediterranean climate, the conditions are ideal for the growth of each form of fishery, coastal and open sea.

Thus “I followed Mr. Niko, a fisherman from that region and I tried to capture certain moments of his daily work that are interwoven with his life,” says the photographer Nikos Papathanasiou. A life surrounded by water, without schedule and without guaranteed income like the jobs of

The Greek List of Best Workplaces

By Dimitris Ganoudis Great Place to Work@ Institute Hellas, General Manager

People understand that the financial situation has changed things. Money is not the main element, trust is. The best workplaces aren’t based on salaries and benefits. It is true that the companies that make our list don’t pay badly. But we have a lot of companies that pay very well that didn’t make the list. What we have always observed is that trust and authenticity of the relationship between the staff and the management is the key element to a successfully run company. Trust is fragile and more important than ever during a time of economic difficulty. People appreciate the efforts of a company that keeps people on. And even if you have to lose staff – because a lot of the companies we feature have over the past year – well, people just want to know that it was handled fairly and that the staff in question were respected and possibly helped to find a position in another company. At the same time, employees are more flexible in relation to their salaries. What we have found is that many of the companies that made the Great Place to Work Hellas top ten list in each of the categories under and over 250 employees also had to layoff staff. That means the employees realized it wasn’t possible for the company to keep all its staff but that they made the right choices. The trust and openness was there. Decisions were justified in the minds of employees and there is a perceived clarity and openness of decisionmaking.

This is my eighth year as general manager. I can say that there isn’t much that is different about successful companies in

DIMITRIS GANOUDIS

Copying the Successful Models

Greece and successful companies elsewhere. At first, a lot of companies approached us just to make the list. But, through working with them, they realized that it is very important to pay attention to their internal structure. The best companies became better. It’s not always the case, but the happiest companies tend to have the best results.

2011 Best GreeceWorkplaces

Over 250 employees 01 Athenian Brewery 02 Elais – Unilever Hellas 03 Tasty Foods 04 Ygeia Hospital 05 Media Strom 06 Pharmathen 07 Leroy Merlin 08 Würth Hellas 09 Vivechrom 10 Accenture

50-250 employees 01 Xerox Hellas 02 Kri-Kri, Milk Industry 03 Imperial Tobacco Hellas 04 Medtronic Hellas 05 Genesis Pharma 06 Data Communication 07 3M 08 Melissa Kikizas 09 Amgen Hellas 10 British American Tobacco Hellas

Great Place to Work® Institute

Hellas

Panormos 74 115 23 Athens T +30 210 6971098 F +30 210 6985810 [W greatplacetowork.gr]

Dimitris Dondas, the HR director at Xerox Hellas, recalls the time when the document technology, services and software provider’s parent company sent in the auditors. It didn’t matter that the business had been in operation as a subsidiary of Xerox Europe for close to 40 years. “They saw Greece at the top of the news all year and were hearing stories about how the country manipulated data and statistics,” he said, “At the same time, the internal and external audits we were supplying them were great. They sent us a surprise audit –again external auditors – who stayed for two weeks and went through our books deeply. And they found nothing. The Xerox CEO herself called and said ‘congratulations’.”

Not that the outcome came as a surprise. Xerox Hellas, a tightly run operation of around 140 staff, was this year voted top of the GPTW Hellas list of companies with between 50 and 250 workers, the result of a survey of staff members on how they rate trustworthiness, respect and management practices within the workplace.

The year wasn’t without hurt, of course. But that’s the point. “Last year was challenging,” recalls Dondas, “Two years ago we had to communicate bad news. First of all this involved cutting jobs. It was extremely limited – 2 or 3 people –and it was our last resort. We explained to the staff how we were going to take the action, who would be involved … and we explained why. We had a very disciplined communication process, and there were of course many other streamlining measures taken. By involving the staff in the discussion, they shared the process. And we asked their opinion. Greeks tend to have extreme feelings, both in happiness and sadness. We didn’t want to panic them. We also told them it wasn’t our intention to cut salaries, even though the management team saw a reduction in their salaries for a period of time. But when the crisis hit us we had no fat. It saved us from

01 Dimitris Dondas, HR director at Xerox Hellas. The Xerox Hellas started in 1972 and since then leads the Greek market in the streets of technological developments with innovative products, technologies and modern ways of Quality Management. Featuring the most comprehensive and innovative equipment and software to manage and produce documents and a wide range of services including consulting, document imaging, content management services and outsourcing. It employs 130 people, trainees in all areas of products, services and administration. The environment is one of XEROS primary concerns, the company addresses every aspect of its business in a responsible manner to help protect the environment.

[W xerox.com]

02 Venetia Koussia, managing director of the employment services subsidiary Manpower Hellas. Manpower is a world leader in the workplace. In Greece, with service offices in Athens and Thessaloniki, the company offers a full range of employment services, helping more than 2,000 employers and 10,000 workers to find the solutions for them. [W manpowerteam.gr]

03 Vicky Bouzouki, Country HR

Director of CCHBC. Coca Cola HBC was formed in 2000 as a result of the merger of the Athens-based Hellenic Bottling Company and the London-based Coca-Cola Beverages. Coca-Cola Hellenic is headquartered in Athens and currently listed on the Athens, New York and London stock exchanges. Our two major shareholders are the Kar-Tess Holding S.A., a private holding company, and The Coca-Cola Company. In conducting operations across 28 countries, Coca-Cola Hellenic provides guidance, support and supervision to each operation while placing day-to-day management and operation in the hands of local employees with a deep familiarity of their own country, its business practices and community aspirations.

[W coca-colahellenic.com]

04 Ketty Hatzianagnostou, Imperial Tobacco Hellas’s HR manager.

05 Paschalis Economides, institutional equities sales trader at Jefferies & Co. Jefferies provides North American, European and Asian institutions and corporate clients with a broad range of U.S. and international products and services across a range of industries. The company pairs a client-first approach with a regionally-focused sensibility. Jefferies is committed to serving the needs of a growing client base wherever they do business. The markets and their clients know no geographic boundaries.

[W jeffereies.com]

06 Elias Angelakos, commercial director of ship management company Angelakos (Hellas). Angelakos is a 5th generation shipping management company, it is headquartered in Athens, although it was originally started in England and then relocated to Greece 15 years ago. The company counts 25 staff members.

Imperial Tobacco Hellas was created in 2003 and is a member of Imperial Tobacco Group, a leading international tobacco company which manufactures, markets and sells a comprehensive range of cigarettes, tobaccos, rolling papers, filter tubes and cigars. With sales in over 160 countries, the company has a strong international profile. Imperial Tobacco Hellas is the center of Group activities in the South Central Europe region, responsible for four additional markets apart from Greece: Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus and Malta. The company’s brand portfolio includes well known brands as Davidoff, R1, Slim Line, Gauloises, Maxim Slims, West, John Player Special, as well as Drum, Golden Virginia and Rizla. [W imperial-tobacco.gr]

The managers' photos were taken for Work Style by photographer Luis Gómezbeck, a photojournalist, actor and founding member of the non-profit organization “Mikros Diakosmos”. He has been awarded by Greece’s National Commission for UNESCO and the NGO "A world without violence. A world without war" in the contest: It is Peace (in 2010).

making unpleasant decisions later.” He also stresses that the often exaggerated press coverage isn’t helping: “I went into downtown Athens to have a look on a day there was trouble. It wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t downtown Baghdad or Tahrir Square either. A few blocks away life was continuing as normal.”

WANTED: LEADERS

There is, however, nothing normal about surveys which periodically show that the majority of young Greeks are considering leaving the country. The OECD puts unemployment of under 30-year-olds in Greece at over 35%.

Venetia Koussia, managing director of the employment services subsidiary Manpower Hellas, has a front seat view of the problem and is straight-talking about the cause.

“Definitely, in Greece, we have a social and cultural problem which has led to a financial problem,” she says, “But the financial problem is the cherry on the cake. And none of this started as a problem. It started 30 years ago as a way of life and has evolved as a problem where we are now producing virtually nothing, we are abandoning the farming sector and we are providing very expensive services without added value. We have a leadership crisis in Greece.” She is optimistic, however, that the worst is over as far as private-sector layoffs.

“The positive thing is that 69% of the companies interviewed [by Manpower Hellas] are not hiring or firing,” she says. “We are reaching a plateau. We are seeing opportunities in the insurance sector and in companies involved in sales and finance, and business-tobusiness services … the intermediaries.” And she has a word of warning to those thinking of leaving the country.

“You should ask yourself why you think you’ll succeed abroad and not here. In my opinion candidates need to be more flexible here. It is not heaven out there and hell here.”

Putting the fizz back into the economy Moreover, it is easy to overlook the success stories. Coca-Cola 3E has been operating in Greece for 42 years now, and not only as an employer of more than 2,000 staff, with a wide-ranging presence across the soft drink, water, fruit juice, tea, coffee and snack market as part of Coca Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCHBC). The multi-national arm, Coca Cola Hellenic, stretches to 28 countries and employs more than 41,000 people. It is the largest company

listed on the Athens bourse, valued at 6.2bn euros.

The second largest bottler of Coke in the world, Coca Cola HBC has suffered its share of a falling market, reporting losses of 1m euros during the first quarter of the year in May. Increasing commodity prices were the primary reason given for the decline. And the impact of a hike from 13 to 23 percent on VAT on all fizzy drinks included in the latest austerity package will likely hit hard.

It is, however, the company’s impact on the local economy over four decades that Vicky Bouzouki, Country HR Director of CCHBC, stresses. As well as running eight production plants in Greece, it sources most of its raw materials for local suppliers and each employment position in the company is estimated to 17 jobs in the production process beyond.

And she insists that rather than allowing the guillotine to fall, there is more mileage than ever before to employers’ looking after their staff. To that end, the belt-tightening measures have been limited to seeking costs reductions wherever possible (teleconferencing over travel and recruitment, management pay freezes, etc.) rather than shedding jobs involuntarily.

“With the shrinking of the economy, most companies are unfortunately being faced with tough decisions,” she says, “Many companies choose to cut expenditures but inevitably the tough decisions involving employees must be dealt with. We acknowledge that it is precisely during these scenarios that companies need to accelerate their humane approach. People are the most important capital in any company. The incorporation of social criteria in all our decisions in nowadays king for our sustainability.”

It was, Bouzouki says, the company’s policy of offering its staff “candid information, clarity in communication and transparency” that saw it top the Great Place to Work Hellas lists for companies with over 250 employees in 2009 and 2010.

PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT

If there is one habit Greeks are unlikely to give up in these austerity-driven times, it is the national pastime of smoking. And just as Coca Cola recognizes the geographical advantage of operating out of Greece, many other companies continue to do the same –among them Imperial Tobacco Hellas. A subsidiary of the Imperial Tobacco

Company, has covered South-Central Europe (Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Bulgaria and Romania) for the past 30 years and enjoys an almost 12 percent market share. Its brands include Davidoff, Slim Line and Gauloises, as well as Drum, Golden Virginia and Rizla.

“

Over the last two years, the tobacco industry has faced a tremendous pressure following a number of excise tax increases coupled with two VAT increases. This, in combination with the overall economic crisis, has resulted in a significant reduction of the market volume and new consumer trends. Turning to cheaper or roll-your-own brands, for instance,” explains Ketty Hatzianagnostou, Imperial Tobacco Hellas’s HR manager. She goes on to stress that Imperial Tobacco Hellas has not only been able to defend its position but sustain its market share.

Not coincidentally perhaps, it is also a company that has been recognized for its sound business and management practices. As well as receiving marketing and sales excellence awards, it too has been rewarded with an esteemed People Management Award and was also among the 2011 Great Workplaces. It is another example, Hatzianagnostou says, of why good human resources management is more important now than ever before. “We are facing higher taxes and longer working lives and their consequence – recruitment freezes and high unemployment,” she says. “We support our people by keeping their morale high by whatever means possible. It’s crucial to offer them a sense of security, offering flexibility and alternatives where possible. We also continue to invest in our people and take care of them by providing private healthcare programs for them and their families. Such actions help minimize the negative impact and improve not only the effectiveness of our people but also our competitiveness.”

Respect and equal treatment are the key, she says, as is an open communication policy.

“As a matter of fact, we have increased our personnel [now 100] despite the difficulties and negative market trends and we have over the past two years given salary increases and full bonuses, and maintained the company’s benefits.”

THE FINANCIAL ANALYST

That is not to disguise the fact that the general trend is downwards. And no business can sustain losses indefinitely. The country’s black market is estimated to be as much as a third of its gross na-

tional product, costing upwards of $20 billion a year (according to Transparency International), the product of chronic tax evasion.

There are those, though, who believe that less taxation would be a better strategy to follow.

Paschalis Economides, an institutional equities sales trader for more than 20 years at the US Investment Bank Jefferies & Co (seven of them as the managing director of the southeastern region of the US) before moving to Greece, offers a blunt appraisal of the government’s fiscal plan. “The measures will not work,” he says.

He explains, “Very simply, an economy that is in recession needs tax cuts to start growing, not tax increases. As the recession worsens the tax revenues will probably diminish further. The high tax rates will serve as a catalyst for even more tax evasion in VAT transactions.”

The annual personal exemption tax threshold of 12,000 euros is, he says, too high – “much higher than the US and about three times that of Germany” – and the higher-rate taxation kicks in far too low (40% for earnings over 60,000 euros a year).

Unemployment, he adds, has further to rise and will be the principal problem over the next decade and the government needs to deliver on its obligation on privatizing 50bn euros worth of state assets by 2015 – or at least making a serious go of it.

“The state has done a horrible job at running these enterprises as the government does not innovate or run the business for profit but rather for political interest and party favor,” he says.

Within all this, however, there are undoubtedly opportunities for the shrewd investor: “As an investor, I have personally looked into the two most visible defaults of the past 15 years – Russia and Argentina. I examined the performances of two very basic companies, telephone operators Mobile Telesystems, in Russia, and Telecom Argentina. The former hit a low of $2.11 in 2000 and reached $42.31 in 2008 and the latter went down to $0.60 in 2002 and had a high of $29.26 just five years later. As strange as it may sound, such opportunities are in the making here. Greece has a competitive edge in tourism, logistics, and upscale retirement communities focusing on Mediterranean living, healthcare, lottery games and, of course, in renewable energy.”

IT’S NEVER PLAIN SAILING

Missing from those sectors is the one

I Don’t Have Email. It Wastes Time

Manolis Grigoreas, a talented painter born in Piraeus, Greece in 1952, lives a very quiet and peaceful life. Since 1992 he has lived in Monemvassia, a small town in Southern Greece, where he paints and likes to keep to himself. Once, Grigoreas was approached by a tourist who requested his email address, his response was “I don’t have email. It wastes time.” In March 2006, he opened his own space, the Malva Gallery in Monemvassia to exhibits his private collection of work.

Grigoreas is a self-taught painter and he exhibited his work in Athens, Thessaloniki and London. Currently his paintings hang in Greece and abroad in private collections. His technique is quite distinctive. It is called a micrographic technique. He is also known for his use of colors and china ink on millboard; a thick paper also containing cotton fibers. This results in a type of dry watercolor. The bright colors are brought out by the use of the china ink. The finishing touch for his paintings is the contour reminiscent of old embroideries. This approach gives painstaking detail and can also, at times, be dizzying in its detail. A critic of Grigoreas described his work as “a flame of fire,” which was inspired by ancient Greek traditions carried through to modern day. In the case of the painting featured here, Cretan Father and Daughter, 1999, Grigoreas created the piece using colored pencils and instead of his usual China ink, he exchanged in Indian ink. Credit: Cretan Father and Daughter, 1999 (coloured pencils & indian ink on millboard) by Manolis Grigoreas (b.1952). Private Collection/ Malva Gallery/ The Bridgeman Art Library

He Smokes Like a Turkish ... or as a Greek?

in which Greece already has a healthy competitive edge – shipping. Greek ship-owners spent some $11bn on ship purchases in the first half of 2011. However, it will not have escaped the EU-IMF inspectors that, while the pips are being squeezed out of every other sector, shipping still enjoys significant tax perks. Income earned worldwide is not taxed.

There are those who predict this will change. Ship owners have not been shy to answer that, if it does, they will simply move to more tax advantageous parts of the world: Singapore, Geneva, Monaco or elsewhere.

Elias Angelakos, commercial director of ship management company Angelakos (Hellas), has succinct way of explaining why: “Shipping companies earn their money abroad and spend it in Greece. They pay their lawful taxes; should the tax regime change, companies would have to consider their options in order to remain internationally competitive, which would mean moving all or part of their operations abroad. It is doubtful it will change, because it will be detrimental to the Greek economy.”

He adds, “Directly or indirectly, shipping employs a significant part of the local workforce. It is where the country excels internationally.”

Angelakos (Hellas), a fifth-generation company with seven bulk carriers and 25 staff in Athens, was established in England and relocated to Greece 15 years ago.

It is a move that Angelakos does not regret. “In the past the country was more isolated. Its activities were taking place out of London or New York. Things have changed. Greece has become more of a shipping centre. And not just Piraeus, the northern and southern suburbs of Athens too. There is more personal contact with lawyers and underwriters in Athens. Some London brokers now have representation in Greece. Telecommunications are so much easier than they used to be.”

He adds that the way of life is better, too, despite the current difficulties. In order to provide relief to the employment situation, the government should, he says, provide further training and encouragement for people to become seafarers.

“Seafaring is a profession that is exciting, lucrative and eye-opening, as well as an exercise in character-building,” he says, “The main asset of a country is not its financial or physical resources, it is its human resources.” •

In September 2003, Kamilo Nollas started a project that would lead him through Northern Greece to photograph what the locals referred to as “kapnomagaza”, otherwise known as cigarette factories. Every new factory was an exciting mystery to him with vast, echoing walls and high-ceilinged spaces. He could feel how these places played such an important historical role in the economic culture of Greece. [W kamilonollas.com]

Where to Work Jump Workplace Hurdles

By ALEX DUVAL SMITH

Tanzania, Looking for Balance

As it happens for many emerging economies in the African continent, working in Tanzania is not something for the faint–hearted. Nevertheless things are changing. Today seems the right time to be there, high skilled Tanzanian professionals have the feeling that they can make a difference.

There is no fuel in the generator so you start your day by bathing in a bucket. In the short time it takes to walk to your car, the tropical heat glues your newly-pressed shirt to your back. The traffic sits bumper-to-bumper in the dusty haze. Motorbikes swerve through the jam. Three-wheeler “Bajaj” taxis zoom past in the inside lane. You are going to be late-again. You turn on the car radio. It’s all in Kiswahili. And you think back with affection on your long, braindeadening European commuter days when a 15-minute delay was a source of profound irritation.

A country where you have to be, now! As in many emerging economies in Africa, working in Tanzania is not for the faint-hearted. But running your own business there “beats being an employee, any day,” says Subira Mchumo, aged 38, whose interior and architectural design firm is based in the commercial capital, Dar Es Salaam. “It’s a great place. It is the right time to be here. You feel you can make a difference,” says Josephine Makanza, 36, a director of an investment trust. Dave Coffey, a 38-year-old Irishman running a radio station, appreciates the journalistic rigor of his staff but misses European camaraderie, “There is no going for a pint with colleagues after a long week’s work.”

FROM

THE TRANSITION

FAMILYHOOD TO CAPITALISM

Tanzania is unlike other East African countries. Ethnically and linguistically homogenous, its culture remains rooted in the vision of founding father Julius Nyerere who died in 1999. President Nyerere believed African traditional values were fundamentally socialist and he

icfafrica.org rfi.fr/afrique tanzania.go.tz]

Working in Tanzania in 2011

Sophie Chivet’s passion for architecture can be seen through all of her photographs. It doesn’t matter if she is working in black and white or color; she commits herself to a sharp light and a pure layout.

Photo by Sophie Chivet, Courtesy of L' agence VU.

01 Traffic is a chaos. Cars, trucks, bicycles, mopeds, all help to build a horrible traffic jams in the cities.

02 The bureaucracy is still, unfortunately, a central problem in the country. Officials earn little. They should find money inside “the complications”.

03 The future mall still under contruction.

called the ethos “ujamaa” (familyhood). It translated into the creation of a nation of collective farmers, almost all of whom were thoroughly uncompetitive and were schooled to receive instruction.

“We are still in transition. Tanzania is still finding its feet, politically and economically,” says Makanza of the Investment Climate Facility for Africa, a partnership between governments and the private and development sectors which aims to improve investment conditions in participating countries, among them Tanzania where it has its head office.

Makanza, a Tanzanian national, grew up with traveling parents. She went to school in Swaziland and Kenya, and university in Wales and South Africa. “When I came back to Tanzania in 1998 people were only just beginning to embrace capitalism. In the workplace I was an oddity - a young lawyer and a woman to boot. People were used to women being teachers and nurses. If you look back at that recent past, you

realize we have come a long way in a short time.”

TANZANIAN COMPLICATIONS

Mchumo also witnessed a few elder gentlemen falling off their chairs when she returned to Tanzania intent on opening her own architecture and design firm. Eleven years later, this diplomat’s daughter - who was schooled in Swaziland, Japan, Britain and Switzerland before going to university in Scotland - feels great frustration at the web of administrative tripwires hampering dynamic entrepreneurship.

“It is very challenging starting your own business,” she says. ‘’The authorities are not straightforward with what is required of you. There are very few guidelines. It is as if everyone sits back to see where you will go wrong or where you will get frustrated so that they can make a buck in between.”

Coffey, who is head of Radio France Internationale’s Kiswahili service, based in Dar Es Salaam, has had extensive

Tanzania Kenya Uganda Congo Zambia Malawi Mozambique

Ruanda Burundi

contacts with tardy administrators in the 18 months since he set up the broadcaster in Tanzania. “What is frustrating is that it is not blatant corruption where people state their price. As a mzungu (white person) you feel as though there is constant suspicion of your motives. The civil servants seem to find waysthrough the paperchain - of slowing things down so they can sting you. It atrophies everything.

“I have encountered the same attitude both in dealing with visas for myself and my family, visas for non-Tanzanian staff, or trying to get a shipping container full of studio equipment into the country,” he says.

ONE OF THE GOALS IS: BUILD PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

Staff working under Coffey and Makanza are drawn from all over Africa and even the world. Mchumo has seven staff, all Tanzanian. “The biggest challenge,” says the architect-designer, “is finding employees who are go-getters and who think of solutions instead of dwelling on problems.”

She also struggles to find people who will deliver work which reaches the standards she expects. “The architecture and building sectors are thriving but quality suppliers and products are a big challenge. Most suppliers stock cheap and fast-moving Chinese products.”

Coffey, who has 18 staff, feels estranged by what he calls Tanzania’s ‘’shikamoo’’ culture. “Shikamoo is a greeting that is usually reserved for elders but I get it because I am a mzungu. If I hold an office brainstorming session, there will be only limited feedback. The Congolese, Kenyan or Burundian reporters

will speak out in a public forum but the Tanzanians will go away and compile a joint email to me. I am sure this collectivist approach is a hangover from the Nyerere period.”

After her return to Tanzania in 1998, Makanza worked at KPMG before being called to the bar, taking a year out to study, then joining mobile phone operator Vodacom for three years before moving to her present job in 2009. “I have seen mindsets change. People are getting more confident in the private sector. They ask questions. They work late and they even take tasks home now that we have decided to turn the office generator off at 6pm to save money. I just wish our salaries could better reflect staff commitment,” she says.

RAISE WAGES, OR AT LEAST ALIGN

Tanzanian inflation has hit 20% in the past year. The monthly minimum wage – what a restaurant waiter might receive before tips – is 80,000 Shillings (about 45 Euro). A social worker is paid 470,000 shillings (225 Euro). Middle-ranking private sector salaries are four times those of civil servants, which partly explains why the palms of officials need greasing. Market food prices are much lower than in Europe but imported consumer goods cost considerably more. Dar Es Salaam’s power supply cannot cope with the demands of businesses and the expanding middle class. This year, there have been fuel shortages.

WE NEED ENERGY

Running her own business, Mchumo feels the overheads burden full-on. “Electricity blackouts pose a huge problem. We work on computers and use photocopiers and printers. The current

electricity shortages and power rationing means having to use a generator and running it is costly.”

To keep up with international design trends, Mchumo needs to surf the web in her spare time. She does so at a price. “We have high communications bills and internet is still very slow so we spend a lot of time waiting to transmit documents back and forth. Mobile phone costs are high, too, and unavoidable because we spend a lot of time on project sites.”

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Tanzania and many other African countries are enjoying the return of a generation of highly-skilled professionals, like Mchumo and Makanza. They, being Tanzanians, enjoy taking part in a revolution that will change their country forever. It is an inspiration well worth enduring sweaty traffic jams for. For European Coffey it is a different story. The frustrations are enormous. Yet he values what he calls “the incredible, mind-boggling challenge” that working in Tanzania represents. •

Mario Marino

Faces of Africa

An Australian born photographer, Mario Marino has spent the last few months in Africa taking what he calls “photographic psychograms” of its inhabitants. Each gorgeously spare portrait represents a different microculture of the region, which Marino chose for its incredible density of distinct ethnic minorities.

01, 02, 03, 04

The eyes of the Karo boy like a defiant look from the undergrowth, as if man had just stepped out of the great order of nature still hesitating to make the final step, which will leave him definitely on his own.

In the spring of 2011 the now Germany based photographer Mario Marino headed to this African origin of mankind with the firm intention to record everything before long, it will be irrevocably lost. He finds villages and pastures recalling the desolate reservations of Native Americans in North America. The pressure of global civilization can be felt everywhere. The voyeuristic glare of the first tourists and in some areas an epidemic alcoholism gradually eclipse cultural identities.

Workplace New Castles

By NEIL HOGAN

The Workplace in the Age of the Brand

As architects and designers we must remember that workers’ real life is still the domestic and social part of our existence and must seek to balance the requirements of the business and the brand with our personal needs.

Many moons ago, before the industrial revolution, the landmark buildings of our towns and cities were the grand houses of the aristocrats, the palaces and government buildings of the ruling elite and, of course, most dominant of all, our places of worship – churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques and monasteries.

NEW MATERIALS

Industrialization changed this centuriesold set up. Workers began to move from agriculture to industry and from the countryside to our fast-expanding cities, which threatened to burst at the seams with the new population influx. At the same time, new technological breakthroughs in the mass production of key building materials - iron, steel and sheet glass – allowed the creation of huge-scale work buildings to house them in. The new era kicked off in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the building of new factories and mills, quickly followed by the erection of public buildings that expressed the common purpose of our new civilized democracies – libraries, schools and universities, transport hubs, public baths, concert halls, museums and art galleries.

FROM CHURCH STEEPLE TO BRAND - BUILDINGS

In the early 20th century, the Americans were perhaps first to grasp the power of architecture to express the power of the new secular icon of contemporary life –the brand. The profits of the new border-crossing private enterprises, accelerated by new forms of transportation, gave rise to imposing buildings like the Woolworth, Seagram and Chrysler Buildings and The Rockefeller Center. These buildings quickly became the new status symbols of achievement in the business world, which was swift to embrace

the technologies of early modernism in a new competitive skyscraper culture, allowing the new giants of commerce to dominate the skyline, climbing higher than any church steeple.

LIKE THE “NOBLES”, THE “CAPITALISTS” EXPRESS THEIR WEALTH WITH THEIR BUILDINGS

These corporate buildings, however, were not three-dimensional expressions of the brand, as we might understand it today. More simply, they expressed wealth, success, dominance and, above all, ambition. Their scale, location and material quality told the whole story, with huge and imposing internal volumes, whose gilded vestibules were used to house large-scale art and show off their owners’ status as pseudo-cultural

apple.com burberry.com bmw.com google.ch guggenheim-bilbao.es hooverbuilding.com]

Work Styleproject:Publisher

“From Castle to Headquarters”. It is a book that recounts with text, photographs and renderings the dynamics represented by Neil Hogan in this first article and in the future articles currently in the pipeline.

tastemakers. The meeting of art and commerce did not always go to plan, however – when the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera included the face of Vladimir Lenin in his commissioned mural at the New York Rockefeller Center, the mural was painted over in its entirety when the artist refused to remove the reference to Lenin and compromise on the issue could not be reached!

Many of these new corporate palaces were also rather good and creative examples of the new emerging architecture – and not only in America. London’s Oxo Tower and Hoover Building, for example, are classics of their era, even if their original owners no longer inhabit them. The Hoover building, now listed and restored, plays host instead to a Tesco supermarket superstore! However, the

01 Chateau Brissac. Photo by CDTA, S. Clément

quality of these buildings was perhaps more due to either the personal taste of the new masters of the corporate world and their willingness to show just how much wealth they had amassed - or else to the happy meeting point of the ambitions of private capital and a new generation of architects, both suddenly finding

Follow the project by a team of international experts, coordinated by architect Paolo Galuzzi, a professor at the Politecnico in Milan. The book is scheduled for the end of 2012. If you are interested in participating with your own projects or with a contribution, please write to: paolo@theworkstylemagazine.com

themselves with a whole new world canvas, on which to make their mark, rather than the actual nature of the business itself. It’s probably no coincidence that their arrival also coincided with the ascendance of photography, with the new media outlets able to communicate and amplify these corporate achievements to the wider world.

WEALTH AND QUALITY DO NOT ALWAYS GO HAND IN HAND

This boisterous struggle for dominance of the skyline has continued apace ever since, with the Middle East, Far East and South East Asia now outstripping Europe and North America in the endless competition to create the world’s tallest building. Over time, in Europe, we’ve come to see the ‘height race’ as even a little vulgar, with the tragedy of 9/11 providing a very literal end of the dream for New York’s skyscraper culture. It is now our cities’ financial districts, from Paris to LA, that play host to the majority of these ‘power buildings’, almost ghetto-ized within the city’s fabric. London’s proposed new HQ for the investment bank UBS by architect Ken Shuttleworth, for example, resembles little more than a medieval castle – a brutal slab of a building, which the site’s original developer Sir Stuart Lipton has called ‘the worst building we have seen in the city in 20 years.’

In Europe and North America we are now far more likely to see a new contender for the most creative new iconic architecture in the domain of leisure or culture, from the Louvre’s glass pyramid to the O2 in London or Gehry’s Bilbao Museum. The Sydney Opera House, by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, is a contender for the birth of this new spate of cultural landmarks in the modern era (al-

though, as ever, the Romans were way ahead of the game with the Colosseum, completed in 80AD!).

BRANDS DRIVE OUR LIVES

Meanwhile, the b-word – the brand – has been fighting its own ‘inside-out’ battle for the dominance of the hearts and minds of corporate culture. Once understood only as a logo, perhaps with a strapline for advertising and a certain service ethos, the brand has now become a living strand of DNA in the minds of most businesses, with every touchpoint or interface given close consideration to ensure consistency of vision. As Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of UK fashion brand Burberry, said in an article in British Vogue recently, “If you’re going to have laser vision, doesn’t that have to go through the same lens?”

The separation between what a company does in the public eye – its products or services – and the behind-the-scenes workers who created the end product, is disappearing. Where corporate headquarters were once clearly defined in terms of the areas a business visitor or client might see – the external building envelope and the internal reception or meeting rooms, for example – and the areas the workers were actually housed in, the deepening understanding of the three-dimensionality of the brand now means that every inch of a workspace interior and every person employed there must embody a company’s brand values.

ALSO INTERNET DRIVES OUR LIVES

We are living in an age of increasing commoditization. Even our new parallel universe – the digital world of social media and instant news and opinion – has been criticized recently for commoditizing even our emotional states. Search engines increasingly give results tailored to what they know about us – our location, tastes and preferences, while Yahoo was recently in the news for saying customers will now have to opt out of their new email service which will ‘read’ emails to find potential information to sell on to businesses about the products which might best be suited to our particular mindset. In short, the private/public lines in our lives are becoming increasingly blurred and the workplace is increasingly testament to this, with every worker now a 24-hour ‘brand ambassador’ for his or her employer.

The recent Vogue article on Burberry, for example famous for its classic check fabric, tells of the journalist entering the brand’s London HQ building and finding nothing short of ‘total aesthetic immersion. Everything carries a reminder of

the brand’s motif. The interior design, a tidy gridwork of Corinthian grey marble, painted black chrome and trench lacquer, gently recalls the geometry of the house check; faint hatched bands crisscross the blinds along the windows; dark wooden vases of eucalyptus are carved with checkered details.’

And what of the people working in the space? The journalist notes that ‘employees sit at shiny white workstations that bear no trace of office paraphernalia… or any other signifiers of individual expression.’ Even the workforce seems to be dressed in a perfect harmony of grey, black and navy. When asked if anyone ever wore orange, for example, Burberry’s press representative laughs and says no – except perhaps if you worked on the seventh floor where the design team were based? Only ‘creatives’, it seems, might be expected or allowed a little more individual articulation…

NEW ARCH-BRAND-PROJECTS

Architects and designers are responding to this new age of brand dominance by creating buildings and interiors, where every aspect obeys brand rules. A perfect architectural example is the proposed design for the new Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley (believed to be the work of Norman Foster), whose giant spaceship/ donut form is a perfect embodiment of the circular navigational interface we are so familiar with from our iPods. The design of Zaha Hadid’s new BMW building in Leipzig, meanwhile, is said to be “A series of overlapping and interconnecting levels and spaces, where the informing idea was to blur all separation between any one part of the complex and another and create a level ground for both the blue and white collar employees, the visitors, and the cars.”

An interior that embodies this same trend is Google’s headquarters in Zürich, where workers can ride a slide down to get their lunch or else shimmy down a fireman’s pole, underlining the playful aspect of the brand, whose online presence changes daily to stay abreast of and ahead of consumer tastes and pre-occupations. As architects and designers working in this brave new world, we have to be very aware of the fine lines between clever and expressive three-dimensional branding and the charge that we are creating over-controlled and slightly nightmarish behemoth corporate environments, where we are constantly ‘switched on’ and where we have all become yet another audience for the values of our brand masters.•

Workplace Life Coaching Design

By ELENA DAVSAR

Executive Efficiency Through Office Space Design

lifecoachdesignTM is intended to embody a person’s own style of organization

within a private or office interior and hence to provide the person with external support in the implementation and achievement of goals.

THE LIFECOACHDESIGNTM METHOD

By analogy, the type of ergonomics that is widely used in design adapts rooms to physical factors, whereas lifecoachdesignTM works with mental processes and an individual’s way of perceiving and absorbing information by adapting a space to factors crucial to personal efficiency. The developers of neurolinguistic programming used the laws of the perception system to identify and describe the strategies of successful people and proposed a way of transferring and teaching them.

WHAT YOU CAN

DREAM,

YOU

CAN DO

Each of us possesses a number of effective strategies of our own. We proceed from the assumption that if they can be described, then they can be manifested outwardly, too, in a threedimensional space through the same language of sensory information using color, volumes, illumination, intensity, size, distance, density, surface structure

or other tools. A projection of success, the development process and long-term objectives that strengthens the necessary aspects and helps us to keep sight of our priorities and the direction we are heading in, as well as the result we want, is thereby created in the external space. LifecoachdesignTM method links coaching with partnership with the client and a common desire to achieve a positive result, contributing to personal growth and realization of objectives. “The inspiration to organize the workspace, based on the personal successful strategies, has been remarkable, as well as the method of introducing some elements as a reminder to the character of the office. It provided the opportunity to evaluate how to obtain bigger advantages from selected principles of efficiency and how to maintain a clear focus on each one’s priorities also by taking into consideration specific elements of interior,” says Riccardo Rocca, CEO, Cromwell Italia.•

Fast Road Map

aPay attention to the arrangement of your office. If it could be described using a metaphor, what would it look like? Does this metaphor match your ideas of success and efficiency?

aIf you know which sensory channel (audio, visual or kinaesthetic) predominates in your working context, then focus on supporting this aspect. For example, soundproofing, balance between furniture and accessories, correct acoustics, organizational procedures and the arrangement of each detail in its proper place will matter in an audiooriented environment.

aWhat attracts your attention most frequently during the working day?

• Try to note your reaction to these external stimuli.

• Do they help you move towards your goal?

If they have too many distracting features, replace them.

• Try to answer the question: what, in your office, says something about your company’s mission and its long-term objectives?

• Is there anything which supports your colleagues’ vision of the desired outcomes?

• How could this be reinforced?

• What should be added?

Working on a project using the lifecoachdesignTM method consists of three stages:

1All of the necessary information is collected, the development priority is selected and the factors that support development are identified.

2

The collected information is transferred to sensory maps, including direct and indirect associations, analogies, metaphors,

creative drawing, collages, etc. The client is given a laboratory of samples and color and light schemes (this stage replaces the conceptual phase of traditional design projects).

3The architect uses all of the information obtained to create a complete interior for a working or living space by contributing his or her professionalism and style to it.

01 Cisco Systems in Chicago creates informal and light-filled gathering venues to inspire collaboration, both planned and spontaneous.

02 HOK’s design for Fraser Milner Casgrain, LLP in Vancouver transformed a law library into a living room and meeting place for staff, recreating the feeling of working from home. Photo by Roger Brooks, courtesy of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP

03 Carnival Cruise Lines in Southampton, UK inspires staff with immersive meeting spaces that awaken the spirit of adventure.

04 Community gathering spaces add to the dynamism and creativity in the offices of marketing research and brand consulting Millward Brown, Lisle, IL.

[W abbott.com americanexpress.com carnival.com cisco.com cromwellsrl.com disney.go.com exxonmobile.com hok.com]

A Growing trend

“The idea of personalization – or micro targeting services and products to individual users– is a growing trend in the industry and, I believe, one that’s going to endure,” says Leigh Stringer Leigh is Director of Innovation and Research at HOK, providing leadership facility planning, workplace strategy and sustainability consulting. She has created breakthrough alternative workplace strategies and workplace design guidelines for, among others, American Express, ExxonMobil, Abbott Laboratories, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Sprint.

Profiling

HOK has long used research and “profiling” techniques to determine both individual and group requirements for the workplace. In recent years, however, we have been expanding our line of investigative questions to incorporate factors that speak to employee psychology

and frame of reference. In addition to traditional questions about job function, we are enquiring about age, gender, national culture, corporate culture, individual personality, personal experience, etc., and exploring what issues have the greatest impact on individual effectiveness for each of these traits. The challenge in creating highly personalized space, however, is doing so for large numbers of people or across multiple facilities. While it’s feasible to design a home office that inspires achievement, it’s far less feasible to design a corporate campus with annual churn of, say, one move per employee each year (100% churn). The latter could be prohibitive, not only initially, but also over time as the organization changes.

“The design challenge then becomes, effectively, how to mass produce individual inspiration,” says Paul Wheeler. Paul is an expert on creating efficiency through innovation at HOK.

He writes and speaks regularly on change management and workplace strategy. Publications include among others, New Ways of Sharing, The Distributed Workplace and An Architectural Perspective on the Future of Workspace.

The New Life Style Offices

Many organizations are managing the dilemma by moving toward a more cost-effective one-size-fits-all-model, but with multiple flexible physical settings (cafés, libraries, gardens, huddle rooms, lounge seating, recreational space, etc.) that engage employees by allowing them to work in the format that best accommodates their individual work styles or immediate work requirements. A number are also adding selfdetermining comfort features that enable better control of individual lighting or climate, with good success.

“While this may not address all components of individual motivation, we are finding that the ability to

control environment, even in small ways, can bolster effectiveness. Notably, many companies generate added inspiration with communal spaces that capture the spirit and culture that attracted the employee to the company in the first place. These can range from beanbag chairs in the lobbies of tech sector firms to the hushed, paneled boardrooms of venerated institutions. The desire to personalize the user experience is not new, but our understanding of the productivity benefits of this approach are emerging clearly across nearly every industry. From personalized medical treatments using molecular profiling technologies to custom mobile applications on our phones, the ability to integrate knowledge about what works best for each user can add both productivity and inspiration.” [W jnj.com microsoft.com millwardbrown.com sprint.com millwardbrown.com]

Workplace A Glance in the City

By THATIANA SILVEIRA DOS SANTOS

Looking for a City to Sleep

This article examines how sustainable transportation together with an effective environmental approach and well-organized security scheme in some working capitals can positively link their inhabitants’ work as well as personal lives.

WE ALL WANT TO LIVE IN THE CITY

The world is experiencing the largest waves of urban expansion in history, due in part to unquantifiable numbers of people migrating to regions that they perceive to be more economically advanced along with a better quality of life. According to the the European Commission legislation on Urban Transportation, the majority of European populace lives in metropolitan areas, with above 60% of them residing in regions with more than 10,000 inhabitants. Yet, according to the EU, those urban dwellers are most likely living their daily lives in spaces that are the equivalent size and with similar transportation infrastructure as their previous residence.

NYC: AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT DESIGNED FOR PEDESTRIAN

41-year-old title-holder of Nutter Media Public Relations, says that New York City is a very special capital due to its rapid commercial growth, high-quality public services in addition to its cultural multiplicity.

“What is totally unique about New York City compared with other American cities, except perhaps Boston, is that it is a pedestrian city suited to walking, and has a public transportation system of subways and buses that eliminates the need of a car. Since I work for myself in a home office, I do not have to travel to work every day, but I did for so many years and it was never harder than a 5 or 10 minutes walk to a subway or 5 to 10 minutes on a subway if not another 5 to 10 minutes walk to the office.” says Mr. Nutter.

“Because NYC’s infrastructure is very efficient, I can walk out of my apartment in Chelsea knowing that I can get anywhere in downtown Manhattan by

How urbanites move around their cities and how urban mobility may enhance or damage their personal as well as professional achievement.

foot, if the place I’m going to is nearby, or I can simply step into a subway car if it is in another part of town. If I need to get somewhere quickly, I take a taxi or a car service. New York is an urban environment designed for pedestrians to get around on foot or by public transportation. It definitely improves my quality of life here,” finishes Mr. Nutter.

SÃO PAULO: NEEDS A PEDESTRIAN FRIENDLY URBAN ENVIRONMENT

In the capital of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city with near to 11 millions residents, the 34-year-old consultant of Application Systems, Fabio Pascallini, explains that mobility has a different aspect for Paulistas, São Paulo citizens, who live near the center of the city and for those who live far away from it.

“Sustainable transportation is most certainly the main significant feature for urban mobility enhancement that con-

New Yorker Christopher Nutter, a

sequently will offer metropolitan dwellers a possibility to maintain a constructive relation between their work and individual lives. In São Paulo, residents who live close to the center have most likely a better quality of life because the transportation system is quite efficient plus since the majority of people work in the center of São Paulo, the proximity to their offices can make their journey trouble-free. São Paulo has intense traffic, which can be a headache. In addition to that, residents who live near the center of São Paulo will not need a car to benefit from numerous gastronomic, cultural events as well as the commercial locations that São Paulo has. I believe these facts can contribute to improve São Paulo’s residents social well-being,” says Mr. Pascallini.

According to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a non-profit global organization with a mission to build sustainable transportation solutions in main cities around the world in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, São Paulo’s automobile traffic has been showing progress lately.

A PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR THE NEW URBAN MOBILITY PLAN

The reason for these mobility plans is to develop projects in São Paulo, which when implemented can reduce traffic intensity, as well as revitalize the city’s cultural, residential and commercials centers.

For instance, the Pilot Bicycle is a project launched in São Paulo by ITDP in 2007 with the objective to reduce traffic congestion during weekends by supporting residents’ use of non-

01, 02, 03, 04, 05 Subway © Luc Dratwa 2011. Manhattan is asleep. The streets are empty and only few taxis are going back to midtown. Walking on the street wet and cold on the 6th Avenue, Luc Dratwa saw the vapors of the subway coming out the grids and he decided to go down the depths of Manhattan, watching the tube completely empty. He came back several times before deciding to take pictures of this sleeping city moment.

motorized transportation such as bicycles. According to ITDP, Pilot Bicycle was implemented in São Paulo’s main neighborhoods such as Butanta, the city’s wealthiest region, Grajau, the city’s working-class area and Paraisopolis, São Paulo’s largest underprivileged area.

Additionally, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy launched a social event where the cities that participated in its program will have to design a diagram presenting their sustainable urban mobility plan for 2030. According to the ITDP, the cities that have the best performance will have a chance to expose their work at an art exhibition which will be announced at a later date. The event will take place in September 2011.

HOW CAN A PRIVILEGED CITY WITH THIS MUCH CHARM HAVE SO MUCH TRAFFIC?

Despite the fact that New York City and São Paulo representatives have been implementing key strategies to improve their urban mobility framework, as well as their residents’ social wellbeing as this article mentioned previously, some well-known cities seem to be in the dark when the subject matter is urban mobility and public services development. According to the 55-yearold Italian Art Producer, Valter Laconi,

who was born and raised in Rome but has been living abroad for many years, Rome does not offer its residents an efficient urban mobility and its public services are mostly inefficient because the city’s principles are still based on the past era.

“Rome is a city that has a lot of culture as well as an amazing gastronomy and wine varieties, however, the city in general does not work well because its structure is still old. For instance, the city still does not have enough parking spots because the majority of Rome’s buildings were constructed in the 60s and 70s, when garages were not necessities. The traffic is exhaustive because there are too many cars on the streets and the majority of the city’s residents go to work by cars or Vespas, the traditional Italian motorcycles. In addition to that, Rome currently has only two subway lines. The streets are tiny and because of that it has always been a problem too and we Italians are crazy about owning state-of-the-art cars. Rome’s public transportation is deficient, meaning, the city has too many people and a small amount of public transportation circulating. Since I came back from Los Angeles, my most recent residence, I have been struggling to move around Rome,” says Mr. Laconi. •

Workplace Environment

By FABRICE LECLERC

The Wheel of Life

As Leonardo da Vinci found, after years of studies and quest for perfection, in 1497 he came to the conclusion that the wheel, represented by his world famous “vitruvian man” was the perfect design.

A PERFECT TOOL

One of the most powerful designs in life is the wheel. The first cell, which appeared on the planet billions of years ago, was a circle, a simple bubble that floated on a primitive sea. It was able to concentrate on life substances like the sun’s energy while being in perfect harmony with its environment.

STAYING IN THE MIDDLE

The expression “to think outside of the box” is just a way for people today to get out of the wrong design. Staying in the middle means giving the same value to all the “quadrants” that constitute the wheel of life. It is also the center of the wheel where the maximum energy is achieving personal terms where happiness lies.

QUADRANTS OF THE WHEEL

They are made of all that matters to us, love, relationships, material accomplishment, food, sex, family, health, dreams, sense, purity of the water, the soil and the air, bio diversity and life which are the direct result of a good balance... if one of these “quadrants” is blocked the whole wheel of life can stop, leading to a crisis on all the other quadrants.

NOW WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE

In the past, the Mesopotamian civilization was convinced that the earth was flat and it took centuries to see “heretics” challenging the concept. Eventually Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano’s vision on circumnavigation proved to be the right approach. It took centuries, fierce battles and many deaths to get there. Speed of reaction and adaptation does not mean rush, “Rome was not created in one day”. Energies of change need to be clearly

01

The wheel was used as a potent healer by the same civilization that created Stonehenge. The Mayans created a calendar wheel that can still predict events that will happen in years to come. The most powerful Egyptian pharaohs used sun wheels to govern their people. Native Americans used “medicine wheels” made of simple stone alignments on the floor to stay in contact with Nature’s healing powers.

Five steps from Patagonia. Apply to individuals as well as companies who want to reduce the harm they do and make a difference.

1

Lead an examined life. Most of the environmental damage humans cause is a result of ignorance. That ignorance is willful when we avoid confronting our problems, when we refuse to learn because we don’t want to have to act on what we know.

2

Clean up your act. Once you learn the environmental costs, try to reduce them. And when you can reduce them, you must. Once we found out how harmful cotton was, we sought a sensible alternative. And we

01 Yasunori Matsuzaka and a lone pine tree that survived. Shot in the city of Rikuzentakata after the tsunami of 11 March. Photo by Ko Sasaki

Back to the wheel

We, human beings, in order to avoid losing money (or earn more), often expect problems to resolve themselves. The Kyoto Protocol, which was meant to help clean up the world and was welcomed initially by everyone with positive feedback ended up with no one really caring (beginning with the US), is an example

of human beings doing nothing. Today we have two options. The first is to wait for tragic natural events or speculators (see Amazon Rainforest) to destroy the plants leaving us with a stack of timber to dipose. The second is to address the issues that are on the table. In other words, act! According to Fabrice Leclerc, the author of this article, acting means putting the event in a circle to ensure that one is leading to another, in order to return to a natural order of life.

accepted and combined into a grid. Civilizations take a leap ahead when this happens and this is the case right now with the energies of change. We’re facing an unprecedented challenge right now. We have three crises that are feeding off of each other – the global economic meltdown, the energy crisis and real time climate change. When you put those together, it’s clear that we’re at the end of an age, and the question then is what do we do?

LOOKING FOR A NEW VISION

What’s missing so far is a new economic vision that would be powerful enough to address the enormity of this moment in history. We began to develop the beginnings of a game plan.

• Do we know that Aspartame, the ingredient contained in most industrial sweetners like Coca Cola, can provoke cancer causing a blockage in the wheel of life?

• Do we know that salmon bought in supermarkets contains heavy metals and super high levels of contaminants?

• Do we know that the water we drink from the tap is drinkable only because the state does not analyze the content of medicines and millions of new contaminants which did not exist when regulations were made?

• Do we know that living in a polluted city has a severe impact on longevity? Can eating non organic, or worse genetically modified food, create a hazard to one’s health? Do we know that using cellular phones is the number one cause of brain cancer and death?

• Do we know that smoking kills?

AUTHENTIC INFORMATION IS KEY

found one. Organic cotton. People love to figure out how to do the right thing, once they know what that is.

3

Do your penance. No matter how diligent a corporation, it causes waste and pollution. Our initial fabric assessment told us that antimony, a dangerous heavy metal, is used in the making of polyester resin. Our penance takes the form of a voluntary “earth tax.” For many years we donated a percentage of our profits to grassroots environmental organizations working to save and restore habitat.

4Support civil democracy. Today in the United States, small groups of kayakers and fishermen work tirelessly to bring down

dams; duck hunters toil to preserve wetlands. These are the people who do the most to hold the corporations at bay and keep the government honest. These are the kind of groups to whom we give most of our money.

5Influence other companies. Share the knowledge. The company that discovers new ways to be more environmentally responsible has an obligation to spread the word to others – to share the knowledge of what can be done. Again, people like to do the right thing when they know the right thing to do.

The problem is that most of this authentic information has been hidden to only benefit one quadrant of the wheel: the profit quadrant.

No doubt the wheel has been blocked by the serious trouble the markets and economies are in. So what environmentally friendly activities can be done to speed up the process of healing.

This is the healing recipe of Yvon Chouinard, the legend of the good business evolution and founder of the Patagonia sportswear company. “It took me nearly 25 years in business to learn how to ask that question. It has taken another 15 years of trial and error to uncover the process that Patagonia has to go through in pursuit of answers.”

The issue we are facing today comes from the fact that our lifestyle and our business models are based on lines. This consumption without bearing the

real environmental or social costs is not sustainable and is, in other words, toxic.

WE NEED MORE FROM BUSINESS THAN JUST PROFIT

Ben Verwaayen, CEO Alcatel-Lucent

When faced with a chronic disease, much like the economy or in us, it is advised that you eat better, through organic, fresh and local foods, take the time to detox and exercise in order to reconnect with Nature. In other words, give room for the spiritual life. Stop and think. Get back to the wheel of life and get back to your center. As soon as that happens, you can feel the system healing. This, of course, works for any lifestyle, any business, for, well, anything.

of water can not break a stone, but a drop of water every day can destroy a mountain. Building trust in the process is crucial.

CONSUMERS ARE ASKING WHO IS BEHIND THE BRAND, SO WE HAVE TO MAKE IT VISIBLE

Paul Bulcke, CEO Nestlé

It is not a matter of central powers but distributed powers. In other words, any one of us has the power to change the world. New York became a safer city thanks to focus on the correction of small disorders. Facebook reached billions of dollars in brand value due to connecting millions of single personal projects. In addition, Muhammad Yun-

nus created one of the most powerful banks, the Grameen Bank, by connecting millions of micro credits. The speed of our evolution is marked by the trillions of small and simple changes that one person has the power to accomplish and could be doing now. Change comes with awareness and information, but most of all, with good sense and authenticity. These must happen everywhere beginning with our lifestyles, businesses and brands.

If you know the rule of Nature, like the wheel, you don’t need information or experience to thrive and speed up the healing of the world. •

It takes a matter of seconds to make the change and take the courage to face social and cultural boundaries that tend to slow us down.

FUTURE CAPABILITIES WILL BE VERY DIFFERENT, AND WILL PUT A PREMIUM ON LATERAL THINKING AND CROSSFUNCTIONAL, COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

Jeffrey Swartz, CEO Timberland

Courage, fun, creativity, vision, love and dreams are the highest energies of the wheel. They are reshaping, for what may be the last time, our civilization.

WE HAVE LOST TRUST AND WE NEED TO REGAIN IT WITH A CULTURE OF RESPONSIBLE BEHAVIOR

Kaspar Villiger, Former chairman UBS

The wisdom of the wheel and its power lays in the observation that big leaps are done thanks to a multiplication of small leaps. The integrity of the human body is the integrity of all its cells. If one cell goes bad and quits the wheel of life, it can cause the whole system to die. Everyday small changes, multiplied by billions of individuals will considerably speed up the transformation of our linear lives and business to the circular ones. As the Chinese say, a bucket

02 © Shunsuke Ohno, Courtesy Russiantearoom, Paris, rtrgallery.com.

For his first personal exhibition at the RTR gallery, Shunsuke Ohno presented his Landamscapes series from 2009. His pieces always have two meanings. On the surface they are singular landscapes, but in a deeper look, there is a perception of beauty strongly inspired by Buddhist culture. Ohno shows that landscapes are infinitely pure with obvious beauty. He makes us feel their essence.

03 Amos. Photo: © Black River Productions, Ltd. / Mitch Epstein, Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne .

These pictures question the human conquest of nature at any cost. There are different ways to

[W patagonia.com alcatel-lucent.com timberland.com ubs.com facebook.com nestle.com grameen-info.org]

consider energy production: one, positive, essential to progress, to society’s well-being; the other, more complex, can be considered as the origin of irresponsible capitalism, which leads to catastrophes such as Chernobyl in Russia or more recently, Fukushima in Japan. Mitch Epstein, an American photographer born in 1952, did his first assignment for the New York Times. Fascinated, he decided to start the American Power project, becoming a kind of “tourist of energy” in the United States. This is more about understanding than judging; it’s not a straight on criticism, it’s more about highlighting elements to reflect upon, supported by the power of images.

1st place for DIS AG in the competition “Germany’s Best Companies to Work For 2011”

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