Anyway, today, they had this lady come in to give us a speech about effective communication at work, like a Lunch and Learn. It was great! Some things were redundant but there were tips that were new to me and I learned something that I didn’t know before. Aside from the seminar itself, the trainer in particular fascinated me. She looked rather young, mid thirties and her portfolio ranged from teaching at a university on subjects such as psychology in the workplace, owning her own consulting company and giving seminars in big corporations for older employees who plan on retiring (how to deal with the major changes) and working part time for our company’s outsourced work-life-balance-initiative-company! From the sounds of it, she probably had a degree in psychology, did graduate studies and made some extensive gender research for 6 long years.

From an engineer’s perspective, typically we scoff, look down and roll our eyes at “art” students and folks who lead the path of the “artsy” life but, making $$ while basically teaching at many different places on topics like communication, gender issues, life changes, etc., in my opinion isn’t work at all! And the best part is, consulting for her must be so flexible on the hours, owning her own company must give so much more tax leeway than being an employee and to spend all her “working” hours basically talking about something that I’m sure she loves, now that’s what I call a decent life. Who knows if she’s a millionaire or not but the beautiful thing is, even if she’s not, it’s still a very decent life!

Enlightening myself of all the different paths out there asides from working for big corporation X in terms of career possibilities always makes me happier. Ignorance is not always bliss!

1. Always issue out an agenda stating explicitly the objective of the meeting prior to the meeting to all participants. Ex. What problem are we meeting to resolve and who is involved? If there is more than 1 meeting upon the same subject, always issue out an agenda summarizing the results of the previous meeting and the actions to be taken by the appropriate people prior to the said meeting.

2. Commence the meeting with a short name calling of all those present.

3. If it is the first meeting, commence by explaining the problem at hand and ask the obvious question, how do we go about solving this? If it is not the first meeting, commence by stating the actions from the previous meeting and confirm if the actions are completed by the relevant people.

4. The conversation will tend to divert, especially as emotion and denial of responsibility start coming into play. As the host and driver of the meeting, always stick to the agenda and do not be afraid to cut in when deviation from the agenda becomes too large.

5. When all points on the agenda are touched upon, do a quick round-table for further questions. Then end the meeting with a thank you.

Tip: When writing out the actions, if unsure of who was responsible for a certain action, call the suspected individual and confirm. Never write out an action for somebody when you do not have confirmation either from the meeting or via a personal call.

Tip: Stack the Minutes (the agenda for every meeting) with most recent notes & actions on top to oldest notes & actions at the bottom.

If you have more tips, I’d love to here them!

From Jobboom

From Entrepreneur.com

I haven’t done much of it lately but I am thinking seriously of doing something for free, for society. Here’s why:

1. It takes you out of your small, small world of problems and stresses that in the grand scheme of things are so minute, they are like grains of sand.

2. You meet a variety of different people in the process.

3. There are opportunities to hone different skill sets such as communicating with different people, driving fundraisers, etc.

4. Points 1, 2 and 3 all help to give a grander perspective on life, usually this also leads you to appreciate life more.

When life’s sole purpose becomes attaining money &/ things, that’s no life at all.

Frankly, it was hell.

From my 3 hours of undisputed pain, I must say, there must be quite a bit of money made in the business of managing condo buildings. Here is my reasoning from today’s observation:

1. There is a surplus of condo buildings right now, especially in my city because of the suspected trend that most baby boomers will get tired of their big, old homes (in need of big repairs) and opt out for the condo instead. Whether or not this induction holds true, remains to be seen… quite frankly, I still see plenty of “For Sale” signs out there for condos.

2. Having a group of condo owners volunteer to be the building administration and management is difficult because of all the work entailed. It is likely that there will only be 1 or 2 who volunteer and then through the process of managing and working to maintain the building, inevitably get stuck with the job because without replacements, they cannot just walk away since it is real estate that they possess (if only by XX%). These select few will inevitably go crazy.

3. But say the building manages to produce a few volunteers for the job, the chance of this select few to actually get along with each other and to work in an effective manner towards the well-being of the building … is low. Hence, there will be conflicts which will lead to a few of the select few to walk away and then we arrive at situation #2.

So from all of this, it is to say that after a year of handling the management, it is highly likely that a condo building association would like to subcontract. Whether it be subcontracting all of the cleaning, the machinery maintenance, handling of the bill payments, one of these or all of these or a few of these, external management will likely be hired.

Given #1, I wonder if these external management companies/”consultants” enjoy a lucrative niche?

Here is to hoping that my building will not fall into category #2 or #3.

Perhaps it is a condition that women are conditioned to have but modesty was something preached to me for the most part of my life. In the end however, will modesty really get me that promotion or raise? Bragging does have it’s perks… it makes you more visible to the people around you …. here is an interesting article about the fine line between self-promotion and downright pompous-ass.

One of my peeves with myself is my lack of creativity. Perhaps it’s a flaw from being raised in a Chinese home, I notice from work and from life that we are much more process oriented and we are expert copy-cats but not so ingenius at thinking out of the box. Pondering if creativity can be trained …

Companies outsource like mad. We hire programmers from India for 5$ a week, we enlist manufacturers from Mexico, China, Poland, Vietnam… etc. for about 1/10th of what we pay in North America, making the operation of a business and getting Awesome-Product to Impatient-Customer a lot more complicated.

Something that I never really took heed of until my recent months of “real” work and speaking with others is the importance of a company’s supply chain. The fact is, manufacturing will likely disappear in North America, this means that every North American company will have a supply chain that spans the world! This supply chain will require people, resources and tools to track inventory, orders, backlogs, processes … you name it, in possibly several different low cost countries. As it is today, there are so many factors involved, I had no idea coming out of school how important these people who support the supply chain really are!

And as it is, I am finding that those at the heart of the supply chain and essentially at the heart of operations, are those who are able to skillfully manage, communicate and mediate the wants, needs, requirements and explanations between a dozen different parties such as customer account teams, quality teams, manufacturers, OEMs, external logistic teams, external human resource teams…. and the list goes on, all to provide Impatient-Customer with their order of Awesome-Product in as short a time as possible to maintain company competitive edge.

Lesson: Trying to make business simple in an ever complex world can become a headache without an efficient supply chain. Those supply chain folks are important.

I could say that he simply identified with my co-worker more because my co-worker is white, male and French however, we were both standing together, we were both strangers to him and I made it clear that I spoke French by speaking loudly and clearly with the receptionist. But alas, he just ignored me, not even initiating eye contact while he incessantly bitched about China. What other reasons can I believe for such behavior but the fact that I look Chinese?

The world is changing and globalization is here, get with it, accept it, move on and adapt. People like Mr. Happy whom do not adapt but rather take on a defensive response will suffer, wither and die.

Lesson: If you can’t beat them, find a way to work with them, don’t be like Mr. Happy.

… Rather obvious hey? It is but do we actually go about seriously pondering this very reasonable, very obvious fact? I don’t think so, otherwise, why do we have so many people doing the standard 9 to 5 and disliking it? Perhaps they just don’t know what they enjoy or they don’t have the time to think about it or they don’t have the time to develop those skills. I guess that’s the deciding factor, will you be passive or active about your search for freedom from the 9 to 5? Will you expend the time to soul search? To practice? Will you expend the energy to try and fail and try again?

My cousin did, I hope it works out for him.

If you recognize and change behaviors that say “girl,” not “woman,” the results will pay off in career opportunities you never thought possible — and in an image that identifies you as someone with the power and know-how to occupy the corner office! “

… That basically sums up the book! This is another one of my favorites. Lois Frankel goes into logical reasoning about how and why some of the actions that “ladies” are expected to uphold really don’t help propel our standings in the rat race. She helps you to discover things about yourself that you were never aware of and she helps you to understand how the little things do matter, like don’t wear pink to an interview! I highly recommend this book, even for a refresher about what to do and what not to do at work.