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Manage the Moments

"Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed." Corita Kent

Use time wisely. Time is time and there is only so much we get each day. How we manage our time will determine many things. Our success or lack of will be determined by how we spend our time. Too many individuals waste time on activities that do not move them ahead. As you look at how you manage your time, start asking yourself the question. "Is this the best use of my time?" and "Is this moving me toward my dreams?" As we begin to analyze how we spend our time and take control over it - we can begin to manage our time to produce the greatest return on the least investment.

Use a planner or time management system. To have a good organizational system will save us hundreds of hours in a year. If we follow a system - no matter what it is, we create space each day by not having to think of how to organize our meetings, notes, etc...

Learn from others. Read books or listen to tapes on time management. There are lots of great ideas out there. Make it a habit to read, listen to tapes or talk to wise people every day. The more we put into our life and our mind – the more rewards we will see.

Take down time. This is where many of us fail. We think we need to work all the time. We are addicted to our blackberries, spend too much time in the office and put off taking the much needed vacation. In order to be  at the top of our game we NEED to take downtime! If we do not take time to recharge we eventually have nothing left to give, our creativity is lost and our life can begin to feel out of control. Self management is sometimes about saying NO to the world and saying YES to yourself.

Schedule creative time. This may sound weird but it work. No matter what the creative outlet - we all need one. Taking time to exercise the right side of our brain increases our effectiveness.

Sleep on it. Before adding any significant commitments to your life - take 24 hours to think about it. We often realize that after we have slept on a decision - the answer comes without much effort. This simple process has saved hundreds of hours of stress and regret.

Say 'NO'. It is okay to say know. Saying no opens up space for something else. if our calendars are booked solid from dawn til dusk - we have no time to be creative, to listen or to grow. Saying 'NO' to outside things can really be saying 'YES' to ourselves.

Stop multitasking - SINGLE TASK! Multitasking is a productivity killer.  FOCUS on one thing at a time until its done.

CONSULTANTS IN A CHALLENGING ECONOMY:

Consultants are generally viewed as “doctors” who diagnose your organization and suggest the relevant remedies. These could be in terms of revisiting organizational strategic priorities and making necessary modifications to the current business model. In effect consultant’s job is to bring significant business change within short timeframes. Thus the flexibility to attack a multitude of problems with the consultants’ area of specialism is imperative for the success of any consulting intervention.

Within the current fast paced, dynamic almost unpredictable economic environment; speed of execution and simplicity of the solutions are two critical ingredients of success for the consulting venture. The need to bring new insights and pertinent best practices from the industry along with the ease of making numerous decisions on the hoof whilst quickly taking a stock of difficult situations (both internal and external) are essential components to propose an effective solution ready to be implemented for the desirable outcome.

World over companies are ‘laying off’ employees and slashing budgets to deal with the current economic situation. Gone are the days when a consultant would stay for months using his/ her set “6 steps” or “14 topic modules”, today consultants need to conduct effective needs analysis to ensure that they hit the bull’s eye and customise the methodology to quickly turn around the organizational condition. Of course expecting consultants to come with a magic wand to make your company the rising star in this age of “halted growth” is not a pragmatic view either. It is therefore critical for consultants to help the client set realistic expectations and explain exactly what value would their advisory services bring; helping the organization differentiate mere wishes from what should be the ideal goal in quantitative terms. Thus collaboratively working together with a greater degree of trust and a common goal of improving the organization so that it not only survives during these tough times but instead uses it as an opportunity to get the customers of its dying competitor! It is important more than ever for consultants to not get enmeshed in their methodology but instead offer a new refreshing perspective to the current gloomy scenario in which our companies are drowning.

Research Paper: Knowledge Management and Organizational Performance

This is a research paper on Knowledge Management and Organizational Performance

A feature of the modern era therefore is the extent to which change is seen as being ubiquitous. This notion of change pervades both the realm of the popular as well as more analytical texts. Clearly the reasons for societal changes are complex but according to Lash and Urry (1987) they can broadly be explained by the liberalization of global capital and the information technology revolution. Lash and Urry (1987) characterize these changes as heralding the emergence of a new form of capitalism, that of disorganized capitalism, while other writers consider the contemporary period to amount to a rupture with modernity itself. Any change in society should also impact upon the way in which knowledge is distributed and organized within that given society.

For a successful company however it is of course not sufficient to respond to changes in the environment; rather it is desirable to anticipate those changes and to adapt before anyone else. This is a source of competitive advantage for an organization. Thus change needs to be a continual process which takes place iteratively rather than as discrete events. The capacity to change in this way involves the whole organization and requires an understanding of how organizations can learn to adapt continually. More particularly it requires the organization to make best use of the knowledge and expertise which is possessed within it and this has become known as knowledge management. In this article we are going to explore what is meant by knowledge management.

While concerns have been expressed as to whether KM is merely the latest in a long line of organizational `fashions', such fears have been allayed through pointing to the likely enduring nature of how 21st century organizations are to go about managing their knowledge base (Scarbrough & Carter, 2000). As such there is a validity regarding a concern with knowledge in organizations that extends beyond the mere vicissitudes of fashion. In terms of situating KM, it is useful to reflect upon its antecedents. It has been argued that KM, as a theoretical area of enquiry, has been constituted through the coalescence of a number of management subjects.

It would be misplaced, however, to suggest that KM constitutes a synthesis between different disciplines. Instead, different perspectives each bring particular analytical concerns. It would however be erroneous to suggest that each discipline has an equal bearing on KM. For example there has been a concerted attempt by the Information Systems (IS) community to colonize KM, while there has been considerable concern among the HR profession that KM is fast developing a people management gap (Scarbrough & Swan, 1999). The preponderance of the IS community in KM initiatives has led some writers to warn that KM must be seen as more than a technicist fix, reducible to the implementation of a company Intranet, such as through Lotus Notes or Groupware. From the perspective of strategy, issues of knowledge have acted as the foundation stone of the influential `Resource Based Theory' approach. Resource Based theory emerged as a critique of the Harvard-based `design school', a perspective which has been influentially criticised as not sufficiently concerned with process and too much with rational planning and market analysis. The Resource-Based View (RBV) in strategic management has put issues of path dependency, the role of (organizational) history, firm-specific resources, appropriability and politics on the agenda (Kamoche, 1996; Mueller, 1996). Undoubtedly, the RBV has emerged as an influential alternative to approaches that were more concerned with market positioning, segmentation, and acquisition and diversification strategies. The appeal of RBV is that it places emphasis on what the organization `can do' as opposed to what Clark (2000:p. 214) has termed `the strategic fantasies of formal, written mission statements'. It is this concern with `what an organization can do' that has fuelled the interest of strategists in Knowledge Management.

This is a relevant starting-point for acknowledging the recent emergence of the interest in Knowledge Management. One of the most striking features of this is the debt to the resource based approach in the way that knowledge is presented as an endogenous, if sometimes elusive, organizational resource. The shift towards looking at the organization, and its immediate supply chain, is a cornerstone of approaches to KM. The spread of the discourse seems to be driven by claims that this hitherto hidden

All about Wedding Planning and Wedding Planners

Many people want their wedding day to be perfect so that they and all of their guests will remember it forever. They would like every last detail to merge together in a way that creates an unforgettable and almost magical experience. It takes great organizational skill and experience to organize such a fantastic wedding. You cannot plan to impress, feed and entertain a few hundred people overnight.

In fact planning a big wedding can be very demanding since it takes a great deal of time and patience. Because many people in contemporary society have very busy personal and professional lives they just don't have the time to organize their own wedding day. Instead they hire a wedding planner to take care of everything on their behalf. What Is Involved Wedding planners work hard for their money.

They offer guidance and advice to their clients to help them plan everything perfectly so that no detail is overlooked. They also negotiate with their business contacts to meet their clients' expectations at a price they can afford. The wedding planner hires the wedding venue, the caterers, the photographer and the entertainment as well as handling the purchase of the dresses, suits and flowers. They also manage the invitations, guest list and seating arrangements. What's more, they only have a certain amount of time to get everything done, and this adds to the stress of their job. What It Takes Not everybody has what it takes to be a wedding planner.

In order to succeed in such a career you have to have great people skills so that you can tolerate the tantrums of the most melodramatic brides as well as the unreasonable demands of interfering mothers without losing your patience. A wedding planner must also be good at negotiating with others to get a good price. Furthermore they need business experience, a good sense of humor, a head for figures, strong organizational skills and the ability to work quickly under pressure. Of course it helps if the wedding planner also enjoys serving other people and making them happy.

What might explain why people who are perceived as strong leaders avoid leaving a paper trail of writings

Communication in organizations, broadly speaking, is the transactional, symbolic process in which the activities of a social collective are coordinated to achieve individual and collective goals. The modern field has a more recent lineage through business information studies published in the 1930s through the 1950s. Until then, only handful of people had a particular interest in speaking and writing in business settings. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote in 1947 about "organization communications systems", saying communication is "absolutely essential to organizations". In 1954, Chris Argyris published Personality and Organization, which singled out "organizational communication" for special attention. Argyris made the case that what passed for organizational communication at the time was based on unstated and indefensible propositions such as "management knows best" and "workers are inherently stupid and lazy." He accused the emerging field of relying on untested gimmicks designed to trick employees into doing management's will.

            Some of the main assumptions underlying much of the early organizational communication research were:

• Humans act rationally. Sane people behave in rational ways, they generally have access to all of the information needed to make rational decisions they could articulate, and therefore will make rational decisions, unless there is some breakdown in the communication process.

• Formal logic and empirically verifiable data ought to be the foundation upon which any theory should rest. All we really need to understand communication in organizations is (a) observable and replicable behaviors that can be transformed into variables by some form of measurement, and (b) formally replicable syllogisms that can extend theory from observed data to other groups and settings.

• Communication is primarily a mechanical process, in which a message is constructed and encoded by a sender, transmitted through some channel, then received and decoded by a receiver. Distortion, represented as any differences between the original and the received messages, can and ought to be identified and reduced or eliminated.

• Organizations are mechanical things, in which the parts (including employees functioning in defined roles) are interchangeable. What works in one organization will work in another similar organization. Individual differences can be minimized or even eliminated with careful management techniques.

• Organizations function as a container within which communication takes place. Any differences in form or function of communication between that occurring in an organization and in another setting can be identified and studied as factors affecting the communicative activity.

            Herbert Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality which challenged assumptions about the perfect rationality of communication participants. He maintained that people making decisions in organizations seldom had complete information, and that even if more information was available, they tended to pick the first acceptable option, rather than exploring further to pick the optimal solution. Reaching a wider audience, including seniors, means thinking broadly about what constitutes communication and how best to communicate. A first step is to define the means or "medium" to reach clients and customers.

            Businesses communicate largely through advertising and written information. But they also communicate each time they answer the telephone, greet clients at an office, branch or store, or broadcast over a public address system. One example is that in a medical clinic, pay attention not only to written or illustrative material handed out during a visit, but also to the telephone answering system, the directional signage, the comfort of the seating, the acoustics of the waiting room, and the interpersonal listening and communication skills of doctors, nurses and reception staff. Another example is when announce a change in a government program or service, mass media advertising, widely distributed pamphlets or brochures, or cheque or utility bill inserts might reach a sizeable proportion of seniors.

            The medium should suit not only the audience but also the nature of the message. Media are not created equal, and research shows that success in reaching target audiences and implanting messages