Personal Observations about Humans Series (4)

Civilization cannot be obtained merely by purchasing brand name products, driving luxurious cars, or spending a relaxing vacation in an expensive resort or spa. Civilization is about deeply rooted and effortlessly repeated civilized practices of living. That is; once the civilized practice is set to be the norm, it turns into a basic of living. Onwards, the civilization can build on this basic to standardize it through translating it into societal behaviors and attitudes. Real evolving civilizations would even improve such basics further and continuously, in order not to render their civilization to obsolescence in a continually evolving world.

In some cases, a business that failed might be better than a business idea that remained experimental or was never converted into an actual investment. Even in extreme and painful cases of business failure, the lessons learned comprise a treasure if documented and shared properly for learning purposes.

Some societies focus in their businesses on the image, on the expense of a solid core that successively survives fierce economic climates and fluctuations, and on quick and massive short term gains, on the expense of recurring and sustainable real long term profits. Businesses of such societies lend themselves to inevitable deterioration that might develop into termination even when success has been experienced at the outset. Shortcomings here are evident in:

• People who run the business focus on a quick image they want to reflect to easily and quickly market themselves and their businesses, before they focus on building solid internal operations and processes which would result normally in reflecting an actually existing good business image.
• The short term orientation impedes businesses from having a real vision and translating it into goals and smart objectives to achieve. In addition, the organization population is denied their basic right to a learning organization and both a planned and structured learning curve. Therefore; real growth is hindered and a steadily growing and sustainable annuity of revenue on the long term cannot be achieved.

The person might expect, and end up facing a reality that fail way shorter than their initial optimistic expectations; a matter which is acceptable if the expectations weren’t based on scientific and knowledgeable bases. Meanwhile, it is not acceptable for estimates of a desired situation to fall way shorter than the actual situation (resulting in a significant gap) if estimates were based on historical data and implicit trends uncovered in the data.

To reduce risks on your investment, distribute your portfolio investments on several industries and businesses with varying seasons and well-studied and documented risk types and levels. Likewise, to reduce social risks, distribute your relationship investments on diverse and dispersed networks. However; maintain good management when networks intersect and shared connections exist (or are created deliberately) as the situation and the entire socialization process might turn into complete chaos with disastrous outcomes, where one party alone bears its full expense.

Allied parties (partners) with shared cause and goals should be careful when they are disconnected and communication channels are cut completely due to the resulting rage when both parties think the other party has more information, possesses greater knowledge about the situation, and keeps this knowledge and information discretely to themselves from the partner. The situation might be escalated until allied parties consider each other the sole and greatest-threat enemies and start treating each other accordingly. Indeed; an intervening third party who involved themselves (or were involved incidentally by one party) and pretend to be a saint-like friend or advisor who care for both parties’ well-being could be the real party who has the information and uses it secretly to create a gap in the alliance and widen it until the alliance is broken into bunch of hostile groups busy fighting each other, instead of focusing on the real enemy.

Jobs Planning

To succeed in a specific task, assignment, or job, try to do the following:

• Treat each task, assignment, or job as a new one with unique requirements or specifications
• Follow the established process for performing it
• Make sure to select the suitable approach
• Challenge the previous approach you used for performing similar tasks
• Re-think the process flow if you have sufficient time, in order to document the results and utilize them for future process optimization
• Be creative! This step specifically produces amazing variations in results among people depending on the creativity orientation in their brains

Personal Observations about Humans Series (2)

Some people tend to over-value themselves and under-value others. Never underestimate somebody as they might be a tough peer or even opponent. Always challenge yourself, even the self needs to be challenged from time to time, especially in cases where it becomes vulnerable to self-conceit.

When everybody in the process completes their work and work products partially and deliver it incomplete to the next step in the process, it would be normal for the final client to receive a partially complete deliverable and consequently end up being dissatisfied.

We should weigh our responsibilities and balance between them. The professional life shouldn’t overwhelm us and leave us with no quality personal life, and personal life commitments shouldn’t occupy our minds and leave us behind schedule in our professional responsibilities. We will be held accountable for both. We also need to be cautious because we become obsolete faster than we expect or anticipate the obsolescence itself.

We are all subjective by nature, yet we should try to be objectively subjective. What rules us might be a mechanically set machine (brain); yet its decisions are affected unexpectedly by the spiritual, psychological, mental and physical powers interacting within each one of us. To avoid misjudgments try to maintain an equilibrium state, where you can be objectively subjective. Start by evaluating your performance in comparison with others. People you select for comparison should be the benchmark you aim to achieve. Start by the close social circle, and once you enhance your relative performance, expand the circle of comparison until you are satisfied about the reduction in your misjudgments and the objectivity of your decisions.

Our daily lives revolve mostly around situation-specific incidents and relative comparisons, rather than standard situations or absolute comparisons. The human aspect behind some events forces us to provide relative comparisons on each criterion. Our learning capability drives us as well to be creative and act differently in similar situations when slightest factors change, even if it was a marginal or negligible change.

The human dimension, whether it was in the form of a dependent, moderating or intervening variable in our equation, precludes us from producing conclusive results, about which we can be sure beyond the least doubt.

Should we shift this to a new level of analysis? I am not sure, but I can tell for sure that I have been observing lately a lot of conflicts and contradicting events which should be scrutinized!

Maybe you should all stay tuned again just like me…