I won't go, no, no, no

Listen to this tune by Amy Winehouse - I think it is very powerful and I especially like the video that comes with it.

Last week I have been driving a lot and have been listening to also another tune from Amy - I'm No Good. She's got an incredible voice that I recognized when subsequently listening to Rehab (see above). The music is also very rhythmic and well-worth listening to while driving.

I cheated myself
like I knew I would
I told ya, I was troubled
you know that im no good
(Amy Winehouse, I'm No Good)

Eighty Percent of Success...

Last night I sat up until 12 to finish a training presentation for a training and I ended up very angry, because the person who had initially designed the training support was extremely careless. I had to stop and re-do formatting, correct grammar mistakes, align the English slides with the Romanian slides and bring some life to the presentation. Given that there was quite a lot to do, someone had obviously lost patience at a point, done some changes, but got bored to apply them to all slides. However, this confused the focus of the presentation and led it to a collection of individual presentation, with a swaying central theme.

Indeed, does re-arranging Powerpoint slides have anything to do with strategy, or does it connect more to professionalism and to the necessary education to do things in a right way? Can anyone be a good professional without paying attention to details and without trying to see a red thread in every document or idea flow he or she issues? Should we really be concerned with these insignificant details?

I think that with no order in your head there can be no order in your thoughts - and chaotic creativity is less valuable than a controlled creativity. I also believe that in order to be really good at anything you must be good at mastering yourself as a part of the system. If the system requires you to conform, then do so and be different while doing it. However, do not let this affect yourself or others. In your professional life, non-conformism may only be applied within certain boundaries, without meaning to say that this impacts on your freedom or personality. This is the meaning of true professionalism – when you manage to comply to the rules, without giving the impression of conformism, but at the same time to not cease to re-invent yourself.

One always forgets that freedom comes from the inside; this is especially true for young professionals, who think they can change the rules in no time. In order to bring about change in a company, one needs to first understand and obey the rules, identify improvement points and bring up the change from within, by consistently following a unitary path. This also goes for an "insignificant" Powerpoint presentation.

PS: I owed you this from an earlier post: the best conflict management method is to show up and stand up for yourself.

Coffee, tea, me?

Does beauty matter when you have nobody to share it with? Yes, it always does. :-)

http://www.wagnerarte.ro/

A Possible Insight

Edwin H. Friedman:

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the
assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.
Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or
articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard.
People can only hear you when they are moving […]

No Appetite for Drama

I first started writing this blog because I had been going through a period of intense stress at work and I had felt that sharing was the best thing to do. Bringing some feelings into the open was hard at first. This is not an online journal, and the first challenge you are faced with is writing in a way that appeals to the reader. Experiences need to be a bit de-personalized. This is not only my little life experiences I am writing about; it is general little things that we all see in our lives. Sometimes we notice them, sometimes we do not, because we are caught up in our own little webs. Then, I imagine, my picturing them helps the others remember and look up to their lives with more vivid eyes than they had previously done.

Writing this blog has helped me communicate at a different level with people who thought they knew me; they found a different me. Some criticized the open style I use; some thought I was making up. Some understood and for that I am thankful to them.

Enough about reasonings, though. My mood tonight is influenced by the U2 I have been listening to in the past days. A very dear friend upset me a lot and all I could do was to withdraw in music and work. Being so upset, I put on an artificial mask and carried on with my daily work (another GoLive due in 2 weeks’ time and still a lot to do). What got me totally down was their refusal to communicate anything. Bringing conflicts into the open and dealing with them is a base stone for every training on this issue that I delivered. And yet I was not able to do this myself without getting emotionally involved in the process. This is where theory will fail – if it will not take into account the feelings behind what is happening. Even if the conflict will be brought into the open – that is, we will discuss and analyse what happened, without blaming or bringing the other one down – I wonder if our relationship will be the same. We both learned about another side and will perhaps adjust accordingly, thus taking away some of the authenticity of our relationship. This is what most often happens in business relationships, where the level of interpersonal trust is generally reduced and thus will suffer no big modifications. In personal relationships however, where the trust level is higher, non-communicative situations may disrupt it, as well as the emotional balance of the participants in the conflict. A way to deal with this is taking an own “silent mode” and postponing communication. This is the wrong option, however – any silence in conflict only postpones and deepens the analysis of causes, which leads into a vicious circle that can endanger the relationship altogether. Another way is to push for communication and conflict resolution; this can lead to a faster resolution but may no work if one partner is unable / unwilling to respond. The third way I can think of is through a conflict mediator – less recommendable, because it can often spark other results than expected (a sub-conflict with the moderator, blocking the communication altogether etc).

So which path did I choose? I promise to tell you in the next blog :-)

Row Your Boat

Arrgh! Blogger just erased a half-a-page comment I had made on three topics: “House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende, a reinterpreted Communist time play I saw on Saturday evening and the necessity to acknowledge oneself as an active player in a turbulent world and not a mere “row-row-row-your boat”-er.

So I’ll just say it with a song:

Talking about a Revolution
While we're standing in the welfare line
Crying in the doorstep of those armies of Salvation
Wasting time, in the unemployment line
Sitting around, waiting for a promotion
(Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution)

The invisible touch of life

Tonight I met some of the people from an intellectual community (link in Romanian) that will probably shape the way Romania will look like in a few year's time. I wrote about meeting them in a previous post. It is always a pleasure and an mind-refreshing experiene to see them and to talk to them. So much more than the average experience one gets to every day when dealing with clients and colleagues.

I remember my participation in the SDV - Summer School in 2002 as being one of the signposts of my student and adult life. In brief, a student association brings together in Bucharest 30 students from all over the country for a fortnight. They meet with personalities from the political, economic and social environment and ask them some of the most inconvenient of questions. In the end, they edit a sort of "Declaration" of the event, in line with the respective summer school's theme.

The evenings and nights were our favourite time of the day - they were meant for discussions, talking, dancing and laughing a lot. It gave us a sense of unity and of participation that each of us then took back to their lives. Be it careers in IT, management, public sector or academia we then chose, the sense of contribution was sed in each of us.

I am sure that we have already started changing the world, because we were so changed by this experience.