Category Archives: Uncategorized

What’s a good boss?

Posted on May 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Inc. magazine just recently posted an open form survey on what management traits  describe the best boss you’ve had. That’s a really good question, and I suspect answers would vary considerably from person to person based on their own personality traits, their beliefs, and their experience. I feel there are numerous traits that make a boss a good boss, but when answering the question without reflecting upon it for too long, here are the first traits that came to mind:

  • Sharp: knowledgeable about their field, sharp mind
  • Confident: Makes timely decisions with confidence
  • Caring: Genuinely cares and looks out for their team

In my opinion a good boos is one that really cares for his/her team and acts accordingly. If you only lookout for yourself, you’ll unlikely be valued as a leader. In addition, a sharp and knowledgeable individual to me forms the basis of a strong boss/leader, which goes in hand with confidence (without falling into arrogance). A bright and confident boss will be more likely to make good and prompt decisions, a strong asset in a company!

What’s a good boss for you?

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The Importance of Milestones

Posted on February 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

As a visual person, I have always found written milestones and project road-maps quite useful. You give me a list of dates; I’ll most probably forget them. But you give me a visual roadmap of important milestones and objectives; I won’t forget what’s to come down the road.

It came to my attention lately that we don’t use such visual cues often enough. In fact, we often don’t even verbally communicate important milestones in both professional and personal contexts. When you take the time to analyze the impact of this, you may just find that not having well communicated milestones considerably hampers your project’s progress. I’ve actually recently experienced this detrimental outcome in both personal and professional situations. The lack of objectives and milestones will undoubtedly lead to inactivity, a state that we often naturally derive to, whether intentionally or not. Total chaos can potentially be avoided by a simple thing such as a roadmap. Don’t think twice, just do it.

 

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Who Gives a #$ about Climate Change

Posted on December 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

For a while Climate Change was all over the media. Everyone heard about, lots were talking about it. Nowadays, not so much. You’ll see here and there an article about it, but nothing really in the hot spot. What’s unfortunate with the news coverage about Climate Change is that it doesn’t really address the immediate problems we all face. In fact, who really cares about it? Everyone is working hard every day, going to their jobs, caring for their families and just struggling to keep it all together. I don’t see how saying the planet is warming by 0.1 degrees is going to make a big impact on people. Why aren’t we talking about the very real and present dangers. A simple example, fuel prices. Recently in Laval the pumps were up to 1.23$ per litre. What does that really mean? Well assuming you own a jeep patriot (9L/100KM) and your office is 30Km from your home (leaving out traffic), you will be using 108 litres of fuel in a month. At a 1.23/l list price, this will cost you 132.84$ per month. That is a lot of cash! And in a family where both parents work separate ways, you double that amount. This is an expense for being able to work – we’re literally paying a fortune to be able to work. *So why aren’t we more aggressively investing and researching into alternative fuels and energy – not just for vehicles but for our general energy requirements? It’s one thing to talk about climate change, but if nothing is being done about everyday issues, how can we change anything?

On the other hand, considering less omnipresent issues, there’s (ir)responsible forest management. We don’t think about it, we don’t hear about it but it should be in our radar. Here we are logging, illegally logging, cutting for urban development, and let’s not forget cutting for tar sands development. What we forget is that by cutting our forests we’re also eliminating our source of clean fresh water and clean air. I’ll leave the detailed analysis of this closing statement for another time. But think about it.

What are the real issues in your opinion?

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