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Communicating effectively
Michael Alan Hamlin
Or making a PR crisis a PR debacle
One of the most popular courses my firm’s training division runs is Effective Presentation Skills. It’s popular for several reasons. First, fierce competition for opportunity means that being able to communicate and present clearly and effectively often means the difference between success and missed opportunity. Second, this is true for everyone. Whether you work as a technical expert or a CEO, you are expected to communicate in a way that impresses colleagues, clients, and even competitors.
The third reason the course is very popular is we have an excellent instructor, whom participants consistently rank as one of our best facilitators and contractors. She’s not just a great instructor, she truly enjoys delivering the seminar, and gets a deep sense of satisfaction from seeing her students improve their abilities to communicate. Frequently, she hears from students relating how the lessons they learned in her class helped close a sale, clinch a promotion, or create a new opportunity.
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Posted
10/24/2007 1:18:02 PM |
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When to think about legacy
Orly Mercado
When to think about legacy
Knowing how involved I am in the raising of my son, my mother-in-law sent me a note, with a short description of the stages of human personality development. Now don’t get me wrong. I think the world of her. She has long retired as a college dean. But I guess, once a teacher, always a teacher. I clipped and posted it where I could not miss it.
This is how it looks:
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Posted
10/20/2007 9:53:14 PM |
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Out-inventing competitors
Michael Alan Hamlin
By creating synergy and doing things differently
Renowned Silicon Valley inventor, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Dado Banatao attributes his success to outworking, out-inventing, and out-innovating talented engineers. In a wide-ranging exchange with local software programmers and engineers, academics, and aspiring entrepreneurs Monday, Banatao said many of his competitors were brighter than he is, but they made the mistake of doing things in a “normal” way.
“Don’t do things the normal or easy way,” the Silicon Valley veteran told his admiring audience. Instead, “look for the best solution ever.” For Banatao, the competitive edge Filipinos enjoy over fierce Asian and Eastern European competitors is not their technical expertise, but their “creative side,” a product of the western-style education provided in the Philippines. “We (Filipinos) learn to take concepts, put them together, and create synergy,” he said.
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Posted
10/17/2007 10:37:43 AM |
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Preview
Michael Alan Hamlin
The Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P) and Outsource2Philippines (O2P) recently completed the latest in a series of periodic surveys they jointly undertake. Complete results of the surveys will be announced in the next few days, but I’m providing a preview of those findings for questions focusing on country image and investment incentives.
Before I get to those results, here’s an overview of the respondents. There were 72 responses, more than double the responses in the previous survey, and representing a response rate of approximately 21 percent. That’s a very respectable response rate for the relatively small universe that comprises the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. All BPO sectors were represented.
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Posted
10/13/2007 3:32:51 PM |
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España
Michael Alan Hamlin
Leveraging national assets
My fellow Manila Bulletin columnist, Bernardo Villegas, recently commented thoughtfully on Spain’s booming tourism industry. Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed touring Spain, and there are indeed, as Villegas wrote, many things that the Philippines and any other place seeking to develop its tourism industry can learn from this increasingly successful country.
We spent last evening, Saturday, in Granada at the Hotel Alixares, a five minute walk up a steep hill from Alhambra, the legendary palace fortress of the Nasrid sultans, rulers of the last Spanish Moorish kingdom. So enchanting is Alhambra that Sultan Boabdil wept as he entered exile in 1492. His mother Aisha is reported to have harshly said to him, “Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.”
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Posted
10/13/2007 3:24:02 PM |
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Having fun with “The Ventures” and “Sputnik”
Orly Mercado
One of my students came in early for our first meeting this semester. I was in the classroom long before the first period’s bell, to prepare my handouts, to introduce my course: Globalization and You. She carefully laid down a guitar hard case. “Is that an electric guitar?” I asked. “Yes sir, I am taking guitar lessons” she said.
As she opened the case, I mentioned that my wife just purchased a 1957 Fender Stratocaster. Not for me, I clarified to her, but for a friend who has belatedly embarked on a musical career. I had packed it for her to bring to Manila. “Have you heard of the Ventures?” I asked, ready to be labeled the dinosaur I am beginning to feel nowadays. “Why, of course sir, we play their music.” She said it like it was fun. I smiled.
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Posted
10/8/2007 12:06:48 AM |
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News Tracker: Philippines
Michael Alan Hamlin
The influentials...
Melanie Thornton, the heroine of Ana Marie Cox’s snarky novel, Dog Days, has two obsessions: Her BlackBerry - more often referred to as her Berry - and real-time e-mail alerts of breaking news. The Berry of course keeps Ms. Thornton networked, even when she’d prefer to hide. It’s for good reason that in real life the Berry is also known as the CrackBerry (There’s a website by that name, as you must know.).
The e-mail alerts are how Washington’s political operatives establish how influential (or inconsequential) they are. The alerts political operatives like the mid-level, barely fictional Ms. Thornton set up are for themselves, and perhaps their rivals, and only secondarily for their employers and their rivals. And considerable angst is spent and effort devoted to ensuring that mentions in traditional media and blogs are picked up and distributed.
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Posted
10/3/2007 6:13:57 AM |
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