Life in 'Surprising' Cork City Ireland

From Autumn To Snow And Spring Finally SUMMER

Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurial Value

I grew up in a tech-oriented household and as a child my biggest weekend getaway was to visit my dad’s work place so I could see all the fantastic giant machines (I mean mainframes). I always adored technology and I still love the idea how technology can make human’s life easier and more wonderful. During the last fourteen months, I attended several online events on entrepreneurial success and want to share some key take aways. 1. Connecting with customers and listening their voice 2. Sell 'Happiness' 2a. Take care of 'Happiness with Profitability' for financial success 3. Earn your first clients and ONLY then search for investment 4. Innovate for 'People' not by them 5. Goal is never achieved! 'Goal is to Progress'

Barak Obama writes his Speech as people focused ... here's how

Favreau and Obama decided to use a special story about a woman named Ann Nixon Cooper:
She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.
Favreau decided to give Ann Nixon Cooper a call before using her story in the speech: “I told her that man who was about to become President wanted to name her in his victory speech. She paused for a while and asked: ‘Will it be on television?’ I said ‘yes’. She waited a little longer. ‘Which channel will it be on?’, she asked, so I told her. That was when she said ‘I’m so proud of him, I’m so proud of us’. She started crying and so did I and at exactly that moment the results from Ohio came in. That was when I realised that it would always be difficult to bring about change but that it can happen if we believe.”

Extract from:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/obamas-speechwriter-shares-5-storytelling-tips-trevor-ambrose?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like

Nergis Mavalvala, Pakistan’s unexpected celebrity scientist

READ
http://www.dawn.com/news/1239667/nergis-mavalvala-pakistans-unexpected-celebrity-scientist

Nergis Mavalvala, Women can do anything (even Pakistani women)

Top Businesses in Pakistan .... Top Pakistanis

Top Pakistani Business Groups:

Those who own everything in #pk

http://pak-today.blogspot.com/2013/08/groups.html

Wall street in Pakistan

How China can create BIG consumer economy

By Bloomberg Business:

You've heard of Made in China. Get ready for Sold in China.

For decades, China has exported cheap goods to the rest of the world even while domestic consumption waned. Now, the country's shoppers could be set for a reboot.

If the government delivers on its promise to transform the economy by encouragingspending on the high street, China's consumer base has the potential to hit $67 trillion over the next decade, according to The Demand Institute, a  think tank jointly run by The Conference Board and Nielsen.

Global interest in Chinese shoppers is already high. Music doyenne Taylor Swift hasteamed up with JD.com Inc., the second-largest e-commerce company in China, to sell a new fashion line designed specifically for Chinese shoppers. At the movies, ticket sales are surging, with first-half box office revenue this year rising to 20 billion yuan ($3.2 billion), compared with just 4 billion yuan in all of 2008.

The hard economic data are also showing a shift, albeit slowly. Consumption in China contributed 60 percent to gross domestic product growth in the first half, even as the country grew at its slowest in 25 years.

Read More on:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-23/how-china-can-create-the-68-trillion-consumer

5 Tips For Boosting Your Brand by Forbes

SHARE:www.forbes.com

There are more angles to building (and destroying) your company’s brand these days than ever. With various social media outlets in play – as well as the traditional means of getting customers’ attention – businesses have to be more tuned in to the image they’re projecting in order to be successful.

Get customers, keep customers, make a profit. With social media, brand building has never been easier, harder and more important. (image: DeanMeyersNet)

To find out how to maximize impact, FORBES spoke with Taylor King, an associate account manager with Inward Strategic Consulting—a Boston-based consulting firm that has advised such brands as Walmart, HP and Campbell’s. According to King, companies have to maintain social media strengths in a handful of areas and gave us some examples of some companies that are doing it right.

Here’s what he had to say:

Authenticity

Traditionally, brands look to sweepstakes, contests and other hokey strategies to grab consumers’ attention. This may draw a bump in interest but ultimately does nothing to set them apart from the pack. A company’s marketing plows have to grow from its established identity. One winning idea, according to Mr. King, is AMC’s The Walking Dead and its “Dead Yourself” app, which turns pictures of fans into depictions of flesh-hungry zombies. “It was such an authentic strategy to say, ‘I want all my customers to be able to make themselves into zombies,’ and then you can upload it as a profile picture on your Facebook FB -1.38%.”

The subsequent buzz generates publicity for the television show and the brand while creating a novelty app that even those who’ve never heard of the show can find appealing and funny.

Reputation

Gone are the days when companies, brands and even people can strongly control their image. With so many social media outlets and a myriad of voices being projected and heard in real time, being aware of what people are saying has never been more important (or more time consuming). One way of leveraging that output is to use it. In the case of Tripadvisor.com – which is a brand Inward Strategic has worked with – hotel reviews use photos taken by users. “You trust what your friends are saying about a person, you’re assessing what your peers are saying about a brand,” King said. “It’s everywhere: it’s in a review, it’s in blogs, and it’s on Facebook.” The first step to using customer feedback is knowing what it is and that means monitoring your social media reputation.

Response

Not only is it easier for consumers to sound off on a product or company, its easier for brands to respond. Maybe that’s the reason why customers are starting to expect that they will. Brands that address a negative comment or situation with an explanation and solution have the potential to recover a relationship with that customer, King explained. There are other advantages too. “This is an opportunity to crowdsource great ideas from a customer and put it back into the brand.” One brand that’s doing it right is Starbucks SBUX +0.92%, says King, particularly the “My Starbucks Idea’ initiative, which allows customers to give the company their two cents. “They create this feedback loop where you submit ideas so people can like and comment on those ideas and it aggregates on a leader board,” he said. “But then Starbucks notifies you when they’ve reviewed it. Then they notify you when they’ve implemented it.”

Romance

Taylor King of Inward Strategic Consulting

Taking in feedback from the masses and collecting metadata on customers is fine but for a closer relationship with individuals, companies and brands have to go the extra mile and offer tailored experiences, says King. Gamification is a good way to do that, he added, and Nike does a good job with its Nike+, a service that lets customers track their own exercise data via a link to their activity monitoring devices. “It’s very easy for the customer to digest and they create a competition and community around it.”

This idea of building a hub of services for customers based on their purchased products and allowing them to interact as they wish is more than going the extra mile to achieve consumer connection. “People are getting into the romance of creating personal experiences.”

Availability

The customer is royalty, or have said many of the prime movers in retail over the centuries, and the decision to place emphasis on customer service is a no-brainer for most companies and brands. A richer, more aware customer service experience, though, is not something that every brand embraces. Well, every brand should. “Nothing is worse than having to repeat the details of a problem again and again,” says King. “Whether you have a mobile service app, call center or live chat feature, the ultimate focus should always be on what works best for the customer.” One winner in the customer service and availability column is Apple AAPL -4.26%, he says. “You can access somebody at will with Apple. If I have a problem, it’s not a call-in number, I’m not on hold—it’s online, through various outlets. There are just so many touch points that Apple has and everyone is knowledgeable and positioned as an expert. I think Apple does it right.”

LINK: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/10/18/5-tips-for-boosting-your-brand/

Six Impossible things before .... Lewis Carroll, How many I do have

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

There are many Impossible things I imagine.

Today's Saying... I loved this one

Healing is a matter of time

But

It is sometimes a matter of opportunity

and

I availed it.

Qualities of A Successful Business Person

"Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation."

Josh Kaufman: Author, learning expert and business advisor

Feel Good ....

"It's really important that you feel good. Because this feeling good is what goes out as a signal into the universe and starts to attract more of itself to you. So the more you can feel good, the more you will attract the things that help you feel good and that will keep bringing you up higher and higher."

By Joe Vitale: Motivational author and speaker

Interesting these days 7 Jan 2013

Reading
Bill Gates Personal Blog
Sell your personal cloths
Family Blessings by Fern Michaels

Character...

"Character isn't something you were born with and can't change, like your fingerprints. It's something you weren't born with and must take responsibility for forming."

— Jim Rohn: was an American entrepreneur,
                       author and motivational speaker 

Working Women

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/06/women-and-men-can-have-it-all.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

Working Women, Management of Life

HBR Blog Network

Women (and Men) Can Have It All

by Tony Schwartz  |  11:18 AM June 25, 2012

• Comments (6)
•        

Annie Marie Slaughter's article in the current Atlantic titled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" had a familiar ring — hauntingly so.

More than two decades ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," which made many of the same arguments that Slaughter does — most notably that the structure of organizational life makes it nearly impossible for a woman to have both a high-powered full-time career and to feel fully involved as a mother.

The writer of the HBR article happened to be my mother, Felice Schwartz, and what she wrote prompted a media firestorm. The New York Times published an article suggesting that my mother had advocated a separate "mommy track" for women who were willing to trade lower pay and less advancement for more flexible schedules and time with their families.

The Times article missed the larger point my mother was making. What women needed most, she had argued, was more flexibility from organizations in balancing family and work at different times during their careers.

Nearly 500 articles were written about the controversy, including a New York Times editorial that pilloried my mother as an enemy of women's progress and a stalking horse for sexist CEOs. This was ironic. My mother had founded an organization, called Catalyst, way back in 1962, to advocate for women in business, and seventeen years later, the Times itself still had virtually no women among its top management.

More ironic still was the story of my wife Deborah, one of a handful of female editors at the New York Times Magazine in the early 1980s. Following the birth of our first child, Deborah asked for the opportunity to cut back to working three days a week. The Times reluctantly agreed, but in return took away her accrued seniority and her health benefits.

So here we go again. Anne Marie Slaughter was the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Slaughter left after two years because she felt her children needed more of her, and she needed more of them. The critics were quick to strike.

"The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough," Slaughter writes. "But it was the second set of reactions — those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard — that triggered a blind fury. All my life I'd been on the other side of this exchange."

The key to making it possible for women (and men) to effectively combine work and family, both Slaughter and my mother agreed, is for employers to provide more options about how, when, and where to do their work.

Perhaps it's no great surprise that I've taken up this cause myself during the past decade at The Energy Project. We work with companies to shift their paradigm from getting more out of people by pushing them harder, to investing more systematically in meeting their needs, so they're freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

At the heart of our work is the conviction that it's not the number of hours employees invest that determines the value they create. Rather it's the quality and focus of energy they bring to the time they're working.

Give people time to renew — not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally — and the evidence suggests they'll get more done, in less time, at a higher level of quality, more sustainably.

The problem is that most employers still accord far more value to those who work long and continuous hours at the office and put obstacles in front of those who seek more flexibility.

Three of the top four executives at the Energy Project are women. Two have young children. Both spend more time working from home than they do from the office. I don't know how they work when they're out of the office although I assume they take care of family needs whenever that's necessary. What I do know is that they're both incredibly productive, and they deliver extraordinary value to our company.

The research strongly suggests that when you treat people with trust and respect, they perform better and feel more engaged.

This transformation won't happen until senior leaders make a fundamental shift away from the deeply ingrained view that more, bigger, faster for longer is better, and let go of the myth that face time is a useful measure of productivity and commitment.

The solution for employers and employees is a new value exchange: autonomy for accountability. To the extent possible, treat women and men like adults by allowing them to define when, where, and how best to get their work done. Then hold them accountable solely for their results.

That's the sort of win-win my mother had in mind

Working Marketers (from HBR)

A study of Harvard Business Review:

All I'm Askin' Is for a Little Respect

Marketers get no respect, writes Ivey Business School professor Niraj Dawar on INSEAD's blog."The CEO wonders how you spend your time, the CFO wonders how you spend the company’s money, the sales folks think you’re too conceptual, too abstract, and not sufficiently focused on the immediate business, and the production and supply chain guys just think you’re full of hot air." 

to read full article Please Check the link below

http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2012/05/morning-advantage-did-rodney-d.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

South Asia Investor Review: Pakistani Women's Growing Particpation in Workforc...

South Asia Investor Review: Pakistani Women's Growing Particpation in Workforc...: While Fareed Zakaria, Nick Kristoff and other talking heads are still stuck on the old stereotypes of Muslim women, the status of women in ...

Continue ....Yet

Yet to be published

Saying .. .. . . .. ..

Denis Waitley said Once: (An American motivational speaker and writer)

"A dream is your creative vision for your life
in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown."

My Designing Ideas . . . . .

Global Fashion Winter 2012

My new back to work (after winter holiday) fashion dresses collection is in process. Hope will be liked by customers.

Inspired by the Famous Celebs Wardrobe