The Message - 4Him

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Lessons from my boss #1

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In a number of organisations, there's a practice of appointing a "staff assistant" to the CEO or other senior leader, where the intent is to provide exposure and development opportunities for the staff assistant, while hopefully being useful to the senior leader.  Examples in the Government include the role of Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister or senior cabinet leaders, or possibly the Justice's Law Clerks for the High Court judges. In the private sector, titles include staff assistant, and for more senior appointments, even Chief of Staff. Many years ago, I was working late in the office when I returned to my desk from a meeting. Some of the office lights had already been turned off, so it was a bit dim, and the office was quiet. When I got to my desk, I saw my boss' boss sitting in my chair! I half thought to myself - oh no. I'm gonna be fired. I wasn't fired. Phew. But she *was* asking me to leave. She asked me how I was, and then in cha...
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Bullying? Stand up!

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When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit.  I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy.    The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect.  I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains.  Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course.  But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy!  And of course I grew up too.  I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual.  But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who...
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Lessons from a Christmas Carol

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We were recently in Penang for the weekend, and managed to catch Robert Zemeckis' Christmas Carol. It is quite a disturbing Christmas Carol, with a number of scary images (it opens with the image of Jacob Marley dead in his coffin with coins over his eyes!), so it's not a kids show by any stretch of the imagination. My kids were noticeably sober when we got out, 3D glasses notwithstanding, and frankly so was I! Anyway, the familiar lessons of the Christmas Carol story continue to be thought provoking today. One particularly stuck in my mind - perhaps because it was the most disturbing! Ebenezer Scrooge's first encounter of Christmas Eve is with the ghost of Jacob Marley, his former business partner. Jacob Marley is bound with heavy chains to his moneyboxes, which he is cursed to haul around. The conversation Jacob Marley has with Scrooge is quite illuminating. ==================== Jacob Marley: I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link and yard by yard! I ga...
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