Filed under: World News
found this on the web. very inspiring!!
The strength of the best leaders in modern business is rooted in years of experience in the world of work, whether or not it’s in the same industry. They’ll tell you that it also takes risk, the right choices and a little luck.
Take the chiefs of the corporate world for example. Some of these leaders started out flipping burgers, taking big financial risks, grinding over legal documents and even shucking oysters.
Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren started to get his hands dirty about halfway through college, when he started to pay his own way. He shucked oysters at first, then waited tables before being offered the assistant manager position upon graduation at a restaurant near his University of Arizona campus in Tucson.
“I [took the job] because frankly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” he said. That was in 1975, when the only thing Lundgren cared about was dumping his Volkswagen Beetle for a new car.
Actually, it wasn’t even business he had on his mind upon enrolling in college. He entered as a pre-veterinary medicine major. He left with a business degree. “I had an epiphany when I did an artificial insemination of a cow and I realized I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life,” he said. “So I transferred to business my sophomore year.”
Six months after graduation, he got tired of the food-service business and started interviewing at various companies, including Xerox and Bullock’s, whose offer he ultimately accepted. He was offered 13 different jobs and had originally taken the one at Xerox. But he got a better vibe from the people and atmosphere at Bullock’s, located in Los Angeles, so he bargained for a steeper salary. He was hired at $8,000 a year, the company’s “M.B.A. rate.”
That must seem like a lifetime ago for Lundgren, 55, who took home $9.2 million in overall compensation in 2006. He’s been CEO for four years and has been with the company 13 years, after a stint with Neiman Marcus.
“I never thought twice about it, because I always loved what I did from the very beginning,” Lundgren said. “I always worked hard. But I will also say that the decision early on to go with the company that I knew was going to at least keep their eye on me … I wasn’t going to get lost in the shuffle. I think that definitely helped me move along at a faster pace.
“I feel very fortunate. I never take any of this for granted, especially from where I started.”
Jim Skinner, 63, CEO of McDonald’s, the largest fast-food chain in the world, started out at one of the company’s restaurants in Carpentersville, Ill., as a manager trainee after serving as a member of the U.S. Navy for 10 years. Now he oversees about 31,000 locations and some 500,000 employees. Last year he earned $15.5 million.
For Umang Gupta, Chairman and CEO of Keynote Systems, his first job as an Indian immigrant to the U.S. was with a steel company in Warren, Ohio, which he says gave him the opportunity to interact with workers on the factory floor. But he was also able to learn about the challenges facing a heavily unionized “old economy” company with stiff overseas competition.
Sun Microsystems CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz started his career at management consultant McKinsey. There, he says, he learned “that no matter what business you’re in, you need effective leadership to win. It doesn’t matter if it’s driving trucks, designing houses or developing software. And I learned about adaptability; that if you do something that isn’t working, that’s OK, as long as you are willing to recognize it and make changes. I saw a clear distinction between the leaders who were willing to learn from their mistakes and adapt and those who didn’t.”
Chris Heidelberger, the CEO of Nexaweb Technologies, says his first job taught him a lesson for when things don’t turn out exactly as you expect.
“As a former college athlete,” he says, ” I was thrilled when I was hired to teach Phys. Ed. for my first student-teaching job. I looked forward to sharing my enjoyment of sports like soccer, baseball and basketball. Instead, I was charged with teaching Badminton to ninth graders. There were 40 students, none of whom wanted to participate or learn the game, most of whom questioned whether it was even a sport. Facing 40-to-1 odds, I found myself having to develop new ways to motivate and organize them, and by semester’s end, my efforts did win some of them over.
“Although the process initially seemed like a disaster, I was rewarded with high marks from my mentor for meeting the challenges I’d been given. The experience instilled in me the skills needed to run a team and to be creative on the fly while working with various personalities and behaviors.”
All of them — and arguably all CEOs, no matter the size of their companies — learned at least some of the leadership skills they employ today from their more humble beginnings. And regardless, it often seems, of their initial educational background.
Scott Saslow, executive director at the Institute of Executive Development, says that while clearly higher education and M.B.A. programs are effective in laying the groundwork for an eventual key to the C-suite, there’s no real substitute for ambition.
“Hard-working and hungry ‘go-getters’ will always have the opportunity to rise in the organization,” Saslow believes. “No fancy degree required.
“Many employers choose candidates based on education credentials because they don’t really know how to interview, which is an art, and they let the ‘brand’ of the school do the filtering for them,” he says. “But if the ‘go-getters’ can build the capabilities I mention, that will serve them well. The company’s development activities — on-boarding, succession, etc. — will benefit all types.
“Experiences and motivation trump education in my book.”
Copyrighted, Forbes.com. All rights reserved.
Filed under: Health & Fitness
Found this on the web..its intersting!!
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Tue Oct 30, 6:41 AM ET
WASHINGTON – Devil’s Revenge. Spontaneous Combustion. Hot sauces have names like that for a reason. Now scientists are testing if the stuff that makes the sauces so savage can tame the pain of surgery.
Doctors are dripping the chemical that gives chili peppers their fire directly into open wounds during knee replacement and a few other highly painful operations.
Don’t try this at home: These experiments use an ultra-purified version of capsaicin to avoid infection — and the volunteers are under anesthesia so they don’t scream at the initial burn.
How could something searing possibly soothe? Bite a hot pepper, and after the burn your tongue goes numb. The hope is that bathing surgically exposed nerves in a high enough dose will numb them for weeks, so that patients suffer less pain and require fewer narcotic painkillers as they heal.
“We wanted to exploit this numbness,” is how Dr. Eske Aasvang, a pain specialist in Denmark who is testing the substance, puts it.
Chili peppers have been part of folk remedy for centuries, and heat-inducing capsaicin creams are a drugstore staple for aching muscles. But today the spice is hot because of research showing capsaicin targets key pain-sensing cells in a unique way.
California-based Anesiva Inc.‘s operating-room experiments aren’t the only attempt to harness that burn for more focused pain relief. Harvard University researchers are mixing capsaicin with another anesthetic in hopes of developing epidurals that wouldn’t confine women to bed during childbirth, or dental injections that don’t numb the whole mouth.
And at the National Institutes of Health, scientists hope early next year to begin testing in advanced cancer patients a capsaicin cousin that is 1,000 times more potent, to see if it can zap their intractable pain.
Nerve cells that sense a type of long-term throbbing pain bear a receptor, or gate, called TRPV1. Capsaicin binds to that receptor and opens it to enter only those pain fibers — and not other nerves responsible for other kinds of pain or other functions such as movement.
These so-called C neurons also sense heat; thus capsaicin’s burn. But when TRPV1 opens, it lets extra calcium inside the cells until the nerves become overloaded and shut down. That’s the numbness.
“It just required a new outlook about … stimulation of this receptor” to turn those cellular discoveries into a therapy hunt, says NIH‘s Dr. Michael Iadarola.
Enter Anesiva’s specially purified capsaicin, called Adlea. Experiments are under way involving several hundred patients undergoing various surgeries, including knee and hip replacements. Surgeons drip either Adlea or a dummy solution into the cut muscle and tissue and wait five minutes for it to soak in before stitching up the wound.
Among early results: In a test of 41 men undergoing open hernia repair, capsaicin recipients reported significantly less pain in the first three days after surgery, Aasvang reported this month at a meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
In a pilot U.S. study of 50 knee replacements, the half treated with capsaicin used less morphine in the 48 hours after surgery and reported less pain for two weeks. Ongoing studies are testing larger doses in more patients to see if the effect is real.
There’s a huge need for better surgical pain relief, says Dr. Eugene Viscusi, director of acute pain management at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, one of the test sites. Morphine and its relatives, so-called opioid painkillers, are surgery’s standby. While they’re crucial drugs, they have serious side effects that limit their use.
Specialists are watching the capsaicin research because it promises a one-time dose that works inside the wound, not body-wide, and wouldn’t tether patients to an IV when they’re starting physical therapy.
“It’s in and it’s done,” Viscusi explains. “You can’t abuse it. You can’t misuse it.”
“There’s been an enormous effort to try and develop alternatives to opioids with the same strength but not too much success,” adds Dr. Clifford Woolf of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. “We think we’re moving toward it.”
His team is trying a different approach: Standard lidocaine injections numb all the surrounding tissue. Woolf and colleagues slipped lidocaine inside just pain-sensing neurons, by opening them with a tiny dose of capsaicin. Rats given the injections ran around normally while not noticing heat applied to their paws, they reported in the journal Nature this month.
That’s years away from trying in people, and would have to be done in a way to avoid even a quick capsaicin burn.
In a third approach, Iadarola and NIH colleagues hope to soon test a capsaicin cousin called resiniferatoxin in advanced cancer patients whose pain no longer is relieved by opioids. Injections into the spinal columns of cancer-riddled dogs did more than temporarily numb — it severed some nerve connections.
Filed under: Academic subjects
hey guys did u all check out the latest news on TP website.
TP along with Lufthansa are now offering aircraft maintenance engineer licnese in 8 months.
Aerospace electronics students and Aerospace engineerign students can apply for it. Those of who are intersted can now chck the tp website for more details.
found this article on yahoo. Its so damn cool. its about the worlds worst consumer products of the year.
SYDNEY (AFP) – Sleeping pills advertised for children, dangerous toys and bottled water taken from local reservoirs are among the world’s worst products, a global consumer group said Monday.
In announcing its bad products awards for 2007, Consumers International said the top prize went to the US subsidiary of Japanese firm Takeda Pharmaceuticals for promoting a sleeping drug for children.
The company ran a television advertisement in the United States which used images of children, chalk boards and a school bus to sell its drug Rozerem.
The “back-to-school” advertisements, which complied with US law, promoted the sleeping pills to parents without including health warnings for children, Consumers International said.
“This case demonstrates the lengths to which some drug companies will go to increase sales of their products, how direct to consumer advertising can promote irrational drug use, and how weak regulation can foster irresponsible corporate behaviour,” the group said.
Another award went to drinks giant Coca-Cola for pushing marketing “into the realms of the ridiculous” in the United States and South America with its Dasani bottled water which is sourced from the same reservoirs as local tap water.
Kellogg‘s, best known for its cereals, was given a bad food award for the worldwide use of cartoon characters and marketing aimed at children despite the high levels of salt and sugar in some foods.
“Kellogg’s are one of a number of international food companies that make money by selling products high in fat, sugar and/or salt,” Consumers International said.
“Threatened with litigation in the US, Kellogg’s have agreed to change some of their marketing practices, however we believe they are doing too little, too late.”
Toymaker Mattel was also named over the global recall of more than 19 million products made in China because of high lead levels and small magnets.
Last month the US toymaker apologised to China, saying the vast majority of recalls were due to design flaws and had nothing to do with where the toys were manufactured.
“This is a classic case of avoiding accountability and shifting responsibility on a global scale,” Consumers International said.
“Wherever the fault lies, the safety of consumers was compromised and this should be the full focus of Mattel’s attention, not finger pointing and not blame dodging.”
Consumers International, a global federation of consumer advocate organisations, said the awards aimed to highlight the abuse of consumer trust.
“These multi-billion dollar companies are global brands with a responsibility to be honest, accountable and responsible,” the group’s director general Richard Lloyd said.
“In highlighting their shortcomings, Consumers International and its 220 member organisations are holding corporations to account and demanding businesses take social responsibility seriously.”
The awards, which were announced at Consumers International’s World Congress in Sydney, were whittled down from submissions by consumer organisations around the world.
Criteria for final selection included the size of the company, the scale of sales and marketing, the impact on consumers, and the potential for change by the corporation.
Any Harry Potter freaks out here? You all must have known the headmaster of Harry Potter’s school, Albus Dumbledore.
The author of Harry Potter, J K Rowling, went on a book tour to america and was asked if Dumbledore found true love.
“Dumbledore is gay,” she replied, before adding that he’d fallen in love with his rival Gellert Grindelwald.
But she said Dumbledore was “terribly let down” when Grindelwald became more interested in the dark arts than good, and so he went on to destroy him.
Fans at New York’s Carnegie Hall were initially stunned into silence by the announcement, but soon started clapping and cheering.
JK said: “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.”
The news should help to clear up lots of rumours about Dumbledore’s mysterious past once and for all. But interesting hey, the best wizard in the wordl is a gay!!!
Filed under: Academic subjects
The time table is released at last…was waiting for this for a long time, cuz i am in the last semester. Aerospace electronics students like me have 2 off days, while photonics students get only 1 off day!! oh well…i am gonna enjoy my wednesday and thursday!!
Filed under: CCA's in TP
Hey there was a Temasek Polytechnic cricket team 2 semesters ago. But last semester it has just vanished!! There was a cupboard for tp cricket team in the sports complex, and last week when i went there, i couldnt locate it.. what happend to all the cricket equipments stored inside?? is anoyone aware of this??
Filed under: Movies / Music / TV
Watched tranformers..well quite late acutally as the movie is no more in theatres now. Man the robots were so cool, and the CGI was simply amazing. Al the actors were cool too. With a sexy girl who knows all about cars, to another sexy girl who figures out how to decode the alien voice while all the wise guys out there were scratching their heads… I mean the movie was so nice with fantastic action sequence, nice CGIs and good comedy and fun, but hey, the story line is so stupid. I mean just because a bunch of soldiers survived the megatron attack in qatar, doesnt mean they will give be made as a special force and promoted so fst just like that…it doesnt happen that way…not in USA. And the sector 7, was shown as a ultra secert organisation, but they revealed all the truth about them, and even gave complete tour guidance of their headquaters. They tried to kill bumble bee car, and freeze him, and suddenly they free him and ask him to save them…the whole bunch of sector 7 listen to this small kid and release the bumble bee just like that?? commmon guys, its too stupid to happen for a such high secret organisation. And when the megatron and the autobots were fighitng how do people know whom to support to?? i found the storyline of transformer so stupid, yet i enjoyed watching it!!
for those of who out there who might want to meet the fresh international students coming into tp for the next semester, be at the poly vicinity on monday 8th of oct from morning 9 am onwards. As i am not part of TPIS, the organisers of the event, i dont know the exact venue or the agenda of the orientation programme. but you all the tp well to find out where its happening. Come early if you are interested to be helper. Usually last minute helpers are welcomed.
