Some interesting facts about our Liver

I didn't exactly know what the Liver does. 

Very informative.

Some interesting facts about our Liver

 

When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others.

I Promise Myself

Human Resource management is people management

 By

-Arti Bakshi

“Human Resource”- A magazine for the discerning professional

www.humanresource.net.in

Human Resource management is people management and the role of managing people lies on the shoulders of a Human Resource manager. People Management is a wide section that involves numerous aspects ranging from hiring to invigorating. Managing people is utmost important as it is only the employees that can make up an organization. The employee directly or indirectly influences and effectuates the organizational augmentation.

The aspects that the manger highlights begins with hiring the appropriate individual well suited for a task on the basis of their education and experience. Once the person is appointed, their role in the organization is explained to them along with the ways to achieve their goals and how their role can enhance the organization. Befitting to the task training is provided that makes the employee acquainted with the task. 

A buffer period is given where the employee actually starts working but under supervision. The HR manager makes sure that the right amount of motivation is provided to the employee to generate quality work. The employee work is evaluated to ensure that the employee works swiftly and the errors could be eliminated. A disciplinary environment is created that allows the employee to work without interruptions. Incase the employee is not up to the mark or the organization has to adopt lay-off principles, the HR department takes the authority and helps in detachment.

The salary negotiations, compensation and benefits all come under the HR perspective. Adopting rejuvenating mechanisms like games and events is the HR manager’s responsibility. The HR team is appointed to serve the employees thus it is said that human resource is people management. 

Arguments good for health

By   PTI

Bangalore: Arguing now and then for the right reasons may be good for your health, a new study has claimed.

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan that carried out an eight-day study involving 1,842 people found that people who avoid confrontations show more symptoms of physical problems the next day then those who engage in reasonable arguments.

The team also found abnormal rises or falls of the stress hormone cortisol throughout the day among those who bypass bickering.

"Relationships have important influences on how we feel on a daily basis, especially the problems in our relationships," said study author Kira Birditt from the university's Institute for Social Research.

"How we deal with problems affects our daily well-being," she said.

Previous research has shown married couples who avoid arguments are more likely to die earlier than their expressive counterparts.

In a previous study, Birditt and her colleagues had found that the most common way for people to deal with their interpersonal problems is to simply avoid them. Now, they wanted to know the health impacts of this avoidance behaviour.

They analysed data of participants, who were asked whether they had engaged in an argument or whether they had experienced a situation in which they could have argued but decided to let it pass without a fight. The subjects also gave saliva samples for four of the days.

About 62 per cent participants said they sidestepped arguments at some point during the study, while 41 per cent reported engaging in conflict and 27 per cent indicated no tension.

Some type of tension (whether they avoided it or not) found to have triggered more negative emotions, such as feeling upset or angry, and physical symptoms, including nausea or aches and pains.

However, avoiding conflict was associated with having more of these physical symptoms the following day, said Birditt.

Why service at Indian Retail stores is so bad…

  

Author: Alok

Alok Kejriwal is a Serial Entrepreneur & founder of 2win group. You can follow him on Facebook as well as twitter.

(Article reproduced with Author’s permission)

A few weeks back I invested a princely sum of money to buy my Airmax 2010 Nike shoes from the flagship store in San Francisco. Last week, just before traveling again, I washed my shoes and was aghast to see a big hole on the inside lining of my brand new shoes. I photographed it and sent the complaint to the marketing folks at Nike India – got ‘Shunya’ (zero) response. This made me madder. Armed with the receipt and with war in mind, I stormed into the New York store determined to make a fuss and noise. This was the ‘Indian’ consumer psyche kicking in – ready to fight and draw blood to set right what should not have gone wrong!

The ‘returns’ counter had a very pleasant girl who greeted me and asked me my problem. When I snarlingly showed her the hole, she shrugged, said ‘oops’, and asked if I wanted my money back? Her reaction took less than 7 seconds. I melted. Yet the Indian consumer was still kicking. ‘Yeah- gimme my money back’ I grumbled. She did and then pulled out her trump card – she gave me a 20% discount on any purchase bought within the hour in that store. Well, you guessed it – I bought the same pair of shoes (new color), pocketed enough dollars for a great dinner, walked out feeling like a prince and started doing social marketing for Nike!

Can you ever imagine this happening in India?

Why does Retail Service in all the stores we visit in India – be a boutique or a super mall suck so much?

I believe:

The staff at the retail counters doesn’t use the goods they sell and have no information about the product.

The folks in Nike USA are athletes. They know everything about running or the sport that interests you. The guys at the Nike store in Mumbai have fat paunches. They wear Nike shoes but I’m sure only as ‘store wear’. The Nike guy in SFO asked me what kind of running stride I had. I had never heard of this before. The guys in Mumbai did not understand the difference between running and jogging.

The brand owners have to make these sales folks use the product and ‘get into’ the brand they sell.

The Brand owner hasn’t educated the sales folks about the philosophy of what their service standards globally are.

The Tommy Hilfiger stores in India are pathetic! The store sales folks never smile – they look like they are recovering from an epidemic or something – neither offer fashion advise nor bother checking if your size is available beyond what’s upfront. When I walk into a Tommy store in the USA – the experience is absolutely the opposite. The problem is that I expect the same experience irrespective of which Tommy store I visit!

Big brand owners must learn from the original software exporters of India who sent young engineers abroad on assignments and then ‘contracted’ them legally to work with the firm when they came back.  The big retail brands should send a few key Sales and Service folks to their International flagship stores or even as just consumers walking the high streets of New York or LA. The investment will be well worth it.

The orientation should be ‘service’ and not ‘sales’ because sales precede great service automatically sooner or later.

The Apple store in San Francisco gives you free lessons on how to use and juice Twitter or begin blogging. It’s an open classroom – just come, sit, learn and go. Nowhere do you get the feeling that someone is going to sell you something. In India, within a few minutes of walking into any store, someone will ask you what you want. When I answer – ‘nothing’, I get glared at! Why the hell did you ask me in the first place?

The Oberoi and Taj groups in India and my favourite – Jet Airways have done a spectacular job in selling service to the India consumer not the product. Stay put in an Oberoi or Taj lobby for hours and no one will disturb you. Put the key brands sales teams thru a hotel or airline experience and then put them in front of consumers.

Don’t focus on looking smart yourself – make the consumer smart instead!

I still remember walking into the Levis counter at Vama (Mumbai) a couple of years back (Vama incidentally wins my prize for the absolutely worst store…in terms of service in the world). The girls at the Levis counter were slim and pretty, chewing gum, strutting around and constantly chatting among themselves without a bother in the world that they had a job to do. I saw a few customers (girls and their moms) standing on the side absolutely intimidated and shadowed by these ‘modern’ girls! I asked one of these wannabe models what was the difference between all those red, blue and black ‘tabs’ of Levis  – she looked snidely at her partner and asked if she knew… in a tone that made me feel like a moron. (hmmm… shouldn’t she have known in the first place)?

The customers in the corner had vanished and so also had vanished valuable sales for Levis.

Tell Sales people to either become models or Sales people and thus choose between one profession. Don’t mix them up.

International brands can open as many stores in India as they want and stuff them up till the walls burst, but it’s the sales folks who will make the cash register ring. Set that right first.

Your Best Career Coach: The Future You

By Marshall Goldsmith

The best coaching you’ll ever get will not come from another person. It will come from inside you. Take a deep breath. Take a deeper breath. Imagine that you’re 100 years old and you’re getting ready to die. Before you take that last breath, you’re given a wonderful gift: the opportunity to go back in time and talk with the person who is reading this blog post today, to help this younger version of yourself have a better life — both personally and professionally.

What advice would the wise 100-year-old you — who finally knows what really mattered in life — have for the you that is reading this blog post? As you think of the older you, whatever advice comes to mind, just do that.

In terms of performance appraisals, this is the only one that will matter. At the end of the day, the only person that you will need to impress is that old person that will one day look back at you from the mirror. If that old person thinks that you did the right thing, you did. If that old person thinks that you made a mistake, you did. You don’t have to impress anyone else.

Some good friends of mine had the opportunity to ask old people who were facing death what advice they would have for their younger selves. Three themes emerged:

1. Be happy now. Don’t wait for next week, next month or next year. A common regret of old people was, “I got so focused on trying to get what I did not have, I failed to appreciate all that I did have. I had almost everything. I wish that I would’ve taken the time to appreciate it.”

I ‘ve asked thousand of parents around the world to complete this sentence, “When my children grow up, I want them to be…” One world is mentioned more than all of the other words combined — no matter what country I am in. What is that word? Happy.

Do you want your children to be happy? Do you want your parents to be happy? Do you want the people that love you to be happy? Do you want the people who respect you at work to be happy? Then, you go first. They want you to be happy, too.

2. Build relationships and help people, especially friends and family. When you’re 100 years old and you look around your death bed, no fellow employees will be waving good-bye. You’ll finally realize that your friends and family are the only ones that care. They are the ones that matter.

Of course, building relationships and helping people are also keys to ultimate satisfaction with your professional career. I have asked many retired CEOs an important question about their professional lives, “What were you most proud of?” So far, none have talked about have large their offices were. All they talked about were the people they helped.

The main reason to help people has nothing to do with money, status or promotion. The main reason is simple: the 100-year-old you will be proud of you if you did — and disappointed in you if you didn’t.

3. If you have a dream, go for it. If you don’t try to achieve your dreams when you are 25, you probably won’t when you are 45, 65 or 85. None of us will achieve all of our dreams. The key question is not, “Did I achieve all of my dreams?” The key question is, “Did I at least try?” Old people almost never regretted the risks they took that failed. They almost always regretted the risks that they failed to take.

No one else can tell you how to find happiness, who to love or where to find meaning. Only you can answer these questions. The best coaching that you will ever receive will not come from any other person, it will come from inside you.

So, what advice would the “old you” have for the you that just read this post? If you don’t mind sharing your thoughts with other readers, I’d love to hear them.

How to Be Productive: Stop Working

By Margaret Heffernan | August 10, 2010

 

Industrial companies put a lot of effort into “asset integrity” — which really just means protecting critical plants and machinery from damage and wear and tear. At companies like BP, it’s clearly more of an aspiration than a reality, but anyone trained in a manufacturing environment learns that asset integrity is a top priority. But what about service industries — companies where the only assets are the brains of the people who work there? Shouldn’t they worry about asset integrity, too? Astonishingly, most of them don’t. Instead, financial services, consulting, the law and even the medical profession perpetuate working hours where all-nighters are heroic, driving with jet lag is the norm and anyone who actually has lunch risks becoming lunch.

But, they argue, we’re in the midst of an economic downturn, the worst recession in our lifetimes. Shouldn’t we all be working as hard as we can? Who has the luxury of time? What do you mean weekends aren’t for working?

Well, for the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: after about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade. You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: you’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: there isn’t as much mess to clean up.

In a knowledge economy, where thinking and creativity are the raw materials from which products and profit flow, brains are assets. They need to be cherished, nurtured and protected, not abused. Leaders need to take seriously a century’s evidence that 1) overwork doesn’t make us productive, it makes us stupid, 2) looking away from a problem is often the best way to solve it, and 3) burnout is what happens when people are asked to work in ways that obliterate all other parts of their lives.

Also: we need to hammer the last nail into the coffin of multi-tasking. No, you can’t safely drive and hold conference calls, nor can you text while driving. And checking emails while in meetings means you may as well not be there. What modern businesses need isn’t distracted Blackberry addicts but human beings who haven’t forgotten the gifts of focus, concentration and mindfulness.

When the cognitive scientist Dan Simons looked at the vast mountain of evidence that demonstrates the futility of multitasking, he was inevitably asked whether there were anything we could do to enlarge the capacity of our minds. The answer was an emphatic “no.” There are hard limits to what our brains will do, and no amount of Baby Mozarts or Brain Trainers will alter that. Practice, Simons says, will improve specific skills but not general abilities. Doing Sudoko will make you better at Sudoko; it won’t raise your GMAT scores.

Is there anything that truly enhances cognition? Yes, says Simons: exercise.  Experiments by his colleague Arthur Kramer showed that walking for a few hours a week led to large improvements on cognitive tasks. Stretching and toning exercises had no cognitive benefits, but aerobic exercise, which increases blood flow to the brain, did. Seniors who walked for just 45 minutes a day for three days a week showed better preservation of their brains in MRI scans. Exercise, Simons concludes, improves cognition broadly by increasing the fitness of your brain.

Care about asset integrity? Get out of the office and go for a walk. And make sure the people who work for you do, too.