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Archive for November, 2011

Leadership and Intelligence

Post heroic leadership places facilitation skills above intelligence. Gone is the heroic individual with the wisdom to cut through complexity single-handedly.

How important is it for a leader to be intelligent? The short answer is that it depends on how leadership is defined. If being a CEO means being a leader, the answer to the question is probably “yes.” But if leadership is defined in a different way, then the answer might be “no.”

The Relationship Between Intelligence and Leadership

In the early years of studying leadership, the so-called “trait theory” took the view that there is a set of traits that marks leaders from non-leaders. Early traits claimed to be characteristic of leaders included intelligence, a drive to dominate others, being extroverted and having charisma. Today, people often point to the importance of emotional intelligence, facilitative skills and integrity. The trait theory implies that certain personal characteristics are necessary conditions for leadership, or at least, effective leadership. In later thinking about leadership, this approach was abandoned because it was felt that leadership effectiveness varied too much across situations and types of people being led. The feeling was that there were no universally necessary traits to be a leader.

More recently, trait thinking has been making a comeback. In particular, numerous studies associate intelligence with leadership effectiveness. Some thinkers feel that the more senior the executive the more important are general cognitive skills, the ability to grasp more and more complex information to make informed decisions.

The Move to Post Heroic Leadership

The work of Jim Collins, especially in his book, Good to Great, has helped to popularize a facilitative style of leadership. He called his version of post heroic leadership “level 5 leadership.” Collins did extensive research on companies that had moved from average to exceptional levels of performance over several years. He found the CEOs of such companies to be humble, to feel that they did not have all the answers. Collins used the slogan “first who then what” to explain how these CEOs worked. They got their best people together (first who) and conducted brainstorming sessions with them to develop new strategies for the business (then what). Collins used this slogan to contrast it with the more heroic leadership model where the CEO decides what needs to be done and then gets people to execute the new strategy. Collins expressed this style with the slogan “first what then who.”

Level 5 leadership is just one model of what has become known as post heroic leadership. The central theme running through all of such models of leadership is that the CEO needs to develop new directions by drawing out the best thinking of the organization. This approach to deciding strategic direction ties in the the “wisdom of crowds” idea, the view that groups make better decisions than individuals. Here, the most important skill for the CEO is to be a good facilitator. The need for intelligence in any one individual is not so strong if the best decisions are made by groups.

So, if leadership means that CEOs should call the shots based on their own thinking then, given the increasing complexity of today’s world, they had better be quite intelligent. Conversely, if leadership means being able to draw the best ideas out of others, then CEO intelligence is not as important as facilitation skills.

Leadership Reinvented for a Digital Age

A totally different conception of leadership says that it has nothing to do with position. On this view, being a CEO means being a manager. A CEO can show occasional leadership, but only management is a role. By freeing leadership from position, it becomes clearer how all employees can show some leadership. The essence of leadership now is that it is simply the successful promotion of a better way, a new idea for a new direction. It can be shown by example when a front-line employee works in a new way or promotes more efficient practices or new products. It involves challenging the status quo. Such “thought leadership” can be very small scale and local.

The question of intelligence is very situational. It depends on the audience to which a person is trying to show leadership. More intelligence will likely be necessary to influence an intelligent audience. Such leadership is a matter of presenting hard evidence for a new product or strategy. An intelligent audience needs to see the person trying to show leadership to them as credible and technically sound in the business case being made. Conversely, an employee demonstrating a better approach to serving customers in a retail store can show leadership without the same degree of intelligence.

Crucially, however, major strategic decisions that take large, complex organizations in new directions are most likely to be sound if made by a group. Where leadership is defined as promoting new directions, the use of facilitation skills to help a group make good decisions can be seen as a management technique. This means that CEOs who use such skills to develop new strategies are wearing a managerial hat in so doing.

Thus, on two of our three ways of defining leadership, high intelligence is either not necessary or only situationally important.

Since Obama doesn’t seem to want to give much of that money he is printing to US green tech companies, we may as well import our green technology from China.  They developed their lead in green technology from the money they make off of us so why no take advantage.

Buy your wind turbines from China

High tech moving to China

China Clean Energy Network

China and carbon

China and Clean Tech

Brains draining toward China

China spends .6 Billion and the US spends .6 Billion on Clean Tech

Giving the trillions that Obama has printed and given to the wall street thieves who all but destroyed the entire financial world, it is difficult to see why he can print and buy energy independence and jobs by putting in enough solar cells and infrastructure to power the US entirely off of solar energy.

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Selling China

By poetryman69

Giving China the Business

China on the Cheap – Associated Content – associatedcontent.com

Doing small business in China

How to Have a Soft Landing in China | eHow.com

How to Have a Soft Landing in China. Often problems like laws, language and custom make it difficult to do business in a foreign country. What is needed is a soft landing. A soft landing would be an America friendly place in a…

How to do Business Travel in China | FireHow.com

How to do Business Travel in China. Forming business models that will allow the expansion of American business into Chinese markets

Giving China the Business – Associated Content – associatedcontent.com

A profitable business model for China

How to Bring Chinese Students to America | FireHow.com

How to Bring Chinese Students to America. We need to generate some more foreign trade income for the US

China on a Shoestring | Bukisa.com

How do small businesses get a foothold in China?

Doing Business in China in 2010, the Year of the Metal Tiger – Associated Content – associatedcontent.com

Doing business in the Year of the White Metal Tiger

Bull in a China Shop

Product Marketing and International Accounting in Emerging Markets and China

Soft Landing in China

Doing Business in China

How to Bring Chinese Students to America

How to do Business Travel in China

Chinese Business Plan

Giving China the Business

Jiang Qian Lilly

Lilly: Jiang Qian

The Heart of the Metal Tiger. Happy Metal Tiger Valentines Day!

The Chinese New Year, the Year of the Metal Tiger, begins on Valentines Day, Feb 14th.

The Year of the Tiger

2010 Predictions

How the seer sees

Law of Attraction

Happy Metal Tiger New Year eHowlers!

How to be a Tea Bagger

How to do Business in China

The Goat prepares for the Year of the Tiger

Discourse of the Thunders

Talking clouds

2010 the Year of the Metal Tiger

Taking a Metal Tiger to Tea

The Year of the Tiger

2010 Predictions

How the seer sees

Law of Attraction

Naked in America

The Secret Lives of Nudists

Traveling Naked

GaGa

Still Sexy After all these Years

2010 Predictions. Billy and the Cyber Punks

2010 New Year Predictions. Flight of the Billionaires

2010 Predictions. When Grannies Attack. Happy New Year!

2010 Predictions. Total Recall. Term Limits

2010 Predictions. The Year of the Tiger

Have a Blue Moon New Year

Happy Beer Year!

2010 Predictions. The Year of the Tiger?

2010 Predictions. Total Recall. Term Limits

Abolish the EPA

Save the Earth, Eat your Dog

2010 Predictions. Billy and the Cyber Punks

2010 Predictions.  When Grannies Attack

2010 Predictions.  Flight of the Billionaires

How get a job in 30 days

,000 per year

Earning per hour

Free stuff and giveaways

12 Days of GiveAways. Happy Xmas Freebies

Free Software

The next million

Beer Omelet

It is better to be drunk than wasted

Money for Art

Dictionary of Dreams

2010 Predictions:  The year of the Tiger

The Capitalist Manifest:  Dismantling Marxism

Christmas Star

Cyber Rainbow

Feathered Suns

Free Short Poems online.  Free Gallery online

New Moon Poetry

Google’s Secret Count Down

Top 20 Gag Gifts

Of Fire flowers and crocus neath freshly fallen snow

the cold snaps and steam rises from hidden waters

seized up and spillout over the snow

Double Happiness

Happy 2010. Happy New Year. Year of the Tiger

2010 New Year Fictional Predictions

2010 Predictions. The Year of the Tiger?

2010 Predictions. Total Recall. Term Limits

Abolish the EPA

Save the Earth, Eat your Dog

2010 Predictions. Billy and the Cyber Punks

2010 Predictions.  When Grannies Attack

2010 Predictions.  Flight of the Billionaires

Mother Earth.  Earth Songs.  Earth Dreams

NEW BlackBerry Torch

BlackBerry Torch Review

If you don’t already own a BlackBerry, you will not want this phone. And if you do, you still might not want it, even if it may very well be the “best BlackBerry ever.”

What is BlackBerry?

The most exceedingly common observation about the Torch is that it’s very much still a BlackBerry. Despite the gloss-speckled new BlackBerry 6 software, despite the retro-quirky slider anatomy, it’s a BlackBerry. Well, what is a BlackBerry?

BlackBerry, in the beginning, was a glorified two-way pager. It’s slowly evolved from that decade-old core into what it is today. Like Microsoft Office, a lot of people might use it at home, but it’s mostly designed for its corporate base. What BlackBerry tends to be good at, and what BlackBerry users love about them clearly exposes those corporate-tinged roots: well-designed hardware keyboards, push email (routed through RIM’s servers), BlackBerry Messenger (a robust, addictive BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry instant messaging service), communications security and encryption (see: Obama, Saudi Arabia, UAE). What it’s not been good at: basically everything else. I mean, if you want to highlight the philosophical difference between RIM and say, Apple, consider that RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis brags about how carriers love BlackBerrys because they conserve bandwidth, while Apple told AT&T to screw itself when the carrier suggested making the YouTube app less awesome for users by eating less data.

When you see that for the first time since 2007 BlackBerry is not the top-selling smartphone platform in the US, RIM’s looming problem seems a lot loomier. The Torch and BlackBerry 6 are RIM’s effort to avoid the same kind of fate Windows Mobile suffered by ignoring regular people and leaning too much on corporate IT departments to keep them in business, especially when Apple and Google are making inroads into the workplace.

That’s a lot of context to swallow, but understanding the DNA and RIM’s incipient existential angst is the only way to understand the Torch: It’s like Two Face, but even less focused. Is BlackBerry 6 a touchscreen OS? A trackpad and keyboard OS? Mostly for business users? Regular people? It’s not quite sure, and the results can be pretty messy. The psychological split is real, and its imprint dominates nearly every aspect of the phone. FWIW, I’m looking at the phone purely from the role of a consumer—if your boss or IT department is handing you the phone, it’s not like you’ve got a choice anyway. Just thank them for giving you this one.

This is how you put together a phone

Not to rely too much on the trope that the Torch is “like a BlackBerry,” but the overarching industrial design and build really is just like everything else RIM has produced over the last year, simply evolved into a chromier slider form factor. While it works, almost shockingly well, because so little else has changed there’s a sense of the uncanny, a subtext of indecision surrounds the whole design.

The Torch is as well-built as you could realistically want a phone to feel. The sliding action is smooth, perfectly balanced in the amount of effort it requires to shoot the screen up over the keyboard. It takes a push, and then it zips along the track until it clacks, satisfyingly. And it feels like you can do it 10,000,000 times. The rippled back is the right amount of rubbery, not so much it makes you hands feel weird, but textured enough the phone will never slip from even gross, clammy hands. The only issue is that the lock button on the left corner of the phone is too easy to trigger, so I pulled the phone out of my jeans pocket, an email half-filled out with jibber jabber or random phone number partially dialed, more often than I would’ve liked to.

The keyboard, ripped from the Bold 9700 is stereotypically fantastic, clicky and ergonomic. It is still one of the best keyboards on any phone out there. The optical trackpad is a suitable trackball replacement, but most of the time, I simply wondered why it was there, since there’s a much bigger surface to manipulate—the 3.2-inch screen—right above it.

The screen is a dealbreaker

After nearly a year of staring at screens packed with pixel counts of at least 800×480, the Torch’s low-res 480×360 display is a grisly sight. It’s like going back to standard definition after a year of HD, and then having a wet fabric softener sheet shoved in between my eyeballs and the screen. Text looks ugly and jaggy compared to the Droid or iPhone. Websites are grosser. Pictures less detailed. It’s almost a cruel joke AT&T’s playing on RIM, knowing it’ll be on pedestals mere feet away from the vastly better screens of the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Captivate. It’s unbelievable that anybody’s flagship phone in 2010 has a display this low rent. Even if you were absolutely determined to buy a new BlackBerry phone, you should wait for one with a better screen.

Needs more guts

Like the display, the Torch’s brains are straight out of 2008. It quickly becomes apparent that the 624MHz processor is too slow. It often hangs and stutters moving from app to app—say from messages to Twitter to Facebook and back to the home screen—pinch-zooming in the browser, or sometimes even moving from app drawer to app drawer on the home screen (the latter less frequently, but it definitely happens). That’s even with 512MB of RAM, the same amount as the iPhone 4, Nexus One and other modern phones. Even if you found the performance acceptable (which, if you’ve spent time with an iPhone 4 or Android 2.2 phone, you won’t after about 10 minutes), it means that there’s not a lot of headroom for more advanced capabilities down the road: The guts seem like they’re being pushed to their max already.

Camera and video

The five-megapixel camera is disappointing, to say the least, even if the software interface is mostly pleasant and mercifully simple, while offering a metric crapload of scenes like a real point-and-shoot, from portrait to party. The only real software drag is that there’s no tap to focus, so the easiest way to get creative with depth-of-field or focus on something off center is to half-press the convenience to focus, then recompose the shot. It’s the photos and video themselves that disappoint. While they don’t lack for detail in daylight, photos do tend to be undersaturated, and at night, the low light performance is pretty lacking. Video, a mere 640×480, doesn’t make up for the lower resolution with higher quality, as you can see. (You can see the full set here.)

Calling, networking, battery life

The Torch’s battery life is up to BlackBerry par, which is to say, thoroughly excellent. I’m talking a day and half of moderate usage, and a day of heavy plowing, without a recharge (granted, I didn’t use GPS very often because I didn’t like AT&T’s map application). Calls are loud and clear, though I noticed a subtle, high-pitched reverb—not quite an echo—in the earpiece whenever I talked, on multiple phone calls. Reception wasn’t noticeably bad, but coming out of the subway more than once it took a few minutes to switch from EDGE back to 3G, and people more invested in the signal bar display might be nervous that it’s apparently quite sensitive—even as I’m typing, it’s bouncing between 4 and 5 bars like an ADHD child who’s just been handed a giant box of Nerds. But no serious complaints.

The software: It’s schizotastic

If the Torch’s dual nature hinted at BlackBerry’s psychological discord, BlackBerry OS 6 crystalizes it in a melange of glossy plastic, blue gradients, smoky shading, dull grays and white screencapes. It’s largely a mess.

Like Android, BlackBerry OS 6 will ostensibly support phones with and without touchscreens, which means that unlike iOS, Windows Phone 7 or webOS, it’s doomed from the outset to a lack of clarity. RIM has more or less embraced that fact, so proliferation, a scattershot explosion of choices, seems to be the operating principle. Sure, there are a million ways to accomplish any one task, but it means there’s no obvious right way to do it either. It’s conceptually slippery.

Examples! The front end of the interface is glossy, stylized, and not un-pretty. Dive into an options menu and it’s like being hurled back into Palm OS circa 2005. It’s highly incongruous. Or, more fundamentally, the way BlackBerry OS 6 integrates social networking, as most modern phones are wont to do. As you might’ve seen, it does this in a couple of ways. There’s a social feeds app that, as you might expect, pulls in feeds from Twitter, Facebook, BBM, RSS and more, creating a single stream, so you don’t have to dive into individual apps. The official Twitter and Facebook apps are baked into the OS as well, and they plug into the central notifications system and universal inbox. So, when there are new items in your Twitter or Facebook stream, you’ll get a message in the universal “messages” inbox (which collects emails, texts, etc.) that you have new feed items waiting; there’s the social feeds app; and there’s the individual apps for Facebook and Twitter. If you have actual Facebook or Twitter messages, like a DM, they’ll show up in the universal inbox and in the main notifications display on top of the homescreen. The only way to clear the messages count is to dive into the actual apps and read them—the social feeds app won’t work for this. Like I said, it’s messy, and at least initially, confusing, even though the idea of a single stream or inbox sounds fantastic. It’s the implementation that fails.

The homescreen feels conceptually muddled too. Rather than going for a full desktop with definable shortcuts and widgets all over the screen, like Android, it blends a drawer system with a half-desktop metaphor in a way that’s less than natural. A handful of icons are visible, which can be dragged up, like a drawer opening skyward, to reveal more icons—apps or now, contacts—hidden below. When the drawer isn’t “open,” most of the screen is wasted space, just an expanse of wallpaper between the four visible icons and the status bar above. Flicking left or right takes you to a different “drawer” (or “panel,” in Android parlance). Each one is a section, like frequent apps, media apps, or downloaded apps. Oh, one interesting point is the pause RIM has inserted into sliding between drawers. It registers your flick, takes a second, and then moves to the next drawer. It’s an odd behavior, but so consistent it has to be deliberate. At the top is one of the more useful aspects of the homescreen, a notifications window like Android’s—touching it drops down a list of messages and events from email or Twitter or whatever.

Universal search is awesome, and very much what it should be. If there’s one thing done truly well, interface-wise it’s universal search. Start typing for a contact, an app, a song, an email, whatever—it’ll pull it up, or offer to search the web, YouTube, App World and others. You can basically bypass the rest of the interface for getting to something, at least a good portion of the time.

The touch keyboard is passable, but I don’t think you’ll ever use it over the real one. Otherwise, why did you buy this thing?

The BlackBerry 6 browser, now running on WebKit, is mostly on par with what other phones are offering—since they’re using WebKit too—but not exceptional. The interface is cleaned up, and better, with a combined search/address bar. It rendered most pages the way it should (albeit still with no Flash), though in real world testing over Wi-Fi, it never beat an iPhone 4 on the handful of pages I tried, like Giz. Pinch to zoom can be laggy, particularly if a page is still loading. It is predictable and can be fairly smooth, once everything’s loaded. (Oddly, the whizzy effects to twirl between tabs never stuttered.)

Email also uses WebKit for HTML rendering now, and while the perks of BlackBerry are still there—hello, push Gmail—there are subtle annoyances, particularly when it comes to Gmail. For instance, a threaded conversation doesn’t show the sender of the email, simply the number of items and the subject. Moreover, for most people, the split between the phone’s inbox and the server’s—which doesn’t exist with standard IMAP implementations, or a Gmail app—feels awkward. The app itself is conservative, aesthetically. There’s a way to make email beautiful and functional; Windows Phone 7′s proven it. The allure of BBM as the be-all, end-all of mobile instant messaging is slightly diminished as well, given that Google Talk for Android accomplishes most of what I’d want it to do, and crosses the boundaries between phone and desktop.

The music and video apps are indeed nicer, even if RIM’s implementation of perma-Cover Flow is gratuitous. Say you have an album queued up—above the player interface is a carousel of album art, repeated 10 times, or however many songs are on the album. You can flick through to jump to whichever track you want, but seeing the art repeated over and over is just odd. (I didn’t get to test wireless desktop syncing, the feature I was most exciting about, unfortunately.)

It’s strange that RIM sacrifices its own software at the whim of a carrier deal. BlackBerry Maps has been refreshed and made better, but you can’t actually use it. You’re stuck with AT&T Maps, which is slow and made me yearn for Google or Bing Maps. (You can sneak a peek at BlackBerry Maps if you try to preview your location inside of BlackBerry Messenger after sharing it. I wish I could’ve actually used it.) There’s even a separate AT&T AppCenter, which wasn’t quite working when I tried to access. Are people supposed to use the newly better BlackBerry App World (with carrier billing), or AT&T’s AppCenter? Other crapware includes AT&T Navigator, AT&T YellowPages, to start. It’s kind of an odd message to developers, whom RIM needs, in a way. BlackBerry’s become a distant priority behind iOS and Android for many, and a lot of the apps that are cross-platform are grossly inferior or straight up ugly on BlackBerry. (I’m thinking of Facebook and Foursquare, in particular.)

What it all means

The distillation of this grand mishmash of observations and scenarios is this: BlackBerry isn’t good enough anymore if you’re comparing it to other smartphones. What does it dobetter than the rest? That’s the fundamental question. And the answer is that for most people, in most situations, compared to Android and iPhone, not a whole lot.

People who love BlackBerry exactly the way it is will like the Torch and BlackBerry 6, because it’s pretty much the same. It offers a lot of marginal improvements in a lot of places—like the browser—even if it makes a mess of some things. That said, in a few months, they might like it a lot less. Nielsen numbers show that half of BlackBerry users are thinking about switching. This won’t change their mind. And even with all of those corporate accounts locked down tight, it’s hard to say that’s not a problem.

Maybe RIM’s too big, too entrenched to build the kind of phone that’ll make people want a BlackBerry again. But they could’ve at least given the damn thing a better screen.

Recycling mobile phones is necessary because they have toxic elements in the circuit board that pollute the soil, underground water and play a wide role in increasing the globally warming. Throwing the mobile phone in the land may cause many harm to the nature and also they will increase the need for the basic raw materials needed to manufacture new mobile phones. Several surveys have revealed that in developed countries only 3% of the people contribute in recycling the mobile phones. Instead of keeping your mobile phones may be the LG, Nokia, Samsung or any other company phones in your drawer or cupboard give them to the mobile phone retailers or to the manufactures for recycling. recycle LG Optimus 2X mobile if they are in very bad condition, unused, old or broken. Recycle LG Optimus 2X mobile phones to reuse the useful parts in them.

When you give your LG Optimus 2X mobile phone for recycling the recycling company will take away the useful parts and then recycle the other pats to use them as a raw material to manufacture new mobile phones. Recycle LG Optimus 2X mobile phones and get paid for it from the retailers. Recycling of mobile phones helps to reduce the toxic waste being dumped in the land. Most of them keep their old mobile phones in the drawer and cupboard. This will increase the need for the basic raw materials needed to manufacture new mobile phones. The most important need for recycling is that it will reduce globalization by reducing the emission of green house gas in the atmosphere. Sell old mobile phones to the mobile retailers or the particular mobile manufactures and contribute to reduce globalization.

Instead of keeping the mobile phones unused you can give them for recycling to meet the demand for basic raw materials needed to manufacture new mobile phones. Sell old mobile phones and get paid for it based on the condition it is. All the precious and valuable metals in the circuit board of your old mobile phone will live in the new mobile phones after they are recycled. If you throw your mobile phones in the land they will leak the toxic materials on the land and pollute the soil and underground water. This in turn find their way back to us and they cause many disease to us. Sell your old mobile phones for recycling and help the environment and get some cash from them which you no longer need. Recycling always makes sense, so do your best part in protecting the environment from the toxic waste and protect yourself from harmful diseases like cancer caused due to the pollution of water, air and soil.

Hardware examples are from the keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, scanner, speaker to the components that consists your system unit. Hardware actually means hard and visible. On the other hand, software which you visible see but virtually, like your Operating System (Windows XP, Vista, 7….. LinuxOS, MacOS, etc.), Word processor, spreadsheets, etc.

The hardware components and software are essential to your computer, the two are interdependent to each other, and it means that if one area will be defective then both will not function properly. That is, the hardware and your processor don’t each other, so software will be mediate between so that the processor can give understandable command where the hardware follow, so hardware will be useless if there is no software that can communicate to it. Likewise software will depend on hardware availability and functionality, that is software will be use if there is no hardware that it should communicate, and after all software will not be around without the hardware. This is a kind of egg and chicken who did come first thing.

Regardless of any argument, both are created to make the life of the user easier and convenient, and we can rest assure that there will be an evolution that will innovate existing software and hardware such as voice operated computer which currently we see from other gadgets and stuffs around the globe. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow, just watch the news….

Protecting both hardware and software are very advisable, obviously. In the hardware part, you should know troubleshooting techniques to locate the problem of your computer hardware by the use of either software or other methods. While in the software part, you should be watching about viruses, malware, or even incorrect installation.

Of course, you can always the net by reading some articles pertaining to different pros and cons of both hardware and software.