“Even native speakers may have trouble with particular dialects. For example, a ‘car smash’ in Memphis is a ‘fender bender’ in California. When an Australian man has a ‘mate,’ it’s his male friend and not his wife.” Another tip from the author is that the language has to be simple and clear. ‘Snail mail,’ for instance, may be misinterpreted as an e-mail account that opens very slowly!

Web-writers, however, have a priceless advantage, says Kilian. You can encourage and provoke your readers to ask questions about the unusual words and phrases on your site, he explains.

“Your content isn’t just a take-it-or-leave-it box lunch, but a constantly changing buffet of interesting and sometimes mysterious items. If customers find you eager to explain what’s on offer, they’ll be delighted to learn and experiment — and you’ll learn how much you still have to learn about your own language.”

Useful counsel that comes along with a CD containing exercises.

As in those popular three-dimensional computer images that suddenly seem to leap from one-dimensional to multidimensional depending on the focus of your eyes, a figure-ground shift in our perception of business is also possible, assures Barbara Shipka in Leadership in a Challenging World: A sacred journey (Elsevier). She mentions, as example, the achievable perception shift in business leaders — from victim/controller to servants.

Business is positioned to be a conductor, a conduit, and a catalyst between the people with their imaginations on the one hand, and the world with its needs on the other, the author describes. “Business has an enormous opportunity to serve as a primary bridge between human creativity and the potential for whole systems change and transformation.”

Urgent messages.

If you want to learn ‘the most popular version of the Linux operating system (OS) available to computer users worldwide,’ which is ‘extremely welcoming to the new user,’ here is How to Do Everything: Ubuntu by Jeffrey Orloff ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). Ubuntu, pronounced ‘oo-boon-too,’ has its origins in the South African Bantu language, the book informs. The word means ‘humanity toward others,’ as you can realise from this quote of Nelson Mandela: “A traveller through our country would stop at a village, and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but Ubuntu has various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question, therefore, is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to improve?”

It was the community that supported the OS, created by the team Mark Shuttleworth, a South African entrepreneur, assembled in Canonical Ltd. The attraction lay in Ubuntu’s characteristics such as a frequent release cycle that the users could count on, and the ease of use on desktop.

The first version, released in October 2004, was called ‘Warty Warthog’ with the realisation that it was bound to have a few ‘warts.’ Version 4.10, released to the public, became a hit, reaching the number 13 spot on DistroWatch.com’s ranking for 2004, narrates Orloff. “After being out in public for only three months, it found itself only one spot behind the industry giant Red Hat!”

For the eager hands-on reader.

Mottinetti is known by three-fourths of the Finnish population; over 65,000 people use it each year, with an annual growth rate of 25-30 per cent. It is expanding rapidly from North Karelia to other parts of Finland so that its services are now available to 1.5 million Finns, informs a box item in Synchronizing Science and Technology with Human Behaviour by Ralf Brand ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

So, what is Mottinetti? A word coined from ‘motti’ (Finnish for one cubic metre of firewood) and ‘netti’ (the Internet), because the latter is used for linking producers and consumers of the former, the author explains.

“It was set up by North Karelian Electric (NKE), the 10th largest electricity company in Finland with around 82,000 customers. Between 60 to 70 per cent of them use electricity to heat their homes. During cold winter days, the demand for electricity reaches extreme peaks that are very costly for NKE to satisfy.”

While an antidote was to have customers use firewood as an additional energy source, NKE found that the firewood value chain ‘from forest owners (especially small ones) via wood producers, dealers and transportation companies to the end customers’ was underdeveloped. “Information about suppliers was often spread only by word of mouth and the prices and quality of wood as well as the standard of service varied considerably.”

In came Mottinetti, ‘to hit several birds with one virtual stone’…

Engaging discussion.

Which is better for the developing countries, low-skilled migration or the high-skilled one? The former, says The Global Employment Challenge by Ajit K. Ghose, Nomaan Majid, and Christoph Ernst ( www.academicfoundation.com).

Low-skilled migration brings benefits through several channels, such as reducing surplus labour, generating foreign exchange earnings in the form of remittances, and reducing poverty, the authors reason.

In contrast, they state, high-skilled migration means loss of human capital for which there is inadequate compensation in the form of remittances. Brain drain has actually tended to increase rather than reduce the asymmetry in the cross-country distribution of skills, the authors argue. “The skill gap between developed and developing countries has nevertheless been narrowing, but the narrowing would clearly have been faster in the absence of brain drain.”

Inputs for policy directions.

Consultative leadership will necessarily mean managing understanding, say Jörgen Sandberg and Axel Targama in Managing Understanding in Organizations ( www.sagepublications.com). The authors find that the ideas of consultative leadership and the management of understanding have received the fastest and most enthusiastic support among people in professional organisations and the so-called knowledge-intensive firms, such as schools, universities, hospitals, IT companies, and consulting firms.

The employees in these organisations are highly educated and through their personal expertise they have developed greater self-confidence, status and pride, observe Sandberg and Targama. The role of management for these employees is “primarily to provide general conditions and guidelines. They do not see management interference as a necessary component of their daily routine.”

Recommended study.

China’s lagging political, legal, and administrative institutional reforms can come under increasing stress in the coming years, foresees China into the Future: Making sense of the world’s most dynamic economy, edited by W. John Hoffmann and Michael J. Enright ( www.wiley.com).

For instance, a proxy server in California dispensing real news by Chinese bloggers about avian flu is accessible to any savvy Chinese Internet user, but it cannot be confiscated and shut down by Chinese authorities like one in Tianjin or Wuhan, the book reminds.

“The instant and essentially free transmission of ideas and tools around the globe makes the Chinese firewall an indefensible proposition, unless the leadership is willing to take on the huge economic losses of sealing off the IT channels to the outside world – a highly unlikely course of action, barring an unforeseen domestic catastrophe.”

Important insights.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“Our think-tank came up with a brilliant idea to cut two more staff for every bus we run…”

“I wonder if your software engineers were ready to double as drivers and conductors?”

“Readily, after we called the initiative ‘job enrichment’!”

More Stories on : Books | Books 2 Byte

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page