V

Mindfulness


For the bright young students of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management of the CUHK:


Value
  1. Value is a very important concept in business, in fact, life in general. You have to get this right. It affects everything you do in life.
  2. Value is neither cost nor price. It is not technically measurable. It is subjective, for the simple fact that the same thing may mean different values to different people. 
  3. "Price is what you pay, value is what you get in return," once said Warren Buffett.
  4. When you pay a price for a product or service, it is only human nature that you expect the product or service to deliver a value to you which is worth at least equal to or more than the price which you have paid. 
  5. When you sell a product or service, it is also human nature that you ask for a price which is at least equal to or higher than what you think the product or service is worth to the buyer. 
  6. On salary expectation, it is natural for anyone to expect himself to be remunerated with no less than from any other comparable jobs he may get from the relevant job market. 
  7. But people usually look for values other than plain financial returns from the job. What they value in their jobs are very personal matters. They may value the organization's reputation, the prospect for upward mobility, the job satisfaction itself, the people they work with, etc.
  8. Value is happiness, more precisely, the degree of happiness as how you perceive it to be. 
  9. The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, given all the various interests at stake, the more stakeholders you have to deal with--shareholders, bosses, staff, customers, peers, regulators, etc.--and the more people other than yourself you have to keep happy. 
  10. But the more people you can make happy in your life, the more valuable you will become. 
  11. Helping people with your good intent is the best way to make people happy, meaning well not just for yourself but other people for anything you do. 
  12. 增值先增缘: Goodwill earned will lead to value added. This is indeed the contemporary e-business model of many online enterprises nowadays--the likes of Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Spotify, etc.--who all try to build up critical mass of membership before getting serious with business models for monetization. 
  13. In evaluating the expected returns for whatever you choose to do in life, think in terms of value, not just money. Think about value in the broadest and furthest sense possible. 
  14. Steve Job's famous commencement speech at the graduation ceremony of Stanford University in 2005 is enlightening. 
  15. Think carefully about what you really enjoy doing, what you can do to bring happiness to most people while making yourself truly happy. 
Leadership
  1. "A leader is someone with a follower," once said Peter Drucker, the father of management.
  2. You are more likely to be in a position of leadership than you may be aware of, at home, in school, among your social circles, and at work. There are always people who are generally more opinionated than the others and naturally become opinion leaders. 
  3. The first thing to learn to be a good leader is to learn to self-reflect and understand yourself. 
  4. A person's behaviour is usually influenced by a lot of things which go on in his mind--intentions, perceptions, assumptions, beliefs, preferences, fears & blocks, values--with or without him being consciously aware of them. You need to get in touch with your inner self to understand these influences.
  5. For example, a certain past failure may subconsciously become your mental block, hindering you from trying the same thing again. So you need to exercise some conscious effort of mental intervention in order to clear the mental hurdle.
  6. Learning to be aware of your inner self and understand how your mind works will go a long way to make you becoming a calmer person, even in face of difficult situations. You will be able to make more sensible decisions rather than simply react spontaneously. 
  7. But you should not just pay attention to your own mind without trying to understand other people, otherwise, you become self-centred. 
  8. Human interactions are all mind games. Whether you are talking with your boss, coaching your staff, dealing with your client or negotiating with your supplier, you will do well if you are always mindful of what is going on in the heads--your own head and the next person's.
  9. Of course how well you can deal with people has to come with experience. But learning to understand how your mind works is the very first step, because it will prevent you from judging too quickly. 
  10. We easily form judgment about people and things--good or bad, beautiful or ugly, etc.--which directly influences our behaviour. We need to learn to suppress instinctive perceptions from influencing our behaviour prematurely and go deeper in our mind to understand what exactly are responsible for different kinds of good or bad feelings. 
  11. We are now living in an age where people may easily confuse loud noises and large crowds with the truth. This is a funny time when someone's value is measured by the number of likes, a person's worth by the number of followers and the mass is supposed to be unquestionably representing the truth. The louder the people are, the more authentic seem to be their claims. But this is a very dangerous phenomenon.
  12. For example, millions of people innocently died for the crazy campaigns of "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution". While we all know how mad and wrong they were in hindsight, these campaigns had millions of willing and enthusiastic believers and followers at the times.
  13. To avoid tragedies, we need to develop and keep our ability for critical thinking. We need to understand how our mind works.
  14. Buddhism's teaching of cultivation can be very useful for training to control our mind. 
  15. Leadership is about the ability to move people into certain actions to get certain things done according to the will and direction of the leader. So leadership is also about the understanding and exercising of power. 
  16. Don't confuse power with authority. Authority, as derived from an official position within a company's hierarchy, is but one source of power. Authority alone is not always enough to get things done, not even for the CEO.
  17. Five sources of power: Other than authority, the leader may draw power from the people who are backing him, from his conviction or ideology, from his expertise and also from his respectable status as recognized by others.
  18. But the leader needs to be clear-headed about whose interests he should represent. The higher up you go in the corporate hierarchy, the more stakeholders you need to keep happy. But more often than not, these stakeholders' interests are conflicting among each other. 
  19. That's why before understanding and exercising power, the leader needs to understand people's mind. He also needs to understand and control his own mind first, because only then can he think calmly and critically in face of challenging situations.
  20. The leader needs to be able to judge what is good or bad for people after all, and needs to keep his integrity intact and be absolutely honest with himself while exercising his judgment.
  21. Power is corruptive by nature. History is full of leaders falling from grace because of the bad things they did by abusing their positions of power. See what's happening in China since Xi Jinping came to power over 2 years ago, count the number of once powerful Party and government officials having fallen from grace. 
  22. Never take power for granted. 
  23. 修行先修念: Cultivate good thoughts for good deeds. 
Paradoxes
  1. Life is full of paradoxes. Don't fool yourself to believe otherwise. Don't get fixated on the abstract idea of good, bad, beautiful or ugly. There are always two sides to the same coin. Every physical law is subject to Einstein's theory of relativity. 
  2. The conventional Tai-Ji icon is an image of perfect harmony because it encompasses the contrasting elements of black and white in perfectly symmetrical proportions to each other. 
  3. China is a place which provides ample examples of life paradox. Even the constitution of the People's Republic of China is fundamentally paradoxical. It states that China is a "democratically autocratic" socialist country with workers and farmers as its base. 
  4. In coping with life paradoxes, Bruce Lee's "be water" philosophy can be very useful.
  5. But adaptability should not be confused with duplicity or being lack of principles. Regardless of its shape and form, the elementary substance of water, i.e., H2O, remains unchanged. 
  6. But even being water as a useful people skill is not enough to solve problems sometimes. We need to build trust with people, particularly when starting in unfamiliar environments. Trust is the one thing, more so than any agreements, ideologies or management skills which will help you through difficult situations. 
  7. To build trust, start with your good intent, show your sincerity, keep your good faith and earn goodwill for everything you do.  

     



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