Basic class about communication

From: "Punk Marketing" by Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons

Basic class about communication:
01. Arrange a vibrator cellphone.
02. Find a silent keyboard.
03. At dinner limit yourself being sit. Listen all people and try to follow the conversation according to their needs.
04. Do a favour in yourself and prove that you can write well.
05. When you speak with someone by VoIP or Skype, do not forget that it different than being surprised from a nice phone call.
06. If you are using a cell phone at the same time that you are with someone, say sorry and explain how important is for you.
07. When someone is explaining you something, look this person in the eye, try to understand, reflict internally what it was saying and if you have any question, ask in coherent and complete. You will see the difference.
08. Stop to use famous quotes from business magazines.
09. When you receive an e-mail mark it and then answer with the right time.
10. When you discover that someone is not listing you, tell them. Shake your head. As much you will be tolerant with bad communication, more people will continue to communicate badly.
11. Being out of the city is not excuse to not see e-mails.
12. Do not answer the cell phone with "Hi Mark", everybody knows that you know who is the person at the other side. Is not good, neither empathic.
13. Ask always "how are you?" then listen the other person.
14. When you send an e-mail to a friend or colleague, do not mix with other subjects.
15. Everybody should be standing up during the conference calls.
16. Why you should send e-mails to other people subjects that you want them to read?
17. Do not difficult the contact from other people with you.
18. If you want really upset someone, do not respond when someone is saying something bad.
19. If someone haven't answer your e-mail. Call. You will see, that they are not ignoring you.
20. Use the silence key.
21. Now read this again. We hope that you will do it.

Manifesto - Punk Marketing

Currently I just read a book "Punk Marketing".

Punk Marketing explains how important is for us to have our own manifesto.
Article 1 - If you do not take any risk, you die
Article 2 - Why not asking: Why not?
Article 3 - Adopt a firm position
Article 4 - Do not submit
Article 5 - Do not be a controller
Article 6 - Expose yourself
Article 7 - Do enemies
Article 8 - Let them wanting more
Article 9 - Think forward to your competition
Article 10 - Do not let yourself being seduced by technology
Article 11 - Know who you really are
Article 12 - It finish the bullshits about marketing
Article 13 - Do not let others to define your patterns
Article 14 - Use the revolution tools
Article 15 - Interrogate, dear participants

"Durazno y Convención" - Jaime Roos

Memorandum - Take 1

Hi all,
Here is going my first draft of my memorandum.
Which I am looking to complete until the end of this year.

MEMORANDUM

My perspective is my perspective. Not from anybody else. Even I would have a twin, this twin would never understand my own way of looking the things.
So, according to my perspective, I have to decide. And decision depends from me. Nobody else.
Feedbacks are all time welcomed and needed to decide. Experience from the others are important and relevant, however the last voice of my own decision to say A or B is from me.

Decisions brings responsibility.
And more important is that I never, never should blame others from my own decision or non-decision. Anything around me is my fault, because I did/did not anything to change it. Even a word or act, if I decide to not do it, is my fault. Never from government, State, companies, institutions or even other people.
Luck happens, but who does really right choices in the right time.

And with my wrong decisions, I have to smile for it, learn and try to do better after.
Looking back sometimes when I think about failing I just want to blame hardly myself.
But easily I go rationally that I think like: "I did my best".

For better future, I have to feel that I am doing my best decisions now. And I am loosing every day, minute, second that I am not moving through my goals well reflect and thought.

If I have to choose, I always choose not...
... what I like more.. or less ....
... what have feeling that is better for me.. or worst (even then I got wrong) ...
... just following my passions, or money ...
... I choose always the most difficult alternative that I can find in my live.

As I threat myself well, I should threat the others the same.
Same looking in the eyes as I am looking to mine in my mirror.
As I never would like to be forced, I believe we never should force people to do whatever they want or not. If we do it, we would be blocking their own freedom for their most valuable thing they have, own life.

Life is life. We do not have other right?
If life is only one travel, which return is not allowed and choosing the ways are truly important, so if we have a lot of ways for good destiny to choose, happier we are.

Open your ways and choose...

Great 90's - Cleaned from dust

I'll be your dream, I'll be your wish
I'll be your fantasy
I'll be your hope, I'll be your love
Be everything that you need
I'll love you more with every breath
Truly, madly, deeply do

I will be strong, I will be faithful
'Cause I'm counting on
A new beginnin'
A reason for livin'
A deeper meanin', yea

And I want to stand with you on a mountain
I want to bathe with you in the sea
I want to lay like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me

And when my stars are shinin' brightly in the velvet sky
I'll make a wish to send it to Heaven
Then make you want to cry
The tears of joy for all the pleasure in the certainty
That we're surrounded by the comfort and protection of
The highest powers in lonely hours
(Lonely hours)
The tears devour you

And I want to stand with you on a mountain
I want to bathe with you in the sea
I want to lay like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me

Oh can't you see it baby?
You don't have to close your eyes
'Cause it's standin' right before you
All that you need will surely come
Uhh hu yea

I'll be your dream, I'll be your wish
I'll be your fantasy
I'll be your hope, I'll be your love
Be everything that you need
I'll love you more with every breath
Truly, madly, deeply do
(I love you)
Huh huh

I want to stand with you on a mountain
I want to bathe with you in the sea
I want to lay like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me

And I want to stand with you on a mountain
I want to bathe with you in the sea
Well I want to live like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me

6 Reasons Why You Are not Getting Hired

Frustrated by unemployment?

Job hunting is tricky business. Getting hired is a subtle mix of the right qualifications, enough experience, interview chemistry, and a dash of luck. Assuming you’re making all the right moves and avoiding the really obvious job seeker mistakes, there are a few points to consider that could be your ticket out of unemployment.

Get out of your job search rut and back in the game by fixing these five mistakes you might be making:

1. Job Description
Read it. Do you meet every qualification listed? If you think you can get away by not having that extra few years of experience or make do without the requested higher degree, think again. Job descriptions are a baseline for hiring managers. With so many job applicants, recruiters are naturally going to pick the best of the best, and that means you’ve got to meet every single one of the job requirements, at the very least. But that doesn’t mean you should give up, either. If you find yourself not meeting a certain job requirement time after time, do something about it! Nothing shows dedication like taking action.

2. Word Play
It’s not enough to have a clean resume free of grammar and spelling errors; you’ve got to go that extra mile. No matter how amazing your resume looks, everything lies in the words. If the hiring manager has to decipher your resume jargon, don’t expect a call back. Phrase your resume with the right keywords. Use powerful words that imply action and sell your experiences by highlighting specific achievements and accomplishments. The right keywords are your key to getting your resume on top of the pile.

3. Job Search Tactics
Browsing through the classifieds? Going through Human Resources? Looking at company websites for job leads? One reason your job search may have hit a dead end is because your methods are outdated. Get with the 21st century and go online! The right social network can connect you directly with the job you want. Use Twitter to find jobs in your field and LinkedIn to maintain your connections. Spread yourself out and try something new — you never know which method will work!

4. Not the Right Fit
There is no perfect recipe to getting hired. You could do everything right — dress your best, arrive on time, and come fully prepared — and still not get the job. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of personality or a clash with the unstated corporate culture. At this point, qualifications don’t matter. It’s the sad truth — and completely legal. One consolation: It’s not you, it’s them.

5. Lady Luck
You’d think if you did everything right you’d be guaranteed a job. But job hunting isn’t always like an equation where the right steps will guarantee you the right answer. Lady Luck can play her hand and leave you in the dust. The position might go to another, equally qualified, candidate, or the timing will simply be off. Family restrictions may prevent you from taking the job or the company simply can’t afford to hire you right now. The best thing you can do in a situation like this is thank your contact for their time and keep that relationship alive. You just may be the person they call for their next opening!

6. High Expectations
It’s one thing to stay positive about your job outlook, and another to have false hopes about your prospects. Are you aiming at jobs out of your league? Expecting a certain salary range or health benefits? We’d all love to work at our dream job, but we take the job that’s good enough — because it is. Ask yourself what you’re willing to give up to get a job. Be honest with yourself. Changing your mindset can broaden your job search results drastically. You may find yourself on a regular payroll faster than you think!

(Hamsa Ramesha | SalesHQ)

7 Tips to Make Meetings More Interesting

7 Tips to Make Meetings More Interesting

Meetings can be deadly, especially if they feel unproductive.
Listening to your boss drone on and on about things that don’t affect you just isn’t a smart use of your time.
So how can you make your boring meetings more productive?

Research shows that increasing activity and creativity in meetings helps increase brain activity and alertness. Everyone’s happier when you make your employees and coworkers feel engaged and important to the meeting. Need help figuring out how? Follow these seven tips to make your meetings more interesting and successful.


Encourage Creativity
We all doodle during long meetings. It helps kill the time and gives our brains a creative outlet. But doodling does more than just waste paper. It gets the creative juices flowing and improves your short-term memory functions.

Try this: Give every meeting participant a few sheets of paper and a couple of pencils and have them sketch out their ideas. It doesn’t matter what they sketch or how accurate it is — you’re not looking for fine art here — the simple act of sketching flexes their brains and helps them feel involved in the meeting.


Make Participation Mandatory
Remember your elementary school teacher who’d call on people even if their hands weren’t raised? She had a point. If you force people to think of answers, it gets their brain working overtime. Nothing makes people feel more uncomfortable than being singled out and unprepared in a meeting. If they know they can be called on at any time, they’ll be more attentive and constantly thinking of answers to each of your questions.

Try this: When you make an important point during a meeting, ask for feedback. If no one comes forward, start calling on the most bored-looking person. “What do you think of this plan?” “Do you think it will work?” “How should we proceed?” They won’t just feel involved in the meeting — they’ll also be generating reactionary, spur-of-the-moment answers that can sometimes breed the best ideas.


Include Vibrant, Engaging Visuals
We’re not talking your dad’s lame PowerPoint here. Slide after slide of numbers and huge blocks of text would put anyone to sleep. A good rule of thumb for any presentation: Show, don’t tell. There’s no point in just reading the words off a screen everyone can see — your coworkers are literate, right?

Try this: Limit the words on each slide to five or six, just enough to make your point. Use the rest of the slides to illustrate what you’re talking about. Use pictures, graphics, and even video to get the message across. Find images that will get a reaction from the audience, whether it be understanding, shock, or even humor. And use vibrant colors, such as reds and purples. The standard blues and grays are just too calming. Do you want to put everyone to sleep?


Use Brainstorming Techniques
Don’t let your meeting get shut down by people shooting down each other’s ideas. If you think your ideas will be disregarded, you’ll be less likely to offer them up in the first place. Put every idea on the table without judging or criticizing, and then discuss which ones are the best. Everyone has to feel comfortable participating.

Try this: When brainstorming, give everyone a topic and have them start writing down random words and phrases in a stream of consciousness. Don’t pause, don’t over-think, just write. Then, have everyone go around and read 5–10 of their best words or phrases. Ideally, should trigger other, fresher ideas from the group as a whole.


Use Games and Toys to Stimulate
There is a reason we gives young children games and toys to help occupy their time — it helps stimulate parts of their brains. Games help with problem solving and deductive reasoning and get creativity flowing. While it may seem silly, introducing toys and games into a meeting can actually help with the productivity of the meeting as a whole.

Try this: Hand out small Nerf guns, and every time someone has a great idea, they get to shoot one of the other participants. Or have everyone illustrate their ideas using Play-Doh. Or turn your brainstorming session into a game of Pictionary. Have people draw their ideas without speaking and have the others guess. Everyone will want to play and the ideas will come pouring out.


7 Tips to Make Meetings More Interesting

Keep the Blood Sugar Up
While donuts and brownies might be bad for you, in small doses they can help elevate your blood sugar during a long meeting and keep your brain active. Offering some kind of simple sugar like bananas, sodas, muffins, or candy will help perk everybody up.

Try this: If you think people will shy away from the donut method, bring a bag of mini candy bars in and hand them out whenever anyone participates in the discussion. It not only gives them a boost of sugar, but also encourages and validates their contribution to the conversation.


Be Concise
Most meetings don’t need to last more than an hour at the most. Keeping people in a confined space for longer than that is just going to make everyone shut down mentally. Not every person needs to be in every meeting. Think about breaking up huge, drawn-out meetings into smaller, quicker meetings with fewer people.

Try this: It’s up to you to make sure everyone stays on topic. Hit the key points. Keep brainstorming sessions to five or 10 minutes, since the best ideas usually come out within that time frame. And no matter you’re at when the hour is up, cut it off and plan to meet at a different time.

Diniz Adrião - Portuguese emigrant - South Africa, Joanesbourg Police responsible

South African citizens and portuguese emigrants who have contributed already for the world cup

Gabriel de Abreu, he is the responsible of the World Cup 2010 Logo!
Learned how to draw in the portuguese minimarket of his father...

Manuel de Freitas, national deputy and responsible for the transportation at the biggest opposition political party. Contributed directly for the transport connections in South Africa until 2050!

Diniz Adrião is the main responsible for Police in Johannesburg,South Africa.
Since the end of Apartheid, Diniz was almost a diplomat, between the conversation from all ethnics in South Africa.
Many stories, for sure, that he has to say about being an example for a multi-racial world...
Keep on eye in this hero.

8 Principles of Fun

8 principles for career management

Interviewed by Portuguese public TV Channel

RTP - BOM PORTUGUÊS

Interview for ODN, Newspaper in Hong Kong - Portuguese feeling about Greek situation

1. What do you think of the new word "PIIGS"?
Can you imagine the citizens of Hong Kong interested to being part of "PIIGS" group? Definitely not.
Nobody would like to be called as "PIIGS". "PIIGS" is no more than an sentence which economists prefers to describe the countries integrated in EU since 80's, and increased their own external debts until today. So "PIIGS" can be compared to the pig animal, who eat everything and not save any food for the coming times.
According to the "P", where I live now, its totally necessary to produce value to have money and pay the external debts. If we look the eurostat last report in the last quarter, Portugal increased 1% the GDP comparing to the last quarter in 2010. Inside UE it was the second best performance after Sweden. UE and EuroZone had 0,2%. This "P"ig actually is made by rubber, save money in their own back and is working hard in the Gym...

( http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/2-04062010-AP/EN/2-04062010-AP-EN.PDF )


2. How is your country's economy recently? What is your prospect of EUR?
This is the time for portuguese economy, because politically the Government and opposition is together finding solutions, and mainly the Euro is being cheaper and cheaper... which allow Portugal to push the EuroZone increasing highly the economy by tourism and exports. I could describe the huge influence of Portuguese economy in South American countries or even to contribute for German industry, but let see for example the portuguese speaking market.
Brazil or Angola which had more than 20% GDP growth in 2007 and more than 10% in 2008 or even Mozambique, São Tomé e Principe, Macao, Cape Verde, Guine Bissau and East Timor. All of these countries are performing very well and Portugal is contributing directly for that with a cheaper Euro. Brazil for example, has 5% GDP growth in 2009 and our exports to Brazil increased 73% in the first Quarter of 2010 to the same in 2009. This year exports to Angola, until April 2010, were more than 21.6% comparing to the last year. With these statistics and Euro being cheaper, I can only being positive and see the best future for Portugal. Am I wrong?

( http://www.indexmundi.com/angola/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html )
( http://economico.sapo.pt/noticias/exportacoes-de-portugal-para-angola-disparam-216_12914.html )
( http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/angola/angola_economy.html )


3. Since the Greece problem was exposed, how have you changed your personal portfolio?
Definitely not change any personal portfolio. The situation of Greece is simple and portuguese citizens are intelligent enough to not be influenced by lobbyists trying to show from the media that everything is going down. Greek State has a huge influence on the Greek economy, is time to cut it and let the Greek market being balanced to the new international trends. Greece needed these reforms long time ago and is better to change now than in the future. Actually, have we seen all European countries before being so together to solve the economic issues and supporting each other as we are doing now? Is time to realize that when this is happening, EU is being solid and consistent and not the opposite.


4. Which kind of investment have you made for your wealth management this year?
First of all, I have to say that I belong to an excellent generation which born in 80's and in the democracy. In any sector (not only in Football with Cristiano Ronaldo), we never being so well refereed and known abroad. To situate easily my case, I have 26 years, an economics degree and 4 years of professional experience in 7 different countries inside EU (thanks to European Union that allowed me to do that easily) and other countries as Turkey or Uruguay. This year I was back to Portugal and in 1 month I could find a job through normal system, being an apartment in the capital, and allow to save 50% of monthly/salary.
In the future I want to start my own business but I am not an example as the majority. However I believe that if every portuguese citizen turn off the external negative mood, stand up and start to operacionalize for their own entrepreneurship goals, all can achieve whatever they want because portuguese economy is an excellent platform for that. In Portugal there is no entrepreneurship burocracy, we can start a company in only one hour and we have a huge number of State/private support programs to do start up.


5. As an European, how did the "debt crisis" affect you (or your family) in your daily life and work? Please also state the biggest change affected you.
The State is handling the external public debt situation, but somehow affected me and my family. The biggest change was this month, which our salary taxes increased 1%-1,5%, 1% for all consumption taxes and my family house credit rates is increasing since last year. However did not have any impact on our savings.