Do school kills creativity?
Banyak tokoh, dan buku membahas tentang sekolah mematikan kreativitas. Pada dasarnya mereka berpendapat bahwa Sistem edukasi yang ada pada sekolah kita adalah warisan jaman dulu untuk mengisi tenaga kerja Industri yang ada.
Sir Ken Robinson memiliki pendapat yang sama, Beliau menambahkan bahwa kreativitas harus di ajarkan sama pentingnya seperti matematika, bahwa terjadi inflasi degree.. dulu S1 dianggap cukup untuk mengisi lowongan kerja, sekarang S2 pun banyak yang nganggur. Very good speech Enjoy
Raise your hand..!
[dropcap2]W[/dropcap2]hy we as Indonesian are too “shy” to ask questions or give opinion during trainings or seminars or other events. Let alone challenging the speaker on the topic. I have seen many times when speaker ask simple opinion to the audience with only three possible answer (Agree, Not agree, No opinion) large number of audience did not raise their hand at all. In contrast Indian will happily give their comment or opinion on most of the things even without asked. Why is that…?
Since I am Indonesian and have the same tendency, I probably can offer some explanations:
- Indonesian has been taught, not to argue with higher rank or older person. Asking question or giving contradictory questions can be seen as arguing, so if we do not agree to the speaker, we tend to keep it to our self.
- We probably afraid, afraid that we asking stupid questions, afraid of giving wrong opinion etc. The stake is too high, everybody is watching, if we do give wrong answer or opinion, we will embarrassed our self in front of a lot of people.
- As eastern, we are very shy people, we tend to lay as low as possible, do not want to be on the spotlight. It’s in our cultural
Although the value thought by our ancestor is good, I think it has bad impact for our growth, we can not get the optimum result of the trainings or seminars if we do not actively participating. The doctrine deeply nailed down in our unconscious mind, It will pull us down if we want to raise our hand.
So how to free our self from this situation..? I have few tips that works for me, you can try it if you want.. here is how:
- Take the very front seat (which usually empty anyway), hence you can only see few people looking at you when you asking questions. If you take the back seat, you will see a lot of eye looking at you when you ask questions, it give additional pressure.
- Give your self quota that you will ask at least two questions and try to find a good questions by listening fully and digest what the speaker said and try to make it relevant with our experience, if it seems doesn’t fit with our experience, it is candidate for a good question. Try to engage more with speakers.
- If we get comfortable asking questions or give opinion now we can do it from any seat we want. My last advise do not over do it…
Cheers
The Importance of Giving the Best Price to Clients
As part of my job, I have been in consistent negotiation process with some of the clients. Somehow I do not like it, because sometime it really can “wreck” friendship that I built over the years with some clients. I want to have more friends not enemies and life is just too short for the endless argument about pricing.
In the past few years, I am trying to give all my clients the best price or fair in the first proposal that I submitted to them. To me this serve some purposes very well
- This will cut down the negotiation process and we can focus our time, energy and money for something else that more useful for both party.
- If I lost the business, I will not regret it because I know that if I take the business, it will do more harm to me or company, unless if we are in the survival mode.
- If I do not give them best price, it means that I am not doing my job as their account handlers.
Similar analogy: you may prefer to buy in the modern trade, you do not bargain, just take the product according to your need and pay. But there are downside to it:
- At the first, you will be seen as a person who are very hard to deal with, it will lead to a perception that you are snob or arrogant. Yap.. been there few times..
- When the clients have what so called “purchasing department” the best price strategy as above may give you headache because their KPI is to lower down the cost, and I tell you they are very-very tough.
It took quite a while to your client to understand that you are in a good will to give them the best price. In my case I need around 4-5 years for some giant local clients.
I usually politely ask them to compare it Apple to Apple to the competitors . When the pricing is no longer an issue and client believe that we give them a good price already, we can have fun to work with them and have a closer client servicing relationship.
Why our salary is getting less and less
The company have to make money first to be able to pay us. The competitor drive the profit almost at 
zero level, hence he company will in constant effort to look out for cheaper, faster and better alternatives. And yes, the alternatives is somewhere out there.
World is connected like never before. The job that you currently have can be outsourced to other country with cheaper labor. The more efficient engine or equipment can slash a job or two. The middleman is now having a tough competition from online shop or efficient retailers.
In result, now the job is getting scarce, but new talent is joining the market and hungry for a job. It’s simple economic, when the resource abundant, the price go down. But we all already know that aren’t we? Yet, we still think that we can have our job forever.
Working Class Hero
January or February, is time for employee appraisal, you usually have to make a case how worthy you are for the company. Your manager will decide how big is your salary rise, or whether you are worthy of promotions based on your performance. But again performance is the quite subjective, if you are close with your manager, you may have some advantage.
Its sucks I know… but its a sacred ritual for all company drone to do it every year without fail… John Lennon have beautifully portraying this situation. “Working class hero” from John Lennon may be a good song to remind us to what we are now (and what we are not…) enjoy…
or you can just click this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKwXwU5iWs to watch it in Youtube. The lyric is as the following
Be Extra Ordinary
We can not be “Extra Ordinary” if we do not know what the ordinary is… if everybody else doing what we are doing.. that means ordinary simple as that.
A good company will always try to increase the “ordinary” level, if you ever heard word like “meritocracy”, “forced rank” etc.. that is what exactly the company trying to do.
If you are always on the top rank, congratulation, you are the Extra Ordinary people in the company. If not, start look at your surrounding and the top tiers.. what they do differently, can we do bit of extra based on our strength and passion?
Two things that we easily get simply by asking
There are two things that you can get easily by simply asking:
- Name
- Discount
It look obvious right…? But some of us is really afraid asking those two things. I attended a networking night before, and I found that most of the participants only mingle with their colleague from the same company. After few questions I know that asking names is not really comfortable to some. So they rather wait someone introducing themself.
I do not recommend you asking those two things at the same time to the same person, she or he may be get totally different idea. Imagine if you ask : “Hi, what is your name…? and can I get a discount?” you may get a slap in your face.. . But yeah.. for networking purpose, asking names is totally save and powerful tool.
How to learn something fast and be good at it
Want to learn something fast and be good at it…? here is how to
- Learn the basics, read books, manual etc. If you can afford a teacher or tutor.. that will be really awesome
- Find friends who passionate on the subject, see how they do it
- Try to copy of the work or style someone who good at it. Its OK if the result is far from it..
- Give some twist to the “copy”, make it cuter, smaller, chirpier, bigger, bolder, higher, whatever
- Do it yourself completely new from the scratch, following the book or basic, or use some ideas that you learn from making the “copy”
- Do it again, this time try to break some or most of the rules, rules are meant to be broken, be creative, be naughty
- If you have done all the above, do the last and most important thing… : Be You, do how you like it best
Good morning and Good luck
You are may be in the wrong crowd…
wondered why you may be not getting a job that you wanted? Check your crowd. Are they coming from the Industry that you are dying to work into? or mostly coming from the “stink” job that you are currently doing.
I am not suggesting to abandon the current friends, but we need to mingle with other type of crowd who relevant with the Industry / area that we want to work… more often…
When you want to be entrepreneur, have some more friends who also entrepreneur, and so if you want to work on the NGO, find some friends who work on the same field. etc etc…
Our friends give us support and we can learn from them, but if we have wrong crowd… we may be getting the wrong encouragement we need.
