WHAT IS TOLERANCE?

 What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly – that is the first law of nature."

– Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), French Writer.

Bob has worked for his organization for many years. He has lots of hard-won, practical experience, and he has a specific, preferred way of doing his job. His new manager, Janisha, is straight out of business school. She has an advanced degree and a fast-paced style, and is keen to improve the way that things are done.
Although Bob and Janisha try to get along, they're becoming increasingly intolerant of one another. Bob resents Janisha's desire to change the way he works. It frustrates Janisha that Bob won't adopt certain new technologies, such as the organization's instant messaging program, to speed up his work. Because of this, they avoid each other as much as possible.
If Bob and Janisha tried to find common ground, instead of being intolerant of one another's working styles, they could build a relationship of trust and mutual respect, instead of their current, strained one.
21st-century workplaces are often filled with people from different backgrounds, ages, races, sexual orientation, viewpoints, and religions. To work well together, it's essential that team members embrace these differences with respect and compassion. However, you also need to know where to draw the line with some behaviors.
In this article, we'll look at tolerance in the workplace: what it means, how to handle intolerance, and how to tell what shouldn't be tolerated.

What is Tolerance?

Robert Green Ingersoll, a 19th-century American politician, once said, "Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself." The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines tolerance as "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry."
Put simply, tolerance means keeping an open mind when interacting with others who are different from you, and treating everyone with respect and compassion, even when you don't share their opinions or values. It means embracing differences and recognizing that these differences help to make our world such a rich, diverse, and exciting place.
These differences can include race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, philosophy, values, physical abilities, and age. There might also be differences in viewpoints, family obligations, background, dress, work practices, political beliefs, attitude, education, and class.

Why Tolerance is Important

Human beings aren't born intolerant. If you watch young children playing in a schoolyard, they care nothing for the color of someone's skin, their gender, or the way that they're dressed. They see nothing other than a playmate.
Often, as we get older, we're taught to embrace the differences around us. For some, however, these differences may begin to challenge a sense of "safety." People often relate easily to those who are similar to themselves, but they may struggle with those who are different.
No matter how different someone else may seem, the reality is that we all share the common bond of humanity. Our emotions and life experiences bind us together, and we often have far more in common with one another than we might think.
This is why tolerance is so important. When we have an attitude of inclusion, a world of possibilities can open up.
Tolerance encourages open and honest communication, promotes creativity and innovation, fosters respect and trust, improves team work and cooperation, and encourages good work relationships. It also enhances cooperation, loyalty, and productivity – all of which are highly important in the workplace!

What Tolerance Looks Like

Tolerance in the workplace can exist in many different ways, both large and small.

• Janet is a Christian. She respects the right and obligation that her direct report, Aamir, has to pray five times daily in accordance with his Muslim faith. She avoids scheduling meetings during these times, and makes sure that everyone on the team understands that when he closes his door, Aamir shouldn't be disturbed.
• Sam is from a small town in the southern United States, a region known for its slow, unhurried business style. His new boss, Mark, is from New York City, which is known for doing business at the speed of light. Although the two have dramatically different working styles and expectations, they try hard to accommodate one another. Mark accepts that while Sam will always meet his deadlines, he won't answer email at night, during lunch, or on weekends. Sam understands that Mark likes things done as quickly as possible, so he does his best to get his work done before it's due.

Put simply, whenever you demonstrate understanding, empathy, and respect to someone different from you, you're practicing tolerance.

How to Encourage Tolerance in Your Team

You can do many things to encourage tolerance in your workplace.

Seek to Understand

Your team members may not believe in the same things or act in the same way as one another, and this may be causing friction. So, what can you do to improve relationships?
Start by encouraging your people to take a courteous interest in one another's beliefs and behaviors, and coach them in active listening skills, so that they can best hear what others are saying.
You can then coach them to appreciate the business importance of tolerance, and practice using the Perceptual Positions technique during these sessions to explore different points of view. Your goal is to help your people be more empathic. As such, they need to be able to put themselves in other people's shoes and see things from their perspective.

Watch What You Say

Ralph Ellison once said, "If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison, and destroy."
Being tolerant of others also extends to what you say: words have consequences, both good and bad. This is why it's important that people think carefully before they speak about sensitive things. Coach your team members to think about the people around them, and the people who will read what they write. Are they saying, or implying, anything that might hurt someone else? Is their message one of tolerance, respect, and compassion? If not, then it might be best for them stay quiet, or to revise their messages.

Set an Example

Sometimes, it's easier to teach tolerance than to practice it. So, lead by example. Don't forget that your words and actions can influence others, so set a good example by demonstrating kindness, compassion, and tolerance with others.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
If your people are struggling with tolerance, it's important that you let them know that intolerance, or discrimination, is not acceptable. You need to address bad behavior at work quickly.

Understand Cultural Differences

Chances are, your team members work with people from different cultures. Every culture has different values and worldviews, which can make it challenging at times to find common ground and work together.
There are several techniques that can help people overcome these cultural barriers.
Encourage your people to use Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner's Seven Dimensions of Culture to understand the preferences and values of different people's cultures. Also, knowing about Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions will give them an insight into the positions and views of people from other countries. You can also teach Cross-Cultural Communication to help them communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Understand Different Working Styles

Tolerance also extends to people's attitudes and ways of working. Others may not do things in the same way, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they're in the wrong!
It's easy for people to become frustrated when others have different working styles. Use psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs® Personality Testing, the DiSC® Model, and the Big Five Personality Traits Model to help team members appreciate others' characteristics and working styles. This will help them get along better with people who work differently.
Models like the Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile and Belbin's Team Roles are useful for helping your people understand one another's different natural team roles.

When to Draw the Line

Although being tolerant means accepting others' behavior or viewpoints, it's not the same as indifference, indulgence, apathy, or condescension. It doesn't mean accepting or justifying behavior that is morally or ethically wrong, or that is harmful to someone else.
When practicing tolerance, you have to know where to draw the line with some behaviors. However, it can be challenging to know where to draw the line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable."
To determine whether a behavior is acceptable or not, ask your people to think about whether it's doing any of the following:

• Harming someone else unnecessarily.
• Damaging your team's mission, or damaging the organization.
• Undermining the cohesion of the team.
• Breaking any organizational rules or being dishonest.
• Negatively affecting the person's work or relationships.

If they feel that the other person is behaving badly, or is doing something ethically or morally wrong, then they should know that it's OK to challenge the behavior.
For example, imagine that you work in an open plan office. Your colleague, Lee, sits near several new team members. These new people are loud, often talking to each other about topics unrelated to work, and their language and stories make him extremely uncomfortable. Lee likes to work quietly, and has trouble concentrating when these people are talking.
In this case, it's fine for him to ask them to quieten down, because their behavior is making it difficult for him to work. And it's right that you support him when he does speak up.
How people should speak up in these situations is a highly personal decision, so encourage them to use their best judgment. Instinctively, most of us know the difference between right and wrong, so people shouldn't discount what they're feeling.
Encourage your team members to ask themselves, "Will I regret not speaking up later on?" Often, people avoid speaking up against intolerance because they feel that they don't have the right, or they think that they're stepping on the other person's freedom of speech. However, with later reflection, they regret not taking a stand.
If people are unsure about what to do, let them know that they can approach you with their concerns, especially if the person in question is a team member. Ask them to let you know specifically what happened, and to communicate their concerns.
If they decide to speak up immediately, make sure that they know to keep their emotions under control. Anger or frustration will only make other people defensive: they probably won't listen, and they certainly won't reconsider their actions with an open mind. Emotion will only entrench poor behaviors.
Instead, they should be firm and assertive. Encourage them to quietly point out the problem and gently explain why it is an issue. They should resist the urge to reprimand or embarrass their colleague; this breeds resentment and will likely eliminate the chance for long-term change.

Key Points

Tolerance is defined as "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry."
To encourage tolerance at work, people should first seek to understand others, be aware of what they say, set an example, and make an effort to understand cultural differences.
It's important to learn where to draw the line with tolerance. If someone is being hurt, or a person's words or actions are harming your mission, your team members or your organization, your people should know that it's OK to step in.

SOURCE: Mindtools.com

Huawei and ZTE pose security threat, warns US panel

 

Officials from the two firms have been questioned by US lawmakers as part of the probe

 

Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE pose a security threat to the US, a congressional panel has warned after its probe into the two companies.

The two firms should be barred from any mergers and acquisitions in the US, the panel has recommended in its report set to be released later on Monday.
It said the firms had failed to allay fears about their association with the Chinese government and military.
The two are among the world's biggest makers of telecom networking equipment.
"China has the means, opportunity and motive to use telecommunications companies for malicious purposes," the committee said in its report.
"Based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems."
Both Huawei and ZTE have previously denied the allegations.

 

“Start Quote

Purporting that Huawei is somehow uniquely vulnerable to cyber mischief ignores technical and commercial realities, recklessly threatens American jobs and innovation, does nothing to protect national security, and should be exposed as dangerous political distractions”

William Plummer Huawei

Espionage fears

Huawei was started by Ren Zhengfei, a former member of the People's Liberation Army in 1987.

As the firm has grown to become one of the largest global players in the sector, fears about its ties with the Chinese military have frequently surfaced.
There have been concerns and allegations that it was helping China gather information on foreign states and companies, charges that the firm has denied.
Last year, its purchase of American computer company 3Leaf systems, was rejected by a US security panel.
Earlier this year, it along with ZTE, faced allegations that some of their equipment had been installed with codes to relay sensitive information back to China.
Senior executives from the two companies denied those allegations when they appeared before US lawmakers in September.
Political distraction? This latest report comes in the midst of a US presidential campaign in which China has become a political hot topic.
Both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney have pledged to increase the pressure on Beijing on issues ranging from China's currency policy to state subsidies for Chinese firms.
Earlier this month, Mr Obama signed an order blocking a deal by a Chinese firm, Ralls Corp, to acquire four wind farm projects near a US naval facility in Oregon.
It was the first foreign investment to be blocked in the US for 22 years.
The Chinese firm has since sued Mr Obama, alleging the US government overstepped its authority.
William Plummer, Huawei's vice-president, said the latest accusations against the telecom firm were politically motivated.
"The integrity and independence of Huawei's organization and business practices are trusted and respected across almost 150 markets," he was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.
"Purporting that Huawei is somehow uniquely vulnerable to cyber mischief ignores technical and commercial realities, recklessly threatens American jobs and innovation, does nothing to protect national security, and should be exposed as dangerous political distractions."

Source: BBC.com

WHAT IS STRATEGY AND VALUE CHAIN ANALYSIS?

Strategy is the art of creating value. It provides the intellectual frameworks, conceptual models, and governing ideas that allow a company's managers to identify opportunities for bringing value to customers and for delivering that value at a profit. In this respect, strategy is the way a company defines its business and links together the only two resources that really matter in today’s economy: knowledge and relationships or an organisation’s competencies and customers.

But in a fast-changing competitive environment, the fundamental logic of value creation is also changing and in a way that makes clear strategic thinking simultaneously more important and more difficult. Our traditional thinking about value is grounded in the assumptions and the model of an industrial economy. According to this view, every company occupies a position on a value chain. Upstream, suppliers provide inputs. The company then adds value to these inputs, before passing them downstream to the next actor in the chain, the customer (whether another business or the final consumer). Seen from this perspective, strategy is primarily the art of positioning a company in the right place on the value chain - the right business, the right products and market segments, the right value adding activities.

Today, however, this understanding of value is as outmoded as the old assembly line that it resembles and so is the view of strategy that goes with it. Global competition, changing markets, and new technologies are opening up qualitatively new ways of creating value. The options available to companies, customers, and suppliers are proliferating in ways Henry Ford never dreamed of.

Of course, more opportunities also mean more uncertainty and greater risk. Forecasts based on projections from the past become unreliable. Factors that have always seemed peripheral turn out to be key drivers of change in a company’s key markets. Invaders from previously unrelated sectors change the rules of the game overnight.

In so volatile a competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a value chain. Increasingly, successful companies do not just add value, they reinvent it. Their focus of strategic analysis is not the company or even the industry but the value-creating system itself, within which different economic actors--suppliers, business partners, allies, customers--work together to co-produce value. Their key strategic task is the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among this constellation of actors in order to mobilise the creation of value in new forms and by new players. And their underlying strategic goal is to create an ever-improving fit between competencies and customers.

To put it another way, successful companies conceive of strategy as systematic social innovation: the continuous design and redesign of complex business systems.





Tapped from:

Richard Normann and Rafael Ramírez

                                       [Harvard Business Review, July/August 1993, Vol. 71, Issue 4]

LADIES, WATCHOUT!

ON-CAMPUS VS. OFF-CAMPUS LIFESTYLES, THE REALITIES MY SISTERS MUST KNOW.

It is an unquestionable fact that upon gaining admission into a tertiary institution like a university, everyone has always had great and penchant desires to excel, do great things in future, and become better persons. Unfortunately, as the saying goes: "man proposes, but God disposes". Most times, we have always neglected some very vital things about our lives, leave them to the wind, and later on try to chase after them, only to realise that the wind had taken them away.
This piece goes to my beautiful sisters who have always thought that life is all what they see everyday on campus. Life's really good, but then we ought to get the understanding that it becomes better when we plan towards it, measure it, strategise and review every step as we go along.
I want to dwell on 'Marriage' and the kind of frustrations ladies go through after age thirty (30). Ladies after 30years have always tended to make a lot of wealth, live in their dream houses, drive their dream cars, live large, change clothes and do so many things at no one's control. But they soon realise that their dream man never comes along. They see guys and expect them to propose, but unfortunately they have always failed to realise that guys propose based on their assumptions and presumptions and the underground works/queries they carry out on ladies.
Naturally speaking, most guys that will go into a relationship that sees the lady have the upper hand financially, they have always had their own reason(s) why. Basically, they are mostly into it for monetary gains only to re-engage with other ladies elsewhere.
Guys that also come along to propose are always 'Married' ones who would want to play the 'Hit-and-run' crusade. They already have the resources, the cash and all that you could think about, so therefore other ladies have 'eyed' them and already occupied those positions. You too, have all the necessities of life, but lacking a comforter whom you would point your hand to as 'husband'. It isn't usually because the ladies don't have good characters or are disrespectful, but their positions or properties alone pushes men far away from them.

I would therefore want to urge my fellow sisters on the various campuses of the nation's universities and polytechnics to take things easy, try to lie low, reduce their high-time, hi-life syndrome and try to see whether they could build  life-long relationships with their fellow students who might probably turn around to be their future husbands. If after completing school you think you aren't going to be a nun, please let's face the reality and settle down early with a trusted partner, such that our lives don't turn around to be frustrated after we have gotten all the pleasantries of life, only to weep bitterly alone in bed.

This in effect does not in any way mean that I am suggesting we should just hang out with any guy on campus, but steadfastly, we can realise some qualities in one or two guys who come our way, so therefore we could capitalise on those opportunities and secure our futures.

I have seen a lot of women in high ranking positions seeking for men to marry, only to used and dumped half-way, that is why I find it prudent to draw our minds to these salient points in order to help safeguard ourselves from future disappointments.

BEYUO JOHN PAUL
ABE POST GRADUATE STUDENT
PENTECOST UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
P.O.BOX KN1739
KANESHIE.
EMAIL: mwinbee1@hotmail.com
020 931 9095