Wonderful speech by Mr. R Gopalakrishnan -- Executive Director, Tata Sons, at the Convocation of Globsyn Business
School


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKLA0XPGCXU

Art-Go-Round, May 2011

Art-Go-Round workshop, May 2011

On the Lesson Plan: Feelings

'Soft Skills' Business Courses Aim to Prepare 

Students for Management Roles

By MELISSA KORN And JOE LIGHT

Business schools are tapping into their "soft" side.

This fall, students at Columbia Business School will be invited to learn the art of meditation. Emotions will run high in Stanford Graduate School of Business' long-running "Touchy Feely" course. And professors at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business will try to teach students to rein in their type-A personalities, lest they upset fellow classmates.

Victoria Roberts

It's all part of a continuing push by business schools to teach "soft skills"—such as accepting feedback with grace and speaking respectfully to subordinates—that companies say are most important in molding future business leaders.

Although business schools have traditionally excelled at teaching "hard skills" like finance and accounting, those skills become less relevant as an employee ascends the corporate ladder and moves away from crunching numbers to overseeing employees, companies and experts say.

However, with classes often resembling a group therapy session, it is hard to quantify what students actually learn in the softer classes.

A recent study by DePaul University researchers found that managing workers and decision-making—two subjects that require softer skill sets such as being sensitive when delivering feedback—were most important to acting managers. However, those subjects were covered in only 13% and 10% of required classes, respectively, in a study of 373 business schools, said DePaul professor Erich Dierdorff, one of the study's researchers.

More: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704740604576301491797067346.html?mod=wsj_share_linkedin

ART-Go-Round session pictures...

What an exciting and enthralling session it was! 

                                  

    

    

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/susanorlean/2011/05/communication-fatigue.html

COMMUNICATION FATIGUE

Posted by Susan Orlean

I have no idea how to get in touch with anyone 
anymore. Everyone, it seems, has a home phone, 
a cell phone, a regular e-mail account, a Facebook 
account, a Twitter account, and a Web site. Some of 
them also have a Google Voice number. There are 
the sentimental few who still have fax machines. 
If you want to be completely quaint, there are also 
physical mailing addresses. With this multiplicity of contact points, it seems 
like it should be easier than ever to get in touch, but communication has now 
become a snarled mess of options. Every effort to interact involves a strategic 
analysis of the person’s habits. I want to let my friend Buster know that I would 
like to have dinner with him tonight. Does Buster work at home? Then how likely 
is he to have his cell phone on? Is he one of those people who only turns on his 
cell when he’s in his car? I hate that. If he doesn’t have his cell on all the time, 
does he at least check the voicemail? Or—like me—does he just scan the list 
of incoming calls to see who called, but never actually listen to the messages?
If I call his home phone, will he answer it? Recently, I have come to assume that 
any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, 
letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur 
on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone. Before e-mail, before 
Twitter, before texting, I used to watch my answering machine like a hawk; now 
I often forget I even have an answering machine, so any message that lands there 
will languish for days.

Is Buster young? If so, he has a cell phone and it will always be on, but he will never 
answer it. The only way to raise him is by text, although a MMS is always 
appreciated. I could e-mail him—but wait, no; e-mail is so business-y and boring, 
with those insistent, demanding Subject Lines, so Buster, if he is still dewy with 
youth, will probably eschew e-mail. I will have to send him a message on Facebook. 
But does he check Facebook? If he’s under thirty, yes, he checks it every two 
minutes. If he’s over thirty, he looks at it now and again. What to do if he’s, say, 
twenty-nine? I could tweet him—if he’s following me, I can send him a private 
direct message. But what if he isn’t? Then I have to tweet him as a public message, 
which means everyone else sees the machinations of our dinner plans.

I am now getting tired of Buster; tired of trying to assess Buster’s social patterns; 
tired of the fact that instead of making one phone call and having a short, efficient 
conversation, I have to blast him via home phone, cell phone, text, Facebook, and 
Twitter to make sure to catch him somewhere. Since when was communication 
so exhausting?

Excellent ART-Go-Round Workshop!

ART-Go-Round: an individual activity that emphasizes on collaboration and communication.

We recently ran our first ART-Go-Round workshop with a client, a tech company in South Bangalore. What a response! 

We had 6 people participating in the ART-Go-Round session, which spread over half a day, exposing the participants to a fun-filled morning of colour, collaboration, cohesion and creativity. Tubes of paints, sprinkled clothes, and 6 vibrant and evocative canvases later, the participants were left with a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and a deeper sense of catharsis and self-exploration, as they explored their artistic side, many for the first time since school. 

The obvious takeaways from the ART-Go-Round were those touching upon the need for creative expression in the workplace, out-of-the-box thinking, the ability to visualize and express visions and goals through different means and mediums, appreciation for collaborative effort, criticality of sequential production, and many new ones that came out from the participants during the debrief. However, the key takeaways for us was a fantastic sense of achievement, of pride and humility, and of opening the mind to the prospects of a new space where we can help ignite minds to new opportunities, learnings and expressions.