[there are four news stories in this post.]
The New York Times :: Hold That Thought. Change That Look.
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
...TWENTY-ONE years ago, Thomas J. Peters was a little-known consultant at McKinsey & Company with some unconventional ideas about how corporate management should operate. Make what customers want to buy, not what you manufacture best? Heresy. Fraternize with your company's hoi polloi? Unthinkable. Recognize that corporate loyalty is an archaic concept? Nonsense.
But then he turned those radical ideas into a zippily written business book, "In Search of Excellence" (HarperCollins, 1982). It flew off bookstore shelves and catapulted Tom Peters (he quickly dropped the formal Thomas J.) from consultant to management guru. Never mind that a still-quoted 1984 article in BusinessWeek - the one with the single word "Oops!" on the cover - chronicled the subsequent hard times of many of the companies that Mr. Peters and his co-author, Robert H. Waterman Jr., had cited as excellent. Mr. Peters, who stopped consulting 15 years ago, has churned out nine other successful books, and has a full plate of speaking engagements, at upward of $75,000 a pop.
His 11th and newest book, "Re-imagine!" (Dorling Kindersley), which just arrived in bookstores, is almost a print version of a blog, those ubiquitous online compendiums of personal anecdotes, thoughts and data. Visually, it is a kaleidoscope of images that assault the senses along with the intellect. It is filled with exclamation points, quotations, bright colors, photographs - all offering different nuggets of information at once. Some (younger) readers may find it exciting; many may find it unfathomable, or even migraine-inducing. ...
Q. A lot of the ideas in "Re-imagine!" - women buy lots of things, the "company man" is a species near extinction - are old. Is this really reimagining, or simply repackaging?
A. Don't denigrate packaging; packaging is substance. Steve Jobs understood that at Apple, the folks running Bloomberg's television programs understand that, Braun understands it so well that it put its chief designer on its board. I'm saying that board chairmen should regularly lunch with designers, that companies should put designers on boards. Those are actually pretty new ideas.
And if presented energetically, with passion and caring, old ideas can be news. After all, Peter Drucker was writing about "knowledge workers" 50 years ago, but it still feels like a fresh concept. Marketers may know that women spend lots of money, but the old white guys in management - and don't kid yourself, old white guys still rule the world - must be reminded to put women on boards and in management so that their attempts to sell more to women aren't seen as exploitative. Middle managers may realize that they probably won't stay with the same company forever, but they need to be reminded to undertake some visibly innovative projects to put on their resumes...
CNEWS Canada - Workforce improved between '71 and '01: StatsCan
...OTTAWA (CP) - University graduates invaded not only high-tech industries, but also a variety of high-knowledge jobs in the 30 years between 1971 and 2001, a Statistics Canada study indicates.
Even in the mining, oil and gas sector for example, the percentage of workers with high-knowledge occupations almost doubled, to 26 per cent from 14 per cent.
In general, 34 per cent of knowledge workers had university degrees in 1971, compared with slightly less than three per cent of other workers, the agency reported Thursday.
"By 2001, 52 per cent of all workers in knowledge-intensive occupations had a university degree, compared with less than 10 per cent of those in other occupations."
The study found that the shift toward a knowledge-based economy was not a new phenomenon that emerged only in the 1990s when the information and communications technology sector experienced explosive growth.
"In fact, the proportion of knowledge workers increased steadily over the last three decades, reflecting a growth trend that began long before the high-tech boom of the 1990s," the agency said.
In 1971 about 14 per cent of the workforce had high-knowledge occupations. By 2001 that proportion had almost doubled to 25 per cent.
The study also found that:
-While knowledge-based occupations pay significantly higher wages, the wage advantage enjoyed by knowledge workers relative to other occupations did not increase significantly from 1971 to 2001.
-In 2001, some of the largest concentrations of knowledge workers were in business services at 66 per cent and finance and insurance at 42 per cent.
-In the 1990s, the proportion of workers who were knowledge-based grew faster in service industries than in goods industries.
-University degrees were most common in professional occupations. In 1971, slightly less than 45 per cent of professionals had university degrees. Thirty years later, this proportion was 66 per cent.
-Growth in knowledge-based occupations has occurred in all regions of the country...
...Zone Labs(R), Inc., the most trusted provider of endpoint security solutions, today announced Zone Labs Integrity(R) 4.5, a new version of the company's best-in-class, centrally-managed endpoint security solution. Available later this month, Integrity 4.5 offers the broadest standards-based support for enterprise-wide policy enforcement for today's borderless enterprise. In addition to more complete integration with network access devices, increased scalability and further security hardening, Integrity 4.5 allows enterprises to secure employees' use of public instant messaging services to reap the productivity benefits of instant messaging (IM) without having to invest in proprietary solutions.
"The weakest link in an enterprise risk management program is unsecured end-points which expose vulnerabilities to the corporate network and drain IT productivity," said Eric Ogren, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "Zone Labs Integrity implements standard 802.1x technology in enforcing a centrally managed policy for end-points that extends risk management well beyond the scope of antivirus solutions. Enterprises are deploying Zone Labs to reduce end-point security incidents and significantly reducing the risks of business disruption."
Integrity 4.5 drastically reduces enterprise exposure to security vulnerabilities, malicious code and targeted attacks by using a "proactive security" approach rather than the traditional, reactive methods dependent on anti-virus updates and software patches. Integrity's combination of robust, multi-layered client protective mechanisms and centrally-managed security policy prevents threats from penetrating the network, thus halting propagation and further damage. This "Zero Day" proactive protection becomes even more important with shrinking timelines between the discovery of a vulnerability and the rapid spread of specific exploits such as seen this past summer with the MS-Blast worm. ...
Integrity 4.5 also introduces new features to protect the growing number of enterprises in which employees use public IM services to communicate. Meta Group predicts that by 2007 over 90% of Global 2000 knowledge workers will be running an IM service. Based upon the technology that Zone Labs acquired this past summer to secure instant messaging at the protocol level, Integrity 4.5 includes an optional module to secure PCs from vulnerabilities introduced via any client that accesses AOL, MSN and Yahoo! public IM services.
Unlike traditional approaches to IM security which require proxy servers or use firewall-like rules to block IM traffic, Zone Labs takes a client-centric approach to protecting PCs using IM. As a result, enterprises can easily add IM protection to their existing security infrastructure, retaining the benefits and flexibility that public IM services provide while eliminating the need for costly retraining or installation of proprietary IM solutions. Integrity 4.5 enables central management of encryption for instant messages, content filtering, usage controls, unsolicited communication blocking, as well as usage and event reporting...
Bangkok Post :: Advocates see no progress on reforms
by Ampa Santimatanedol
...Education reform is heading nowhere because authorities are concerned only with keeping power and fail to chart new education courses and set new goals, reform advocates said yesterday.
Ratchanee Dhongchai, a coordinator of the Network for Education Reform, said the education system had not improved since reform began two years ago mainly because there were no new "innovations" and because authorities refused to change.
The National Education Act supports alternative education but so far no mechanisms had been set up to give learners choices outside the mainstream education system, Mrs Ratchanee said.
Schools were still focusing on producing students who competed academically. Teachers, meanwhile, still did not know if they were under the jurisdiction of the education, tourism or sports and culture ministries. Because teachers themselves were confused, they could not give students guidance under the learners-centred education system, part of the reforms.
"Children are left on their own because teachers cannot give them advice. Now both students and teachers seem to know nothing," Mrs Ratchanee said.
Anuj Arbhabirama, a Thailand Research Fund researcher, said education reform failed because there were no goals. Western countries or Japan were turning out knowledge workers to invent high technological products but Thailand could not produce and sell technology like them, Mr Anuj said.
"We need to have goals. We need to think what we we want our rural children to be," he said.
Mr Anuj said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to make teachers know what teaching reform was about by teaching students at Samsen Vidhayalai school himself, but changing teachers would never be easy.
"The prime minister does not understand teachers. To change them, he must empathise with them. He must know what is going on in the heads of those teachers. He may understand the police but he does not understand teachers," Mr Anuj said.
Mrs Ratchanee said some local communities were fed up with waiting for the Education Ministry and had started alternative education programmes themselves...