Emotional Intelligence: The Shot Felt 'Round the World?Written by Susan Dunn, The EQ Coach
I just hung up phone with Li-Yan, who wants me to come to Malaysia and present a workshop with her on emotional intelligence for businesses. She quit her corporate job there, because she found work environment stifling, unethical and demoralizing. Now she wants to help businesses in Malaysia change to a more emotionally intelligent culture. We agree that when they do, they won’t lose exceptional workers like Li-Yan. Tom McDorman , managing director of Western Digital (Malaysia) Sdn. Blh.D, believes emotional intelligence-style management techniques” can bolster faltering Asian manufacturers, according to an article in Wall Street Journal. When he began cultivating ‘soft’ side of his workers, productivity at his Kuala Lumpur factory jumped 20%. In England, Greg Syke, director general of BBC, was accused of being over confident and “lacking emotional intelligence” by a Labour peer. Lord Lipsey, then tipped as a board member of new media watchdog, Ofcom, said that Dyke’s instincts are “to colonise, to compete and destroy.” Neal Ashkanasy, a professor at University of Queensland, Australia,is also a proponent of emotional intelligence. He says “It’s an easy target in terms of softness and fluffiness, but failure to recognize emotions in workplace [can] reflect in a demoralized workforce.” In April, an Emotional Intelligence Conference is scheduled in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where IIR will challenge participants to “learn about most significant innovation in people management in last 25 years.” They’ll be showing a film where a commercial organization suffers a major business setback, not related to business strategy, but because people in key positions didn’t have appropriate levels of emotional competency. An article on an Australian website begins, “Top leaders are getting in touch with their emotions and those of their staff as intuition and emotional intelligence become hottest management buzzwords.”
| | Failure is Not an OptionWritten by Diane Hughes
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that online businesses -- just like brick and mortar businesses -- have a very high failure rate for startups. Ever wonder why that is? There are several business consultants, success gurus, and motivational experts who can tell you. The problem is: Most of us don’t listen.How many times have we heard "success secrets" of multimillion-dollar pros? Countless times we have all been preached to about setting goals, having a defined plan, giving it all we’ve got, and aiming high. Yet still, take a look around. The statistics of small business failures have not changed. In first five years of starting a new business, odds say that you’ll fail. Ready for good news? There is one thing I can tell you -- from personal experience, and from experience of well-known, successful online business owners that I know. More important than setting goals, more than following a plan, more than shooting for moon, is your mindset. Ask people who have succeeded online how they did it, and they are sure to tell you that they had to. That’s right -- they HAD to. Why? Because failure is not an option. When you set your sights on something as grand as starting your own business, you simply have to have mindset that, regardless of what happens, you will not allow yourself to fail. When difficulties come, "failure is not an option" attitude will drive you to overcome them. When things aren’t going as you originally planned (and many times they won’t), "failure is not an option" will keep you from folding. When everybody else tells you that you can’t make it, you will be able to tell them you can because "failure is not an option."
|