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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (65227)	8/13/2010 9:53:35 AM
From: Joseph Silent	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 217576

This is a very important point. That leaves me in Angola on my 12th year in Africa. How many years have you lived in Africa? Come on tell me your experiences living and working with the Negros. While we walk (or for some of us, waddle) through life, we encounter (at least?) these three phenomena --- indoctrination/socialization, our own experience, and hard fact . Dealing with these in a way that makes our journey constructive and meaningful is not an easy process. Before I had the experience of living and working in a certain European country, I had no experience of caucasian distinctions. In a short time, a series of hard facts drove home those distinctions .... and my experience began to be informed in a way that conflicted with my indoctrination. A series of realizations showed me, in a manner I had no way of comprehending before, that set A was really more complex than I had thought, and could be (at the very least) looked at as sets A and A'. What is indoctrination/socialization? These are negative/positive ways for someone else to make you look at things. They, I think, are pretty much the same because one person's negative is often someone else's positive. For example, where I work it shows up in terms of "complicated favouritism" for women and minorities when it comes to hires, promotions, awards etc .... because a bright mind can make the case for it based on contemporary social values. Often, I can't fault those values. But just as often, my own experience is at odds with those values because I know the award, hire or promotion was plain wrong based on (a) technical proficiency, and (b) potential long-term negative impact (which, granted, is harder to evaluate but is something a decision-making leader, in his/her desire to be promoted/successful, never thinks about ---- because, increasingly, everything that drives one's upward-mobility is based on short-term measures). I don't want to be long-winded :), but I want to support Elmat's point that experience counts a lot. Most leaders I know make decisions based on self-interest and not experience; the decisions have little to do with long-term values to the organization or social values. Having lived and worked in several cultures, I observe that indoctrination/socialization is winning, and there will be consequences. In Eastern culture, for example, my experience tells me that it is going to be a negative for a woman to be forced to sit an in office to make end meets for the family, and a McDonald's on main street there is not going to improve their lives.