“We trained hard…but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization“. This is not a quote from the latest biography of a retired CEO, or from a management consultant’s book in an airport bookshop. It was written in AD 65 by Caius Petronius, who apparently had an insight or two into organizational development.

In 513 BC, Heraclitus observed that, “There is nothing permanent except change.” And in the 16th century, Machiavelli stated in ‘The Prince’, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” So there you are - change and reorganization was sort of invented by the Roman army, had already been accepted as inevitable by the Greeks, and has continued ever since. But don’t despair if you are part of it, even Machiavelli conceded that it is difficult. But how difficult?

If one has to judge using the conventional wisdom and shared beliefs in this area, the answer is: “Very“. I can’t think of any other phrase or statement more used in management conversations than the one that says ‘people are resistant to change’. By repeating it like parrots, we have taken it at face value. If you heard somebody in a company saying that people are not resistant to change, your first impression would be that he, or she, must be nuts! Look around you: all these legions of consultants and academics saying the opposite; a whole industry of books, tapes, conferences and motivational speakers delivering ‘how to’ (change) solutions, all under the premise that people need to be pushed, otherwise they would prefer to remain static. The Machiavelli school of change management is the official one: it’s going to be difficult, pain is inevitable, people don’t like it - push or else.

There is a particular sector of the organization that has repeatedly been given the Oscar for the ‘best resistance to change’. It’s called middle management. Apparently, there is this layer in the organizational sandwich, somewhere in the middle, that blocks everything, resists everything and that, quite frankly, we would be better off without. So, that’s what happened during the past two decades under the lean and mean corporate clean up. Hierarchical corporate structures became flat pancakes and those battalions of unhelpful managers in the middle - blockers of change, gatekeepers of information flow, obstructive individuals, corporate parasites and ugly people in the ranks of middle management - left big corporations to be resuscitated as top managers in smaller firms, enablers of change, providers of information and knowledge, facilitators of change, and beautiful consultants selling services to their ex-employers at a premium rate. The science best positioned to understand corporate transformation and talent markets is not management science but ecology. The market place is an ecosystem of life and death, growth, maturity, degeneration, regeneration and, unlike biology, resuscitation. But this is a topic for another day.

Now, suspend judgment for a minute, forget management and look around. You may be married and have children who are small and growing, or already grown up and independent. You have perhaps moved jobs three or four times if not more, moved house a couple of times, and perhaps emigrated a while ago. Look at your neighbors, they may be in a similar situation and, if not, surely you know others like you. As for your health, perhaps you feel a bit older now and have stopped doing the things that you did when you were younger, but have started doing new things that you didn’t do just a while ago. Perhaps you stopped smoking recently. Perhaps you have remarried and started a second family. If not, you know somebody who has. You may have seen your children going through primary and secondary school, abandoning you for university (and providing you with that spare room that you always wanted) and having boyfriends and girlfriends, who always look different from what you expected. You’ve seen the death of your parents and the birth of your grandchildren, or you are now spending more time than ever with your surviving parents.

When you look around, what you see is a symphony of change. People, emotions, attachments and geographies sometimes changing with the rhythm of the four seasons, at other times with the violence of tsunamis and earthquakes. There is a name for all this: it’s called life. In life, pain is inevitable but misery is a choice. I can’t figure out who said this first - there are hundreds of people claiming authorship - but what I know is that management could learn a thing or two here. Just by looking at ourselves in the mirror we can see that all around us, and within ourselves, there is pure change. We are part of a Heraclites-sized world where we constantly adapt. From a biological viewpoint we are not resistant to change because we are change. You can’t say that a baby resists becoming a child and a child resists becoming an adolescent. Life and change is the same word. There are different degrees of pain associated with the various changes but we are always in transition; we are transition. And, incidentally, the transformation from pain to misery is largely in our hands.

Unnecessary misery
Sloppy, insensitive, mismanaged, unnecessarily prolonged change programs in companies, whether on the back of a merger or an internal reorganization, create misery out of the possible pain. Creating unnecessary uncertainty by lack of clarity or openness produces anxiety that could evolve to unnecessary pain and misery. We are not talking here about the need for suppression of all forms of pain but the unnecessary hi-fi of pain. We all know that a deviant form of obtaining pleasure is to produce pain. We have a name for this: sadism. There are managers who believe that part of their role is to turn on the pain hi-fi under their underlings. That would apparently make them powerful. I know a few of them. They have a tremendous ability to create a sense of fear and misery around them. They belong to a spectrum of deviant management that has on the one hand benign machismo and, on the other, malignant machismo often disguised as “it’s not me, it’s the system“. Ooops, a conversation for another day!

So, what about change cookbooks that can lead us to reasonable ends with some ingredients of pain, no misery and finally to a good dish on the table? There are hundreds of them but for some reason John Kotter’s - the legendary Harvard expert on leadership - are the management equivalent of Nigella Lawson if you are in the UK or Martha Stewart if in the US (despite her small local difficulty), and my apologies to the rest of the national chefs-cum-advertisers. Kotter’s steps for change read as: establishing a sense of urgency, creating a guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering a broad base of people to take action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and, institutionalizing new approaches in the organizational culture. There you have it, follow the steps, add salt and pepper, put it in the oven, and change will be produced.

Far from dismissing or trivializing Kotter’s approach I think that it has the merit of making management feel that change is doable if certain conditions are created and some success factors are embedded. My main criticism is that there is too much sequence in this approach. Whether he supports this sequential view or whether it is the inevitable translation from the practitioner’s to the reader’s side, I don’t know. After all, we are used to absorbing things such as the six steps to A and B, the five steps to become C, and the three steps for a successful D, etc. We are probably doing the same with managing change and Kotter’s sequence makes sense in this context. But the biological reality, and therefore the psychological, psychosocial and managerial one, is less sequential and more of a parallel one. The boiling life of the organization, the pressure of challenges, the shortening of product and market life cycles, the speed at which technology reinvents itself, the 24/7/365 information and life knowledge, the ephemeral nature of many products and the compressed time and space that, whether you like it or not, characterizes business life today forces us to look at things as ‘whole systems’ as opposed to a ’sequence of events’.

In plain English, and paraphrasing Woody Allen on London (”all seasons in one afternoon“), we need the eight steps in one afternoon. There is no such thing as a sequential, orderly business organization world, but there is a chaotic, multidimensional, network-centric, otherwise very rich one. Kotter’s and a Kotter-like framework would work for me if we could establish a sense of urgency at the same time that we are creating a guiding coalition, and at the same time that we are developing a vision and strategy, communicating, empowering, generating wins, and consolidating gains, all in one and in parallel, all in the pot together and moving backwards and forwards. I know this is counterintuitive but not impossible.

In my article ‘Forget culture, change behavior’, I made the case for focusing on changing behaviors to change the organizational culture. I usually introduce this framework to my clients as a “cultural change program, and this is the last time you hear the word culture“. Behaviors are what matters.

Behaviors in the spotlight
Talking about counter-intuition, people believe that cultural change is always slow, often painful and, on occasion, possibly miserable. This is true when it is not behavioral-focused. Putting the spotlight on behaviors has the advantage of producing faster-than-expected changes that, when properly reinforced, change the ways of doing things, which change culture ‘without calling it a culture change’. The most popular change-management cookbook, Kotter’s, is not behavioral and this is its main weakness. I accept that I may be the only management consultant alive daring to say this; and that it will sound to some like stating that the recipes of three star Michelin restaurants are no good.

One key advantage of behavioral-focused change management is that it’s fast and avoids misery. It doesn’t get rid of the pain, but it makes it very difficult to hi-fi it. Although Sun Tzu, in the 2,500-year-old ‘The Art Of War’, said that “there is no invariable strategic advantage (shih), no invariable position (hsing), which can be relied upon at all times“, people in business are always looking for proven recipes, templates, repeatable process and standardized frameworks. That is why the ’seven habits’, the ‘three steps’ and the ‘50 ways of’ type of literature is so attractive. We can’t blame ourselves for looking at maps to travel and walking sticks to walk in mountains. But we need to see those maps as tools to take us from A to B, not as ends in themselves, and certainly not as providers of one-way itineraries.

Dr Leandro Herrero practiced as a psychiatrist for more than fifteen years before taking up senior management positions in several pharmaceutical companies, both in the UK and the US. He is co-founder and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd, an international firm of organizational consultants. Taking advantage of his behavioral sciences background - coupled with his hands-on business experience - he works with organizations of many kinds on structural and behavioral change, leadership and human collaboration. He has published several books, among which The Leader with Seven Faces and Viral Change, both published by meetingminds.

http://www.meetingminds.com - http://www.thechalfontproject.com

The success is something that is left to be judged on case by case basis. Only a handful of people in modern democracies consider themselves as really successful. There are two universal factors that we identify with word “success”. The first one is most likely to be “wealth”. In global view wealth is extremely rare. At the end of the twentieth century a study found that richest 2% of people own well over 50% of global household assets. But wealth should not necessary be generalized on greed or materialism.

The second category tightly connected with success would be “respect”. Having respect more or less means being appreciated by the community for the work we do. Respect in its core means no less than being loved by others. Respect and love are basis of happiness, a crucial quality of success that can not be covered by material wealth.

There are 4 really strong principles to follow if you want to get close to the selected group of successful individuals:

1. Do the things other people are afraid of!
All you need to do is to get out of that pool of mediocrity and to understand that you do not need to be an average guy. How to do it? Do the things other people are afraid of! Majority of people are afraid of public performance, talking to strangers,… Well, do not be like that. Go out, speak to people, dare to stand up for your goals.

2. Search for motivation within yourself!
The easiest motivation is the so called “he motivation”. If he could do it, I can do it as well. That is the poorest way to drive your dreams forward because life will put hurdles on your way, hurdles that no other successful person had to cross. And you will stumble, thinking that no one has ever made it with such a bad luck. Accept bad luck and do not become a part of it - do not let it drain your motivation. You have to realize that you are unique because you have the choice to be different. Your mindset is responsible for bringing you closer to your goal. The attraction law secrets can surely help you with that.
Make that power of unique decisions and positive mindset your key motivators because all you will ever need to succeed is “you”.

3. Do some mistakes!
There are some mistakes you will have to do, even though you know you will fail. Some mistakes can not and should not be learned from others. If you are not prepared to go wrong, there is no way you will learn the positive effect of doing mistakes. You will have to fail 99 times in order to become good enough to succeed in attempt number 100. That 100th person, decision, event, attempt… will support your goals and will make it worth falling 99 times. But if you would not have failed 99 times, you would never have had a chance to gain experience of making that last attempt a real success. And there is no way to learn that from other people mistakes.

4. Be sociable!
In the modern world of web based businesses and virtual realities, short messages and spam mails, it is easy to forget that people are the ones that will decide of your success or failure. The wealth is in hands of human beings, and you need to communicate with people on a personal level all the time. There is always a living person behind each an every decision that is being made on this planet.
How to be more sociable? This one is old as the bible and will probably never lose its power. Treat people in a same way you would like to be treated! And that statement very much involves talking to people, making them feel important, special and loved. Never miss a chance to share a nice word with people surrounding you and to listen to them.

You will find out that 4 steps of building a successful life cover much more than just “increasing wealth” and “gaining respect”. Implementing them to your life will open your eyes to a whole new world of personal growth opportunities. Wrap each goal you have into proven findings of attraction law secret and there is no mountain you can not conquer.

For the full length article on success, personal growth and wealth visit Melanie Hudson’s success building site at http://www.attraction-law-secret.com .

As many as one in five people face problems applying for a credit and it is not just the poor who can find lenders less than willing to help. Anyone who has had credit problems in the past will find their options severely limited. Others might never have had credit before, but that in itself can provide a barrier to obtaining credit.

When assessing a person’s application for credit, lenders, look at two areas: the person’s credit history and their credit score. Poor credit history will certainly amount to a low or poor credit rating, but a clean credit history or none at all, is no guarantee of a good credit score either.

As many as one in four people in the UK have some form of adverse credit history such as late bill payments, defaults, arrears, CCJs and bankruptcy. These people will have trouble satisfying the credit scoring criteria used by many lenders and individuals with a bad credit rating will be turned down for a loan by many lenders. However, this company specializes in arranging bad credit loans for people with a poor credit rating, they have access to a number of lenders who are sympathetic to people with impaired credit. As an independent broker they are not tied to any particular lender and can advise on the top deals available to you. Serious problems such as county court judgments (CCJ), bankruptcy or defaults on a loan will stay on file for six years; bankruptcies and CCJs are a matter of public record, with details held by the courts.

Less serious, but still problematic is a history of missing payments on a personal loan, credit card or a mortgage. Mortgage arrears are given particular weight by lenders. A default - where a lender has effectively given up chasing repayments - is also extremely serious. One or two late payments on a credit card might not be a problem. Typically, lenders will only contact credit reference agencies once an account has been in the red for some time, so being a day or two late with a monthly payment should not create a black mark. Lenders, though, are looking for habitual late payment: this suggests the borrower is struggling to cope.

Multiple applications for credit, successful or not, can be an issue. Each time someone applies for a card, personal loan or a store card, the lender undertakes a credit search. Each search leaves a “footprint” on the individual’s credit reference file. This is not necessarily a problem, but too many footprints can trigger warning bells for lenders. A poor credit rating will cost you money. The best credit card deals are only open to people who meet the credit scoring requirements set down by the main lenders. People with a poor score, or a blemished credit record, will not be able to take out mainstream credit cards.

Improve Your Credit Rating

If you ensure you repay each month so there is no charge, after a year you will have built sufficient credit history to enable you to move to a card with a more competitive rate of interest. If used sensibly a credit can help you strengthen or rebuild your credit rating. A bad credit rating can limit your borrowing options. County court judgments, defaulted payments and bankruptcy orders leave a black mark against your name when trying to secure credit.

Scarlette started on a horse back and had a few falls herself. Therefore, she knows Financial decisions are to be made after considerable thought and backed by good financial understanding.To find poor credit rating loan visit http://www.poorcreditratingloans.co.uk

Sounds like a tongue twister..

In this modern and extremely advanced time of human development and as civilization peeks in many parts of the world, we have come to contaminate our genetic making with an enormous amount of chemical over exposure that not all of us really care to know about.
Natural products have become too boring and none interesting to the more advanced generations.

A while ago I joined the health and wellness industry in a form other than being a doctor. I started a home business that of course centers around health and wellness as that is my field of expertise if you may. It amazed me that I, a sufferer of terrible allergies and multiple chemical sensitivities & a doctor, had simply never heard the name of the one natural ingredient that was the pillar of every product line in my company. I was shocked to simply have never come across the name Melaleuca before.

For those of you who are like me at the time, melaleuca stands for “tea tree oil” it is obtained by steam distillation of the leaves of Melaleuca Alternifolia, a tree mainly found in Australia.

Being a skeptic by default and having learned only through evidenced based medicine, I just had to try it to believe it. what can nature provide for me, and millions of other people who struggle and suffer day in and day out with allergies, eczema and asthma, that antihistamines and anti inflammtories cannot?

I simply decided what the heck! I’ve tried everything else on the face of the earth so I might as well give this a try.
So, I converted my home completely to my health & wellness businesses products which are all formulated to incorporate melaleuca into them.

I simply threw out everything and anything I had bought at a local or grocery store including makeup and cosmetics, my very special shampoo that I have developed a personal connection with and found it traumatizing to seperate from. My household cleaners, my laundry detergent, my cream, even my pet shampoo..
You name it was gone!

Over the months I simply bought all my needs from the health and wellness business Affiliate company and test drove everything.
The conclusion to my benefit yet extreme sorrow was that I no longer had a need for the cocktail of anti- histamines that filled my cabinets nor did I have much indoor use for my puffer that was in at least one drawer of each room of the house.

I realized that I had missed out for the most part of my life on utilizing one of natures gifts to humanity and thus I felt cheated and left out.
I was upset that I had to suffer so much trying to get that Perfect medication, that would cure my allergies and just fix me, but never did.

Enough with my sob story!
If you, or any one you know, are miserable with allergies, eczema, psoriasis, asthma, autoimmune problems, and many other problems I will list later. You are not cursed and NO, you don’t just have to live with it.

-Melaleucas oil uses, based on scientific evidence, include:

-Treatment of Acne Vulgaris
-Treatment of Athletes Foot.
-Treatment of Fungal Nail Infections.
-Treatment of Oral thrush
-Treatment and prevention of plaque and gingivitis
-MRSA ( Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus)

-Treatment of Genital Herpes.
-treatment of Dandruff.
-Allergic skin reactions: reduces histamine induced skin inflammation
-Vaginal Yeast & Bacterial infections: Trichomonus vaginalis

I have come to realize that lack of knowledge sometimes really can be your worst enemy. The target of this article and many to follow is to explain and show the evidence behind rediscovering Melaleuca tea tree oil and how it ties in to health and wellness..

Dr Iman Ashour is a 30 year old stay at home wife. As a medical professional and a member of the Fourpoint group, her goal is the education of family members on applying healthier life styles. As a wellness/business specialist she helps people build a solid , ethical and viable home business.
email: dr_halifaxhealth@yahoo.com
phone: 1-888-210-8176
http:// http://www.meetmybiz.net/?ref=eashoor

This cheddar potato recipe makes a soup that is creamy and smooth with true baked potato flavor. You can dress this up with a dollop of sour cream and chives or crumbled bacon, but I like it just as it is.

The flour serves to thicken the soup. I don’t like my soup real thick, so I usually use less. If you like a real thick soup, increase the amounts to 6 tablespoons or a little more. The important thing when adding flour is to cook it in the butter before adding the liquid. This will avoid that raw flour flavor that can result if the flour is not completely cooked.

It is important that the soup not boil once the cream is added. Boiling will cause the cream to separate. If this is a problem for you, wait to add the cream just before serving and only reheat.

Cheddar Baked Potato Soup Recipe

6 Tablespoons butter
1 cup yellow onions, diced
4 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
6 cups hot chicken stock
4 cups baked potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 cups heavy cream
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons granulated garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse black pepper
1 1/2 cup Cheddar cheese, grated
1/4 cup diced green onions (white part only)
Additional grated cheese and chopped parsley for garnish

1. Cook onions in butter over medium-high heat until transparent, about 3 minutes.

2. Add flour, stirring to prevent lumps. Cook 3 - 5 minutes until just golden brown.

3. Add chicken stock gradually, whisking to prevent lumps, until liquid thickens.

4. Reduce heat to simmer and add potatoes, cream, chopped bacon, parsley, garlic, basil, salt, pepper sauce and black pepper. Simmer 10 minutes. Do not boil.

5. Add grated cheese. Heat until cheese melts and soup is smooth.

Garnish each serving as desired with grated cheese and chopped parsley. You can also use a dollop of sour cream and chives or crumbled bacon.

Do you need more easy soup recipe ideas? Sign up for our newsletter at Easy Soup and Stew Recipes from Easy Southern Cooking and get quick and healthy recipes delivered to your email regularly.

Are you interested in traditional southern cooking? Diane has just finished a free cookbook of her favorite southern recipes. Download Easy Southern Favorites today. These recipes are guaranteed to have them begging for more. Best of all, its free!

Diane Watkins is a traditional southern style cook. She enjoys cooking, teaching, and writing about good food and family. For more information on southern cooking and recipes visit her website at Easy Southern Cooking

The Bank has averaged about $2 billion in annual IBRD and IDA lending over the past five years, representing nearly 10 percent of total annual lending, although the share of overall education lending for Africa has steadily declined over this period. On average about 25 countries receive a loan or credit for education from the World Bank each year. Although it varies from year to year, about half of all education lending — about $1 billion per year — is devoted on average to basic education (primary and lower secondary levels); about half of education lending on average is also in the form of IDA credits. About 1/3 of education lending is through multi-sector programs such as social funds, urban development, poverty reduction and public sector governance. As of July 2006, the Bank’s education portfolio consisted of 136 operations in 88 countries, amounting to $7.74 billion in net commitments.

In addition to its own lending, the World Bank has been a leader in creation of the Education Fast Track Initiative, which is beginning to make an important contribution in terms of mobilizing and coordinating financing for education from other donors. As of July 2006, 54 low-income countries are receiving financial or technical support from the FTI, 20 as fully endorsed partners and another 34 through the FTI’s capacity building fund (the Education Program Development Fund).

An equally important element of Bank work in education is knowledge sharing and capacity building. This includes research in key areas of education such as lifelong learning, teacher training, education quality, tertiary education, school-based management, bilingual education, labor market outcomes, private sector participation, girls education and economics of education, as well as training courses organized by World Bank Institute and others.

Taking Concrete Actions To Improve Education

The Bank expects to lend slightly more than $2 billion in its 2007 fiscal year and to exceed its recent average of 25 countries receiving support. Lending for Africa is expected to increase somewhat to slightly over $400 million. Further increasing lending for Africa in coming years should be a high priority for the institution. The Bank could expand its lending for education considerably if more IDA funding and internal funding for education were available.

An additional 40 countries are expected to join the FTI partnership by 2008. Depending on increased support from the Bank and other donors, the FTI initiative hopes to enroll some 70 million out-of-school children by 2015, 42 million of whom are girls, and to help millions of others who are already in school to receive a higher quality of education.

However, funding shortfalls jeopardize donor credibility and the scaling up of further investments. While recent commitments to the FTI Trust Funds of US$299 million represent a significant step forward, the needs are greater, growing, and longer term in nature than resources currently committed. The current 20 FTI endorsed countries require a total of US$1.1 billion annually in external financing, and the funding gap for these countries alone is $510 million for 2006. If 40 more countries join over the next two years, as expected, the annual financing gap will reach US$ 3.7 billion per year. Along with increasing its own support for education, leveraging increased support from others in education should be one of the Bank’s highest priority.

Emmanuel Ayomide Praise is a world leading internet entreprenuer and investor. Some of his areas of interest include sport management,merchandise,ownership,internet entreprenuership,investments, media and writing amongst others.
Business URL: http://www.emmapraise.blogspot.com,

http://www.nigeriasoccer.blogspot.com,

Education

“I go to collect water four times a day, in a 20-litre clay jar. It’s hard work!… I’ve never been to school as I have to help my mother with her washing work so we can earn enough money… If I could alter my life, I would really like to go to school and have more clothes.”

–Elma Kassa, a 13-year old girl from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

AT A GLANCE:

Despite recent successes, more than 100 million primary school-age children still do not attend school and about 264 million adolescents of secondary school age are not currently enrolled.
Average educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa is 3.5 years while in industrialized countries it is nearly 10 years.

Due to a lack of capacity and recurrent cost financing, the majority of developing countries still cannot systematically measure their children’s learning achievement.
Over 800 million adolescents and adults lack the competencies that could equip them with the skills needed to work their way out of poverty and up into an increasingly competitive, global labor market. Two thirds of these youth are women.

In the developing world, the richest 20 percent of the population is almost three times as likely to be enrolled in school as the poorest 20 percent of the population.

Tremendous disparities exist in tertiary education enrollment between the developed and developing world despite the recognized impact of tertiary education on national productivity, competitiveness, innovation, and economic growth. Tertiary enrollment is 86.9 % in Finland, 16.2 % in Indonesia, 7.7 % in Nigeria, and 0.9 % in Mozambique.

World Bank lending for education in Africa has been steadily declining for the past five years.

Summary

The focus of the Bank and its partners on achieving the education MDGs is beginning to have a measurable positive impact on expanding children’s access to school. The Africa Region, for instance, has seen gross enrollments increase from 79% to at least 95%. New initiatives such as the wave of new teachers brought in to achieve Education For All (EFA), the abolition of user fees, the increasing harmonization of donors, and the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) experiment are working and bearing results.

Increased resources and focus will be required in the coming years to make sure that even the most difficult to reach children enter school and to renew our focus on better learning outcomes for all children. There is some concern, however, that at this crucial moment, resources and attention may be turning elsewhere.

Although overall Bank lending for education has remained steady at about $2 billion per year over five years, lending for education in African-the top priority for achieving EFA-has steadily declined from near $500 million in FY02 to just over $300 million in FY06. The Bank’s internal funding support for education activities has also declined. Overall staffing levels for the education sector in the Bank have also dropped by 10% over the past three years, from 210 to 184, and the number of education specialists has dropped by 14% over the same period, from 96 to 83. Quickly reversing these trends and monitoring our increased commitment to education in Africa should be among the World Bank’s top priorities. Finally, the shift toward a focus on quality, consistent with the results focus of last year’s Education Sector Strategy Paper, needs to be consistently translated into more success in measuring and improving learning outcomes.

Emmanuel Ayomide Praise is a world leading internet entrepreneur and investor. Some of his areas of interest include sport management, merchandise, ownership, internet entrepreneurship, investments, media and writing amongst others.
Business URL: http://www.emmapraise.blogspot.com,

http://www.nigeriasoccer.blogspot.com,

When taking out a home equity line of credit, you have the ability to access cash at low interest rates. Typically, home equity lines of credit have lower rates than credit cards and you are only charged on the actual amount that you spend. People with bad credit can also find lenders who will offer them reasonable rates verses credit cards and personal loans. The following are five tips on getting approved and using a HELOC.

Tip #1 Check Your Credit Report
Before you approach lenders it is important that you know what your credit report says. There may be a discrepancy on your report that you should clear up prior to consulting a lender. Also, there may be accounts on your credit report that you haven’t used in a long period of time. If this is the case, then by closing these accounts you will be able to improve your credit score.

Tip #2 Shop Around When Looking For a Lender
It is important to remember that no two lenders are alike. Lenders offer different rates and different deals daily. Many major lenders also offer financing to people with low credit score. There are also sub prime lenders that can provide financing. These lenders specialize in assisting people with bad credit. Sub prime lenders can also offer various unconventional loans, such as 100% cash out of your home equity.

Tip #3 Take Advantage of Higher Insurance Deductibles
Once you take out a home equity line of credit make sure that you raise your deductibles on your auto and homeowners insurance policies. If you increase your deductible, in most cases you will be able to cut your premium by as much as twenty-five percent.

Tip #4 Secure Big Savings
If you have more equity than debt, and plan to stay in your home for the next three to five years, then by replacing your first mortgage with a HELOC you will save more money in the end.

Tip#5 Pay with Rewards Cards

If you are planning to use your HELOC for a major purchase or home improvement project, then you are better off to use a rewards card for the purchases. Once you make the purchases with the rewards card, you can immediately payoff the card with the money from your HELOC and reap the rewards from the card.

View a List of Recommended HELOC Lenders Online - We maintain a list of recommended mortgage companies online and update the list regularly.

Things to Know About Home Equity Lines of Credit- Read this article to learn more information about HELOC’s.

Certain beliefs, convictions and statements keep being repeated in our conversations and seminars and feedback sessions with managers and leaders. What follows is Part Four of our series dealing with beliefs that are critical to success in the areas of Leadership and Hiring and Selection.

Leadership

In a new job, three things you need to do right away are; get to know your boss and his top three expectations; take action on an issue that you have inherited; and identify your “universe” - the people and processes that have direct impact on your job.

Step up to situations you instinctively feel are issues the first time they happen - once you have let them go the first time it becomes more difficult to approach them the second time, and the third time, and on and on - practice Constructive Confrontation.

90 to 95 percent of the answers to any organization’s issues lie within the people within the organization - getting that “collective genius” to work is a source of huge competitive advantage and one of the top leadership challenges.

Replacing assumptions with expectations is critical - and it is done through the establishment of goals that align individual effort with organizational goals.

Personal savings and investments buy you independence and the freedom to make choices - and make you much more effective as a person not compromised by need when you have to take a stand - on anything.

Recognize that only 17% of the population learns by reading. That means 83% learn by observing, doing or a combination of the two. Ensure your processes and programs reflect this reality.

The biggest mistake is making a mistake and then not admitting it. Leadership is the ability and willingness to step up to mistakes and fix them and be accountable, while others simply wring their hands and hope for the best.

Your set of skills, experiences and accomplishments have broad application to a variety of opportunities - place a high value on how much you bring to the table.

Encourage constructive, “what if” dreaming - encourage turning dreams into goals that lead to action that lead to the dream being fulfilled.

Opportunities will be presented to you - some will be more obvious than others. Train yourself to think in terms of opportunities - particularly if you instinctively think in terms of consequences. 30% of the population thinks in terms of opportunities and 70% in terms of consequences.

Avoid putting your boss in the position of having to choose between you and another person - bosses don’t like being put in that position. If a choice has to be made, there is a good chance your boss will resent having to do it, and even if you win, you may lose! Better to work out your peer level issues with your peers.

If you have a manager who constantly communicates they could do better if only they had better people, you have a leadership problem, not a people problem.

Hiring and Selection

In every successful organization, every hire and selection is seen as an opportunity to improve the organization.

Hiring and selection is the job of the leadership of successful organizations. Staff functions can provide help, but the leadership of the organization must lead.

“A” players are defined as the right persons in the right jobs. That fit is defined by the organization, not by the flow of applicants.

Spend at least as much time and effort on ensuring the success of new hires and selections as was spent on their acquisition.

The manager of the person being hired must be accountable for the hire decision - it is amazing how many managers do not consider themselves accountable for the decision to hire.

Make sure you have a hire process, and insist that it is followed - sloppy hiring leads to all kinds of things - all bad. Most employee lawsuits arise out of poor selection processes and practices.

Other things being equal, select the smarter person. Make sure your process can identify applied intelligence as part of the selection process.

Leaders will know within 90 days whether or not a person is going to make it. If they are not going to make it, they take action quickly.

Share these beliefs, convictions and statements with your own universe of people and be amazed at how effective they can be as a tool to begin discussions on the issues in your organization.

Andy Cox is President of Cox Consulting Group LLC. The focus of his work is on helping organizations and their people increase their success in the hiring, developing and enhancing the performance of leaders and emerging leaders. Cox Consulting Group LLC was started in 1995, and has worked with a wide range of organizations, managers and leaders - helping them define success, achieve success and make the ability to change a competitive advantage. He can be reached at http://coxconsultgroup.com

Are you shy? If you suffer from extreme shyness, you have probably wished there was a pill you could take that would make all your shyness just go away.

Researchers have discovered that some anti-depressant medications, particularly the kind called SSRI’s (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors), can help people who suffer from a condition called social anxiety disorder to become more sociable.

This class of drugs seems to help people who are socially anxious to turn down the excessive volume of their inner judgmental thoughts.

Is it a good idea to take a pill to make you friendlier? There are pros and cons to be considered when deciding whether to take a drug for social anxiety. The SSRI drugs can cause insomnia, weight gain, nervous agitation, and a loss of sexual desire, as well as many other less common side effects. These drugs can also be quite expensive.

Because the SSRI drugs are relatively new, it is not yet known what the long-term effects of this class of drugs may be. Some doctors are concerned that society is trying to medicate shyness which is a normal human condition.

Yet many shy people who are overwhelmed with negative feelings of anxiety when they are around others turn to these medications to deal with their social anxiety.

When using SSRI medications, the improvement in sociability only lasts as long as the drug is taken on a regular basis. When the drug is discontinued, the symptoms of shyness will likely reappear.

Using Illegal Drugs Or Alcohol To Cope With Shyness

Many people who are shy or who have a fear of being rejected by others, try to deal with their fears by getting drunk or taking illegal drugs whenever they are at a party or in a social situation. This can be a dangerous way to try to deal with shyness or a fear of social rejection.

Have you developed the habit of drinking lots of alcohol or using illegal drugs so that you can relax around others and just let loose? Getting very drunk or stoned at parties so that you overcome your sensations of feeling anxious is very common with people who feel inadequate or shy.

There are many dangers with this approach, and it does not lead to any positive solutions.

You won’t be at your best when you are intoxicated, and the people that you meet when you are drunk or stoned will only get to know your intoxicated self, not your real self. By abusing alcohol or drugs you also increase the risk of other negative outcomes such as getting into arguments and fights, and having serious accidents.

One danger of course is that you can become physically and psychologically addicted to drugs or alcohol. Eventually the addiction can cause even more serious problems in your life than the problems you started out with. If you rely on drugs and alcohol to get the courage to deal with other people, you will never develop the social and emotional skills needed to make real emotional connections to others.

This article is by Royane Real. Do you want to learn ways to overcome shyness and learn how to make more friends and have a better social life? Download Royane’s new special report “How to Overcome Your Shyness and Your Fear of Rejection” at http://www.lulu.com/real