Richard Branson: People Power -- the Engine of Any Business

I read the article People Power -- the Engine of Any Business by Richard Branson (founder of Virgin Group) in Entrepreneur magazine some long time ago, but the following piece is still echoing in my mind:

One main reason people leave a job is that they are not listened to.

Be aware that a bad leader can destroy a business very quickly. In small businesses this is easily apparent. On my island of Necker in the Caribbean, we had a general manager who tried to change the way things were done. He discouraged the staff from drinking with our guests. This soured the atmosphere fast. We had to step in to replace the manager and restore staff morale and the sense of management’s trust in them, which had been broken.

Comments

Stampede and the "Dirty" "Dark" Crowd

Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds. About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds. For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action. During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of...

Interview question #1

Since I have been asked to interview experienced PHP programmers, I was preparing few interview questions. I came to know, most of the people ask questions found in the Internet; most of them are like "What is the function used to connect MySQL DB in PHP". Personally, I don't like these types of questions; I'd thought the person must apply ideas what he was taught in colleges--finally I came out with one question: A product vendor has Quantity Vs. Price data like 1 -> Rs. 50 2 -> Rs. 95 3 -> Rs. 140 .... like upto 1 million data. He wants a system, which gives the price when the quantity is provided. For example, if you provide the quantity value as 2, then it should provide Rs. 95. How this system can be designed? As expected, all the people said about using database tables and quering on quantity. I have asked them to find out a system which doesn't use databases--provided the accuracy of the system may not be 100%--it may give at least 90% ac...

.fig extension used by Figma software - source of confusion

Recently one of our customers sent design files in fig format (with .fig extension). As .fig is an extension used by famous old Linux design tool Xfig , we tried to open in it and were getting errors. And then the designer came to rescue and informed about the online tool Figma . Figma provides easy prototyping options for lazy aka productive designers. In my opinion, it is somewhat comparable to Pingendo . It is more of an online tool developed in JavaScript. They also provide desktop version / downloadable software. I'd thought that its performance will be better in desktop tool, but noted that it is only an Electron app.