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

Work avoiders on the rise

roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes -- 80–20 rule / Pareto principle One popular store (that is known for its less selling price, 6-storied air-conditioned showroom) is situated to close to our home. But, Heleena is allergic to it. Reason? Even though there are at least 50 sales people per floor, only 1 or 2 people will be working and responding to the customers' queries. In another shop, I even noticed that the owner was serving customer when many staffs were cleverly avoiding the show! I'm finding the same problem everywhere. Who're affected here? Obviously the people who're actually working--they will have to handle more work that the clever people have avoided. Two common gestures/characteristics I have noted in these clever people: 1. They'll pretend to be absolute ignorant (These people's agenda are merely to avoid works, but not to take credits.), 2. They'll create politics on anything (These people's agenda ar...

Google used PHP?

I wanted to know what are the pages in Google are powered by PHP . I have tried various keywords including "inurl"--but it produced huge list. So I tried "filetype:php" and it worked very nice. The real keywords are php filetype:php site:google.com Google used PHP?

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...