Finance & Economy

Best time in life

The ups and downs of life may seem to have no predictable plan. But scientists know there are very definite patterns that almost all people share. Even if you've passed some of your "prime", you still have other prime years to experience in the future. Certain important primes seem to peak later in life.

When are you smartest? From 18-25, according to I.Q. scores; but you're wiser and more experienced with increasing age.

You're sharpest in your 20's; around 30, memory begins to decline, particularly your ability to perform mathematical computations. But your I.Q. for other tasks climbs. Your vocabulary at age 45, for example, is three times as great as when you graduated from college. At 60, your brain possesses almost four times as much information as it did at age 21.

This trade-off between sharpness and wisdom has led psychologists to suggest that "maturity quotients"(M.Q.) be adopted for adults.

When are you happiest? You have the best physical sense of yourself from 15 to 24; the best professional sense from 40 to 49.

Before age 24, we believe that our happiest years are yet to come; over 30,we believe that they're behind us. A National Health Survey agrees: After age 30, we "become more realistic and do not view happiness as a goal in itself. If we maintain our health, achieve professional and emotional goals, then happiness, we feel, will follow".

When are you most creative? Generally between 30 and 39, but the peak varies with different professions.

Mozart wrote a symphony and four sonatas by age eight, and Mendelssohn composed his best known work A Midsummer Night's Dream, at 17, but most of the great music was written by men between 33 and 39.

Though the peak in most fields comes early-most Nobel prizewinners did their top research in their late 20's and 30's-creative people continue to produce quality work throughout their lives. For the "well-conditioned mind", there is no upper limit.

Why work?

You are 40 years old, head of China investment banking for Merrill Lynch, the pride of your family and clearly destined for greatness. So, Wilson Feng, what do you say to the Bloomberg reporter who phones you up and asks for an interview?

“I want to change my life,” Mr Feng said. “It's a nightmare. My father won't recognise me if I stay in investment banking.”

Mr Feng is off to go and work for a state-owned Chinese company. “Salaries at state-owned enterprises are low compared with investment banking, but you can have a better life,” he explained. Merrill Lynch is gutted. “It's sad to see him go. He was a model employee,” said Damian Chunilal, head of Pacific Rim investment banking.

“Model employee” is probably nearer the truth than Merrill realises. For this is not simply another case of executive burn-out. Mr Feng is treading a path that, according to research published this week, is likely to get more and more crowded in the months to come.

Worthwhile Work, a report by the communications consultancy CHA, contains the results of a survey of more than 1,500 UK employees working for a range of organisations. It has uncovered deep dissatisfaction with the sort of work that is currently on offer.

About 40 per cent of younger workers (under 35) in private sector companies are considering a move into the public or charity sectors, the survey reveals. In all, one in three private sector workers is thinking about making such a move. More than 60 per cent of 18-25-year-olds, and almost half overall, are looking for what they call “more worthwhile work”.

A phrase such as that will get some managers spluttering with indignation. What on earth do they mean by “worthwhile”? What do they expect? After all you have done for them: paid holiday, sick pay, weekends off, health and safety legislation, protection from discrimination of all kinds, with a salary and pension on top . . . and now they want to be inspired as well? They don't know they're born.

The role model for indignant managers is the film director Alfred Hitchcock. When asked by anxious movie stars what their “motivation” was in a scene, his answer was blunt. “Your salary,” he would say.

Grown-up bosses can also be impatient with the more unrealistic expectations of their employees, especially those held by members of Generation Y – the feisty 20-somethings. There is a paradox here: even though younger colleagues are facing the prospect of working well into their 60s and perhaps beyond, many seem to be in a hurry for rapid advancement.

And younger colleagues in particular seem unpersuaded that dedicating themselves to wealth creation is an attractive or noble option. “You hear people saying that they are going to stick with their private sector job, before going off and doing ‘something more worthwhile',” Colette Hill, chief executive of CHA, says.

The evidence points to leadership failure on a huge scale. Employees do not understand what is important or worthwhile about their work. They do not see why profitability matters. It is hardly surprising that research into employee engagement invariably throws up dismal findings. Employees don't feel they are being offered anything that is worth engaging with.

Leadership gurus talk grandly about providing “a narrative” that people want to follow. More prosaically, it would make a nice change if managers simply told their staff what they wanted from them. The Gallup organisation's “Q12 employee satisfaction survey”, a popular way of finding out what staff are thinking, opens with the statement: “I know what is expected of me at work”, a phrase employees are asked either to agree or disagree with. That first statement often reveals, to business leaders' surprise, just how badly people are being managed.

Does corporate responsibility (CR) offer a new narrative that people want to hear? While the CHA survey confirms that CR matters to employees, it is not an end in itself. Good businesses are responsible. But they also have a purpose that people can believe in. Leaders have to do a better job of explaining why their employees should turn up for work in the morning.

There is a reason why sitcoms such as The Office and novels such as Joshua Ferris's bestseller of last year And Then We Came To The End have proved so popular. The portrayal of worthless rather than worthwhile work strikes a chord. Mr Ferris's deceptively flat narrator describes an average working day in these terms: “We spent most of our time inside long silent pauses as we bent over our individual desks, working on some task at hand.” Inspiring? No, not really.

Stacking supermarket shelves so that families can find what they want to eat is worthwhile. As is paying cheques into the right bank account for customers. Managers have to show why these and other apparently banal tasks matter.

We don't have to go quite as far as the Chicago-based writer Studs Terkel, who said: “Work is about a daily search for meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash . . . for a sort of life, rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying.” But the business that succeeds in providing worthwhile work will leave competitors struggling in its wake.

Doing something meaningful

AS a patriotic student activist in Ang Lee's Golden Lion-winning Lust, Caution (Se Jie), Leehom Wang plots to kill a traitor to save his country. But in his latest album, Change Me (Gaibian Ziji), the R&B idol faces up to the threat of climate change. "In the past, I cared about whether I could lead a music trend," said the 31-year-old Wang. "But now I just want to do something meaningful for my listeners." He believes that pop music should reflect modern society, and he wants new challenges. After watching the Oscar-wining American documentary An Inconvenient Truth he was shocked by the threat of climate change. The environmental problem persists and Wang feels now is the right time to address it. Green music In Change Me, he calls on everyone to help save the planet by making small adjustments in their behavior. And that's what he's doing in his daily life too. "I ride a bicycle to interviews," he says. "I set the temperature of my room at above 28 C. I refuse to buy over-packaged products." The cover of Wang's new album is made from recycled paper. Inside, he gives advice on protecting the environment, for example, by using energy-saving light bulbs. To get more people involved, Wang's organizing an online charity auction to sell off outfits from his concerts. He will use the money raised to plant trees. Some critics believe the album won't sell because of the serious message behind it, but Wang says that he sees the album as a "venture". He also thought hard about it before making it. "This topic doesn't belong in mainstream pop music," he said. "My record company was reluctant to let me change direction, but I insisted." However, the air conditioner in the interview room was actually set at 22 C, rather than Wang's 28. But we can't blame the hotel. They probably haven't had a chance to get Wang's album and hear his message. What to expect NO matter what, this "green" album still has some elements that will sell. The song Long Live the Chinese (Huaren Wansui) was written in honor of Olympic champions like Liu Xiang and Guo Jingjing, who made an ad with Leehom Wang. He wrote another song, Falling Leaves (Luoye Guigen), under the pen name Kuang Yuming, which is actually the name of his character in Lust, Caution. Wang said he wrote the song with the emotions and tone of Kuang. "I felt the words were strange after I finished composing it. It was in the style of 1930s poems and Kuang's essays. I realized that I had got too absorbed in him and seemed to stay in the past." Careful listeners can find traces of Chinese hip-hop in the album, as Wang himself admits: "It can be subtle. After all, you don't have to add some Peking Opera just to show that music is Chinese."

Detour to romance

Located in the checkroom in Union Station as I am, I see everybody that comes up the stairs.

Harry came in a little over three years ago and waited at the head of the stairs for the passengers from the 9:05 train.

I remember seeing Harry that first evening. He wasn't much more than a thin, anxious kid then. He was all dressed up and I knew he was meeting his girl and that they would be married twenty minutes after she arrived.

Well, the passengers came up and I had to get busy. I didn't look toward the stairs again until nearly time for the 9:18 and I was very surprised to see that the young fellow was still there.

She didn't come on the 9:18 either, nor on the 9:40, and when the passengers from the 10:02 had all arrived and left, Harry was looking pretty desperate. Pretty soon he came close to my window so I called out and asked him what she looked like.

"She's small and dark," he said, "and nineteen years old and very neat in the way she walks. She has a face," he said, thinking a minute, "that has lots of spirit. I mean she can get mad but she never stays mad for long, and her eyebrows come to a little point in the middle. She's got a brown fur, but maybe she isn't wearing it."

I couldn't remember seeing anybody like that.

He showed me the telegram he'd received: ARRIVE THURSDAY. MEET ME STATION. LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE. MAY. It was from Omaha, Nebraska.

"Well," I finally said, "why don't you phone to your home? She's probably called there if she got in ahead of you."

He gave me a sick look. "I've only been in town two days. We were going to meet and then drive down South where I've got a job. She hasn't any address for me." He touched the telegram.

When I came on duty the next day he was still there and came over as soon as he saw me.

"Did she work anywhere?" I asked.

He nodded. "She was a typist. I telegraphed her former boss. All they know is that she left her job to get married."

Harry met every train for the next three or four days. Of course, the railroad lines made a routine checkup and the police looked into the case. But nobody was any real help. I could see that they all figured that May had simply played a trick on him. But I never believed that, somehow.

One day, after about two weeks, Harry and I were talking and I told him about my theory. "If you'll just wait long enough," I said, "you'll see her coming up those stairs some day." He turned and looked at the stairs as though he had never seen them before.

The next day when I came to work Harry was behind the counter of Tony's magazine stand. He looked at me rather sheepishly and said, "Well, I had to get a job somewhere, didn't I?"

So he began to work as a clerk for Tony. We never spoke of May anymore and neither of us ever mentioned my theory. But I noticed that Harry always saw every person who came up the stairs.

Toward the end of the year Tony was killed in some argument over gambling, and Tony's widow left Harry in complete charge of the magazine stand. And when she got married again some time later, Harry bought the stand from her. He borrowed money and installed a soda fountain and pretty soon he had a very nice little business.

Then came yesterday. I heard a cry and a lot of things falling. The cry was from Harry and the things falling were a lot of dolls and other things which he had upset while he was jumping over the counter. He ran across and grabbed a girl not ten feet from my window. She was small and dark and her eyebrows came to a little point in the middle.

For a while they just hung there to each other laughing and crying and saying things without meaning. She'd say a few words like, "It was the bus station I meant" and he'd kiss her speechless and tell her the many things he had done to find her. What apparently had happened three years before was that May had come by bus, not by train, and in her telegram she meant "bus station," not "railroad station." She had waited at the bus station for days and had spent all her money trying to find Harry. Finally she got a job typing.

"What?" said Harry. "Have you been working in town? All the time?"

She nodded.

"Well, Heavens. Didn't you ever come down here to the station?" He pointed across to his magazine stand. "I've been there all the time. I own it. I've watched everybody that came up the stairs."

She began to look a little pale. Pretty soon she looked over at the stairs and said in a weak voice, "I never came up the stairs before. You see, I went out of town yesterday on a short business trip. Oh, Harry!" Then she threw her arms around his neck and really began to cry.

After a minute she backed away and pointed very stiffly toward the north end of the station. "Harry, for three years, for three solid years, I've been right over there working right in this very station, typing, in the office of the stationmaster." www.EnReading.com

Let Us All Be Heard

There really is nothing more important to me than striving to be a good human being .so, to be here tonight and be acknowledged as the first to receive this honor is beyond expression in words for me . We all are just regular people seeking the same thing –we all just want to know that we matter .we want validation. We want the same things .we want safety and we want to live a long life .we want to find somebody to love .we want to find somebody to laugh with and have the power and the place to cry with when necessary . The greatest pain in life is to be invisible. What I’ve learned is that we all just want to be heard .And I thank all the people who continue to let me hear your stories, and by sharing your stories ,you let other people see themselves and for a moment ,glimpse the power to change and the power to triumph . Maya Angelou said ,”When you learn ,teach .when you get ,give ,”I want you to know that this award to me means that I will continue to strive to give back to the world what it has given to me .so that I might even be more worthy of tonight’s honor .

Making the impossible possible

Adidas aims to position itself as the No 1 sports brand in China next year by capitalizing on its relationship with the organizing committee of the Beijing Olympics, said Wolfgang Bentheimer, managing director of adidas in Greater China.

"As a brand, we have seen a very positive development in the China market," he said.

"The Beijing Olympics is another very important milestone for our long-term development in China. It will certainly elevate our business further. With the campaign we have launched, it will help us to achieve the No 1 position for a sports brand in China in 2008."

After joining adidas in the late 1990s, Bentheimer has since taken the brand to new heights across several markets.

Before coming to China, he was the managing director of adidas Korea, where his team won a regional award for its 2006 FIFA World Cup activities.

Before moving to South Korea, he filled a similar role in Hong Kong, the No 1 adidas subsidiary in terms of retail operations and its No 2 in terms of retail marketing.

He also once served as vice-president of marketing for adidas Asia Pacific, during which time he oversaw the highly successful 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan campaign that locked adidas in as Japan's favorite sportswear brand.

After moving to China early this year, Bentheimer now oversees a tightly-knit team of over 620 staff who maintain adidas Greater China as one of the best-performing subsidiaries in the adidas Group.

Now he has his eyes firmly set on the Beijing Games.

"The Beijing Games is going to be the biggest and most important Olympics to date, and China is a very important market for us," said Bentheimer, who launched a marketing campaign of unprecedented size and scale for adidas at the end of last month.

"The concept is to rally the nation of Chinese people behind their Olympic athletes and heroes and to give them support and to involve them in the athletes' journey towards the Olympics," he explained.

Entitled "Together in 2008, Impossible is Nothing," it is an integrated marketing campaign aimed at engaging Chinese consumers on a new level. Through a combination of TV, print, outdoor media, public relations, digital, point-of-sale and road show activities, it provides various platforms enabling consumers to get closer to the athletes and to the Olympic Games.

Bentheimer's earliest memory of the Olympics dates back to the 1972 Munich Games, when he was just 14 years old.

"I can still remember them," he said. "Just imagine what kind of spirit you have in watching the Games and athletes. I mean, almost everything stands still for weeks because everyone in the country is focusing on the Olympics, even those people who are not always interested in sport, because it is such a special event."

"Our brand attitude is 'Impossible is Nothing'. Every athlete has at some point said to themselves, 'I can't do this'. But this word 'impossible' -- for athletes as well as for our brand -- does not exist. They always try to overcome the impossible."

As the Official Sportswear Partner of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, adidas will supply sportswear for all staff, volunteers and technical officials at the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Under its agreement with BOCOG, adidas outfitted the Chinese Olympic teams for the Turin 2006 Winter Games and will do so again next summer in Beijing.

Adidas has finished designing the clothes for the Chinese sports delegation at the 2008 Games and will display them with the Chinese Olympic Committee next year when it names its Olympic squad.

With a network of 3,550 adidas and Reebok stores spread over 400 cities, adidas is on track to achieve 1 billion euros ($1.47 billion) in net sales by 2010. This benchmark will make China, together with Japan, the second-largest market for adidas outside the United States.

"China will be the biggest market for us in Asia next year and probably very soon the biggest market for adidas worldwide," he predicted.

God's Coffee

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups – porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some

expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.



When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said
"If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress


Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee,In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups.



Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us."



God brews the coffee, not the cups.......... Enjoy your coffee!



"The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything."



Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly.

A Bend in the Road

Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. Missy had been his first love, and Miles fervently believes she will be his last. As a deputy sheriff in the North Carolina town of New Bern, he not only grieves for Missy, but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice.

Then Miles meets Sarah Andrew. The second-grade teacher of his son, Jonah, Sarah had left Baltimore after a difficult divorce to start over in the gentler surroundings of New Bern. Perhaps it is her own emotional wounds that make her sensitive to the hurt she sees first in Jonah's eyes, and then in his father's. Tentatively, Sarah and Miles reach out to each other. Soon they are both laughing for the first time yes.and falling in love.

Neither will be able to guess how closely linked they are to a shocking secret - one that will force them to question everything they ever believed in. and make a heartbreaking choice that will change their lives for ever.

thanks for everything

In our life, we have rarely expressed our gratitude to the one who’d lived those years with us. In fact, we don’t have to wait for anniversaries to thank the ones closet to us—the ones so easily overlooked. If I have learned anything about giving thanks, it is this: give it now! while your feeling of appreciation is alive and sincere, act on it. Saying thanks is such an easy way to add to the world’s happiness. Saying thanks not only brightens someone else’s world, it brightens yours. If you’re feeling left out, unloved or unappreciated, try reaching out to others. It may be just the medicine you need. Of course, there are times when you can’t express gratitude immediately. In that case don’t let embarrassment sink you into silence-speak up the first time you have the chance. Once a young minister, Mark Brian, was sent to a remote parish of Kwakiutl Indians in British Columbia. The Indians, he had been told, did not have a word for thank you. But Brian soon found that these people had exceptional generosity. Instead of saying thanks, it is their custom to return every favor with a favor of their own, and every kindness with an equal or superior kindness. They do their thanks. I wonder if we had no words in our vocabulary for thank you, would we do a better job of communicating our gratitude? Would we be more responsive, more sensitive, more caring? Thankfulness sets in motion a chain reaction that transforms people all around us—including ourselves. For no one ever misunderstands the melody of a grateful heart. Its message is universal; its lyrics transcend all earthly barriers; its music touches the heavens.

Long Term Vision

Long Term Vision

Early on Schultz realized that the key to his success was to recruit well-educated people who were eager to communicate their passion for coffee. This, he felt, would be his competitive advantage in an industry where turnover was 300 percent a year.

To hire the best people, he also knew he must be willing to pay them more than the going wage and offer health benefits that weren't available elsewhere. He saw that part-time people made up two-thirds of his employee base and no one in the industry offered benefits to part-timers.

Schultz went to work in an effort to encourage his board of directors to increase expenses while most restaurant executives in the 1980's were looking for ways to cut costs. Initially Schultz's pleas to investors and the board fell on deaf ears because Starbucks was still losing money.

But Schultz was persistent. He was looking long term and was committed to growing the business with passionate people. He won, and he said many times afterward that this decision was one of the most important decisions, if not the most important, that he made at Starbucks.

His employee retention rate was about five times the industry average, but more importantly, he could attract people with great attitudes who made their customers feel welcome and at home.

As a leader, Schultz realized early on that Starbucks wasn't a coffee business serving people...they were a people business serving coffee. This simple but powerful insight was the foundation upon which his long term vision was built.