A New Year haiku or two…
A new year begins/
may it bring joy and peace for/
you and those you love
Year of the dragon/
So be bold and not humble
Water for wellness
GONG XI FA CAI
As the Chinese would say, Happy New Year! Yes, I know, the Scots have “first footing” where they bring luck into a house by being the first person over the threshold carrying a lump of coal…but the French leave themselves until the end of January to wish “bonne année” ..So yes, for many I am almost a month late, for the French I’m just about ok, for the Japanese I should have said “akemashite” at least three weeks ago… but as this blog is all about the East and the West, I have taken the liberty of starting the year using the Chinese New Year calendar.
So what is in it for us? According to many of my Chinese friends, the year of the Dragon is a special year for all. To bring in the new year, my friend Rosita prepared the most amazing spread of Chinese food and ordered us all to bring Champagne to celebrate this most auspicious of years. Needless to say, we brought in the New Year in style!
The Chinese Dragon is a mythical creature that is both symbol of good fortune, sign of power and a somewhat divine animal who is ultimately the master of authority. If you know anyone born in the year of the Dragon, pay him or her your respects…2012 is the year of the water dragon and apparently is a year in which to be bold, not humble.
This is the year to do what you have always dreamed but never dared.
So what do I want this year to be? Well, as I have just about finished sending new year greetings to my friends I can now concentrate on my aims for the year…you know, resolutions and all that…While I hope that this year I will find the time to write for this blog more often, I don’t want to make any wild promises. However I very much hope that this year a new project I am currently working on goes from paper to practice. I will be writing about it in future posts but for the moment think culture, think fluency, think doing business in today’s multicultural world…and ask yourself what really makes the difference between knowing your profession and knowing how to make it a success in a different cultural context. Today the key to business success is cultural fluency.
So with that said, may I be the first to wish you a happy, successful and culturally fluent 2012!
Social Media – are you in control or is it?
It’s been far too long since I last wrote a post for East West…I am not going to make excuses because there really aren’t any to make. The other day I went to a talk on the social media handshake. The presenter made it all sound so simple: just spend 8 minutes a day updating Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the other sites your profile is on, make a couple of intelligent tweets on Twitter, check your blog for responses and post something worth sharing, and “bob’s your uncle” as the saying goes…
Well, if you are anything like me, this is much easier said than done. How can one possibly do everything in only 8 minutes ? I know a few people who invest more time on Facebook than they do in speaking to real life friends…then there are others that spend time hooked to their Blackberries (well last week must have felt like being ship wrecked on a desert island !! aagh 3 DAYS WITH NO PHONE…) or answering every single email in realtime…When on earth do these guys get the real work done?
Our lives are gradually being invaded by digital tools that are the most amazing inventions (thanks to Steve Jobs and many others) since possibly the light bulb. It is incredible to think that we can speak to people on the other side of the world almost as if they were in the same room as us. Skype is making the world a smaller place and so is just about every other app around. But as the world becomes smaller our networks expand. How in control of your network are you?
1000 friends on Facebook? or 100 ? Are you managing your online relationships as you would your real life relationships? How sincere are you when you ask someone whom you’ve never even met to become a friend? Have you ever taken a step back and worked out how much time you spend each week on actually meeting people and how much time on virtually meeting people?
Today’s social media revolution is definitely here to stay. Whether you like it or not and whether you use it or not, social networks have you covered. Your profile is out there be it thanks to photos friends have posted, an article or book you’ve published or a comment you posted. So my advice, and that of many social media gurus (yes, they too are making a mint advising people on how to live “virtually”) is :
- take a quick look at your online profile;
- decide whether you want to be in control and to what extent;
- choose the tool that suits you – don’t be duped into using twitter if you don’t see the point
- work out how much time you can spend socialising on line and exactly what good it will bring you;
- whether it’s 8 minutes, 80 minutes or more, make it work for you and not the other way;
- give yourself regular free time with no digital tool even in earshot;
- and remember EVERYTHING you do, show, say online is open to the world…there are NO secrets in the social media world!
And last, but in no way least, socialising is all about enjoyment…it shouldn’t be a chore. We’ve all enough of those to do every day without adding to our list !
Sharing ideas …in the Athens of the North
Athens of old was at one time the capital of the ancient world and an amazingly vibrant nest of learning, ideas and knowledge.
The Athens of the North, as Edinburgh is sometimes known, lived up to its nickname in July this year when it hosted TEDGlobal, a conference whose very straight forward aim is to share great ideas. TED as you may know by now (as I do make regular references to it) stands for technology, entertainment and design. It was the brain child of a clever Philadelphian who realised in the early eighties that technology hardly ever spoke to entertainment and they both never spoke to design. Richard Saul Wurman is an architect who had the insight to try and “make information easily understandable”. He is no longer associated with the Sapling Foundation which owns TED but is one of the forces behind TEDMED.
Making information easily understandable is one of the main aims of the TED Conferences and the week long conference at the Edinburgh International Convention Centre certainly tried to do that. Talks on the theme of “the stuff of life” took us from beginnings to the dark side via medical, scientific, and artistic experiments which all went to prove that in life there is indeed much stuff and much to say about it.
What is perhaps so unique about TED Conferences, be they independently organised TED-like experiences that come under the logo TEDx (see TEDxMIA), or Chris Anderson and Bruno Giussani – TED Curator run events, is the skill with which each speaker has been trained to present his idea.
At TED one doesn’t really go into the details of one’s career, nor of one’s job. It is a totally non transactional, purely idea based conversation platform where a conductor like Charles Hazlewood can expound his theory on trust and a swiss “jetman” like Yves Rossy can explain how to build a flying machine. Speakers mingle with attendees. Ideas are exchanged both online and off. Conversations are sparked at 8am or 2am…And the icing on the cake is that all of the talks presented at the conference are then put online so that you, me and anyone who wants to can download them, listen, watch and share what are often brilliantly simple explanations of amazingly complicated theories or ideas.
Edinburgh has always been a seat of learning. I am not going to list how many awe inspiring Scots trod these cobbled streets. However, I cannot resist feeling a little proud that TED has found a new home here in the Athens of the North. Thank you Chris, Bruno and the whole team!
For ideas worth sharing, let your fingers do the walking: ted.com
The stuff of life…a great summer holiday !
One of the highlights of my summer so far has been a week at a conference centre. Yes, there are some people who pay a premium to go on a Caribbean luxury cruise with 3000 people and there are others, like myself, who prefer a week with 800 or so people exchanging ideas on the stuff of life.
Incredible though it may seem, after a week at a conference centre, I felt completely invigorated. In fact, it was rather as if I had taken my brain to a spa. Treatments included brain storm therapy, conversation brush up, neuron massage, emotional reiki and idea facials.
This spa is commonly known as TEDGlobal (where TED stands for technology, entertainment and design), and for the first time, it was held in Edinburgh, my home town. It brought together a crowd of thinkers and doers who were all there to share ideas and listen to amazing speakers talking very broadly about “the stuff of life”. Listening to the talks was only part of the brain therapy. The other part was what I’d call the serendipity spa service where meeting other attendees was a series of serendipitous moments: a simple hello my name is…turned into a meeting of minds, an exchanging of ideas, or an intellectual or emotional “click” which made you think ” yes, I was meant to meet this person although I didn’t actual go looking for them”…
Talks were spread over five days and ranged from subjects as diverse as cave art, solving energy problems, future billions and the great divergence, language as the voice of our genes, the dark side and cyber crime, the chemistry in a kiss, a new way of being atheist, the economic invisibility of nature, making music to create trust, the chemistry of morality, the the Cyrus cylinder, and making peace an option…Already out of breath? All these talks and many more will be available to listen to on ted.com.
So my advice for an even better summer holiday is to take your brain on a mini break and go, relax, close your eyes, press play and enjoy some great ideas.
Sharing ideas …connecting community
Today I had the most amazing meeting. Thanks to a friend who works on women’s health and is conducting a study with a group of Haitian women, I discovered more about the amazing island of (Little) Haiti. So far my roamings have led me primarilly to the Haitian Cultural Centre but today I went to the Centre for Haitian Studies and met not only the head of Radio Mega (radiomega.net) but a wonderful actress and radio presenter who goes by the stage name of Fanie and is called Monique Souvenir.
Monique gave me a rude awakening to the situation in Haiti. She has been living in Miami for some years now and only been back to Haiti once, for a friends funeral. When she described her fear of the situation there and her desire to try and help her country get back on its feet, I suddenly realised how little I really knew about what Haitians all over the world must be feeling about their country.
Connecting communities is part of the mission my colleagues and I at TEDxMIA have set ourselves. Today made me realise just how separate and insular communities in one town can become. Here we are in one part of Miami moaning about traffic, or prices, or our kid’s homework or sugar and bad school food, or the Mayoral race and how much it cost the city, and a few kilometres away, a whole community is dispairing about how their family and friends are going to make ends meet and get up on their feet again.
Talking to these wonderful shakers and movers from Haiti made me think twice about what it means to connect and communicate. Next time I pretend to understand a situation, I might just take a step back and put myself into “avatar mode” in order to try and see things from a different perspective. I will presume to know nothing until I have shared an idea or two.
Royal Wedding – a haiku or two
Today and for many days to come, the Royal Wedding will be the subject of many a spoken and written word. Difficult not to write something on the media event of the century (so far). I was asked by a friend here (who also happens to be the British Consul) to compose a haiku for the op-ed he did for the Miami Herald (here in Miami, April is poetry month). So, in an attempt to capture in just a few words what Britons everywhere will be experiencing, I dipped my proverbial pen in some Japanese ink and composed a few more haiku.
An April shower
Of happy faces and flags
Greet the newly weds
As I played with words, tried to find the right count and cadence, seasonal references (all important elements of a haiku) I realised that the haiku is possibly the most ancient form of tweeting (as in twitter and all that). So here are a few more attempts
Spring sun shines on crowd
Eyes search, hands wave, voices cheer:
A couple in love
Am I a little too optimistic about the weather ? Well, yes probably given the high chance of rain in UK on an average day!
Warming rays of sun:
A prince and his brand new bride
A nation applauds
On that note I will leave you with the link to Kevin McGurgan (yes, we Scots are everywhere!) article.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/28/2190606/here-comes-the-royal-couple.html
Sugar (and some frightening facts about fructose)
Corn syrup, corn sugar, crystalline fructose, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrates, galactose, glucose, barley malt, brown rice syrup, high fructose corn syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, invert sugar, isomalt, lactose, levulose, maltose, maltodextrin, maple sugar, saccharose, sucrose, syrup, turbinado sugar, xylose…in a word: sugar.
Obsession ? Passion ? Addiction ? Probably all of those things…and yet, had you ever thought of it as a poison? Last Tuesday Jamie Oliver, hero of the school food campaign and America’s food revolution showed us just how much sugar is going into school milk. In last Sunday’s New York Times, Gary Taubes then went one step further into describing sugar not only as bad for our health but as a poison and possibly one of the explanations for cancer. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1
Is the message finally getting through or is this just another phase where sugar and high fructose corn syrup are going to get bad press but nothing concrete will be done? I sincerely hope more and more people realise exactly how destructive the massive quantities of sugar being consumed here in the States, in Europe and now more often than not, in Asia, are.
Robert Lustig’s 2009 talk that inspired the NY Times article is definitely a wake up call to how poisonous sugar and high fructose corn syrup are. I was glued to all 1hr30 of what was sometimes technical biochemistry but the overall message was clear as day: fructose in soft drink liquid form is metabolically evil. HFCS is not only cheap (and has made its way into every type of food on the supermarket shelf) but is equally as evil.
According to Lustig, a book entitled Sweet & Dangerous written by a British scientist John Yudkin in 1972 about how deadly sugar is, has proved to be correct. The low-fat food craze heralded the arrival of fructose as an alternative to make low-fat food taste better…bad idea…it’s killing us.
So, taking inspiration from all of this, I tried to find some more frightening facts about fructose:
1. Juice consumption increases the risk of type 2 diabetes
2. Today, an average American consumes 2-3 (1.5kg) pounds of sugar a week. At the end of the 19th century the average American consumed only 5 lbs (2.5kg or so) a year.
3. Over the last 20 years, sugar consumption in the U.S. has increased to 71kg of sugar per person per year. The Japanese only consume 20kg.
4. Brown sugar is actually sugar crystals that have been prepared in molasses syrup with colouring and natural flavours.
5. Sugar (or one of the various types of sugar listed above) has found its way into practically everything we eat be it bread, condiments, sauces, and foods we would usually consider “savoury”.
6. Simple sugars contribute to asthma, mood disorders, mental illness, nervous disorders, diabetes, heart disease, gallstones, hypertension, and arthritis.
7. Sugar raises insulin levels in turn depressing the immune system and promoting fat storage.
8. Sugar has no nutritional value. It is a carbohydrate that is metabolised like fat.
9. Cancer’s favourite fuel is glucose. And you can run a car on ethanol or sugar…
10. Exercise helps your body metabolise fructose as it improves insulin sensitivity, reduces stress and raises your metabolic rate.
So the next time you grab a soft drink or juice, take a sugary snack or dream of chocolate…grab an apple and enjoy the natural fructose shot it will give you. Where there is fructose in nature there is always sufficient fibre to allow you body to metabolise it properly.
Thanks to Jamie Oliver, Gary Taubes @nytimes.com, and Robert Lustig and sugarfacts.org for the facts and figures and the inspiration.
Jamie and a bus load of sugar - the amount in a week's worth of school milk
Over the last few days, like so many of us, I have followed with horror, shock and despair, the effects of the earthquake and tsunami that shook Japan to the core last Friday. The country is facing one of its most difficult situations since the Second World War, families in the Tohoku region are now trying to survive some unseasonably cold weather, fire fighters and officials are trying to contain a pending nuclear meltdown, public services are trying to patch things up so that the northern eastern part of the country can get back on track. Yet despite these incredible hardships, Japan and the Japanese are showing the rest of the world what the words dignity and respect really mean.
I have been struck, whether it be through talking to my Japanese friends on the phone, reading emails from friends in the disaster zone who are living without electricity, heating and very little food, or following the Japanese press, social media and television, by how dignified, stoical and resilient this nation is. Three words come to mind to describe how the Japanese have reacted when the going has become really truly rough:
Calm: in the face of nature that they know only too well is far superior in strength to any human machine, calm in the face of anxiety and worry, calm because there is no other way to go forward.
Respect: towards each other, to those who have died, and to the property of others that has neither been ransacked, looted or destroyed.
Resilience: in the face of nature’s destructive forces, in their acknowledgement of the need to pick up and keep going, in the face of a pending nuclear meltdown, and in the face of economic ruin for so many.
We have not seen one image of violence, one image of anger, nor one image of hatred…be it towards nature or mankind.
As we watch in horror as the number of dead creeps towards 10 000 and as the country buckles under the effects of this terrible natural disaster, we should find inspiration and hope in the calm, respect and resilience that this nation is showing the world.
If anyone is wondering how to give donations, the best route is via the Japanese Embassy, Consulate or Mission in your region or country. Donations will then be sent on to the Japanese Red Cross.
http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2011/3/0316_02.html
Acceptance of Relief Money through Japan’s Overseas Missions in Response to Tohoku district -off the Pacific Ocean Earthquake
March 16, 2011
Japanese
- We would like to inform that Japan will now be accepting relief money, as long as conditions permit, from foreign governments, private organizations, individuals and others, through its overseas missions as well, in addition to the Red Cross, in response to the request from people around the world. Japan’s overseas missions have so far asked them to send relief money to the Red Cross Society in their respective country instead.
- Relief money accepted at the overseas missions will then be sent to Japanese Red Cross Society. Please contact the Japanese overseas mission in your country concerning the specific procedures to send relief money.
Valentine’s Day – what exactly are we celebrating?
The 14th February has always been a special day for me simply because it was the day I was born. I would however like to suggest that we reconsider and rename Valentine’s Day.
I bet you have no idea what it really is all about…none of this love and pink roses nonsense…oh no…Valentine was, in fact, the first child saint to suffer from early onset diabetes :
“Early onset diabetes refers to Type 1 diabetes. The term Type 1 diabetes has replaced many other terms such as childhood-onset diabetes, juvenile diabetes, and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.” It is the direct result of extreme amounts of sugar being consumed and the body’s (inevitable) inability to cope.
Valentines Day has become one of the most important perpetuators of this malady. We are not talking “maladie d’amour”, lovesick or anything as romantic as that. No, Valentine ’s Day encourages our children to consume more sugar than they should be consuming per month in one single day. It puts the cup cake and “bonbon” on a pedestal and creates the “hyper-sugar child’ whose sugar level knows no bounds…and whose hyperactivity is pretty impressive too.
Given the quantities of chocolates, cakes, biscuits, sweets (candies for our US friends) and high fructose corn syrup content food that I saw being carried in (and then out) of my children’s school on February 14th, I felt an urge to address the problem and give this day its true name.
So next 14th February think twice about buying chocolates! And if you do, let me be the first to wish you a happy Early Onset Diabetes Day!
