The Info Barrack Resources Site

1) Yaravi: for the Condor

Lift up ye everlasting wings

To heights above Rucu-Pichincha

(old volcano)

Whence far thy fly to lands unknown
To heights of ampler fates!

The condor sings her Yaravi!…

With wings so towering high

Her music of gold
An age now forgotten
That now roams anew in the dark

Lift up your emerald wings

To the empires of the world

Where life awakes the morn
By gentile flutes the melancholy
As the condor sings her Yaravi

Lift up your wings once more
To unnumbered tears!…

Note: written while in transition, in Lima, Peru, Oct 7, 2005; #883 (AM).

In Spanish
Translated by Rosa Pealoza

Poemas en Transicin V

1) Yaravi: para el Cndor

Levanta tus alas eternas

A alturas encima de Rucu-Pichincha

(volcn viejo)
De dnde lejos vuelas a tierras desconocidas
a las alturas de destinos ms amplios!

El cndor canta su Yaravi! …

con alas tan altsimas altas

Su msica de oro
Una edad olvidada
Que ahora vaga de nuevo en la oscuridad

Levanta tus alas de esmeralda

a los Imperios del mundo

Donde la vida despierta la maana
Por flautas gentiles de melancola
Mientras el cndor canta su Yaravi

Levanta tus alas una vez ms
a lgrimas innumeradas! …

Nota: escrito mientras en transicin, en Lima, Per, el 7 de octubre de 2005; # 883 (en la maana)

2) Day’s End: in Lima
(October 7th, 2005((a birthday))

In docile: golden-brown, evening falls
A dim light above my head…

Estranged by the day’s many events
It’s my birthday! My birthday! -

(little now is said)

The day is almost, almost gone
Forgotten dreams, now old songs

A party todayfor my birthday
My soul now scans the deep

As the voiceless skies afar
Linger above my tired head

Eternal night has now crept out
Another day…another day…is dead

Note 1: written after a birthday party, in Lima, Peru, while in transition (travelling throughout Peru, and Colombia), #884, Oct 7, 2005, Lima, Peru. Dedicated to Martha and Armando

Note 2: Cesar Hildebrant, International Commentator, for Channel #2, in Lima, Peru, on October 7, 2005, introduced Mr. Siluk’s book, “Peruvian Poems,” to the world, saying: “…Peruvian Poems, is a most interesting book, you should read it….”

In Spanish
Translated by Rosa Pealoza

2) Final del Da: en Lima
(7 de octubre del 2005 ((un cumpleaos))

En una dcil: dorada, noche de otoo
una luz tenue encima de mi cabeza …

Alejado por muchos de los acontecimientos del da
Este es mi cumpleaos! Mi cumpleaos!

(poco ahora es dicho)

El da est casi, casi terminado
sueos olvidados, ahora viejas canciones

Una fiesta hoy – por mi cumpleaos
Mi alma ahora explora el profundo

Mientras que los cielos mudos lejos
Se inclinan encima de mi cabeza cansada

La noche eterna ahora ha salido sigilosamente
Otro da…otro da…esta muerto

Nota 1: escrito después de una fiesta de cumpleaos, en Lima, Per, mientras en transicin (viajando en todas partes de Per, y Colombia), #884, 7 de octubre del 2005, Lima, Per. Dedicado a Marta y Armando.

Nota 2: César Hildebrant, Comentarista Internacional, en Canal 2, en Lima, Per, el 7 de octubre del 2005, introdujo el libro del Sr. Siluk, “Poemas Peruanos”, al mundo, diciendo: “…Poemas Peruanos es un libro muy interesante, usted debera leerlo…”

See Dennis’ web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

– Sun Tzu

A study not so long ago said that most companies have strategies, but 70% to 90% of them fail to execute those strategies.

That’s a little simplistic. I don’t think it reveals the whole story.

Look at any organization in trouble, and odds are you’ll find a group of frantic, anxious people. Leaders will be demanding “answers,” managers will be building “action plans,” and workers will be tearing their hair out trying to implement them all.

There’s a lot of “executing” going on, but there are no results.

What gets lost in such situations is how the organization got in that awful place to begin with. And almost 100% of the time, it got there because it lacked an adequate purpose-driven strategy.

It’s easy to see why people prefer tactics over strategy. Tactics are about action and answer “How do we do X?” questions.

Strategy is about identifying what it is you want to do about the problem or opportunity, not how to solve it. Strategy defines what X ought to be, and why you want to do it.

The Purpose-Driven Strategy

A well-defined purpose is the context in which you create strategy. Your organization’s purpose should be defined by a simple mission statement that is understandable by the average ten-year-old.

Your purpose is the compass that guides all strategic decisions. Without purpose, strategy becomes mere shooting in the dark.

The purpose of your organization is its reason for being. It embodies the answer to a simple question: Why does the organization exist? When you have the answer to that question, you have the foundation you need to think about strategy in the right way.

The overall strategy for your organization and your purpose are inextricably linked. For instance, if your purpose is to be the voice of the insurance industry, your strategy might include educating businesses and consumers on the different types of insurance available to them, or taking on the growing problem of insurance fraud.

Strategy and purpose go hand-in-hand, and lead you always to the correct tactics for getting your organization where it needs to be.

Creating An Effective Strategy

Strategy is the answer to the million dollar question, “What are we are we going to do about X?”

When you have the right strategy, the right tactics needed to achieve that strategy fall into place all by themselves.

To create an effective strategy:

1. Identify the key problems and opportunities, or challenges, your organization is facing.
2. Identify the top five challenges.
3. Describe what you will do to address each challenge. This is your strategy statement.
4. Identify the initiatives and goals necessary to implement the strategy.
5. Create a detailed action plan for reaching each goal.

The organizations who follow these simple steps succeed at accomplishing amazing feats because they looked down the road before taking the first step.

1. Identify the Key Problems and Opportunities Your Organization is facing.

The number of problems and opportunities facing even the smallest organization is fairly large. Developing a strategy for handling them hinges first on your understanding of what those problems and opportunities are.

Identification is probably the easiest of the five steps. Gather your top people and devote thirty minutes to listing the problems and opportunities you’re facing. Do not concern yourself with prioritizing yet. Simply get the list together as quickly as you can.

Once you have a list that you feel confident is complete, proceed to the next step.

2. Identify the Top Five Challenges.

Gather your team again, and be prepared to spend whatever time is necessary to reach agreement on your organization’s top five challenges.

Here the waters get a little murkier. One person’s challenge is another’s trivia. Do whatever it takes to reach a consensus on the top five challenges. Refer back to your organization’s purpose as you think through the challenges. Let your purpose guide you to identifying the challenges that are key to making it possible for your organization to remain relevant to the people and businesses it serves.

3. Decide What You Will Do to Address Each Challenge.

Once you have identified the top five challenges, you can talk about what needs to be done to address them. You therefore create a strategy for approaching each challenge.

For example, if one of your challenges is customer retention, the strategic approach to addressing that challenge might be to (a) find out why customers are leaving and (b) create programs and initiatives that resolve those issues.

Again, gather your team. Be prepared to spend at least half a day deciding what you will do to address each challenge. Do not try to come up with specific solutions. Focus only on the general approach to addressing each of the five challenges.

4. Identify the Initiatives and Goals Necessary to Implement the Strategy for Each Challenge.

Now it’s time to start digging deeper into each of the challenges. Here you are going to set one or more goals for each challenge. You’ll also want to identify specific initiatives or campaigns related to each, where appropriate.

Your goals and initiatives are high-level tactics you will later break down into action plans containing due dates, specific actions, and the people who are responsible for seeing that those specific actions are accomplished by the due dates.

Remember: A goal consists of a specific result and associated date. Using the example from Step 3, one goal might be to put a customer satisfaction program in place by the end of the third quarter.

5. Create a Detailed Action Plan for Reaching Each Goal.

Here’s where organizations fall down most often: taking the right actions to reach identified goals. Once more, assemble your team and assess your goals.

Break each goal down into the steps necessary to ensure you have the greatest opportunity for achieving it. Each plan you generate must have discrete, achievable actions. Every action must have a due date and an owner. At this point, applying some of the basics of project management will take you a long way toward achieving each goal.

As you can see, taking this top-down approach for creating an effective strategy can give you the best possible chance of success for the long term. The five-step process works for projects large and small.

The key is to work through the steps, always keeping your organization’s purpose directly before you. With your purpose as your guide, and power by intention, you cannot help but reach your organizational goals.

Michael Knowles is co-author of The Entrepreneur’s Concept Assessment Toolbook (available at http://www.booklocker.com/books/1988.html or Amazon.com). His company One Straight Line works with businesses who are struggling to refocus and reenergize their organizations to better serve their customers. Sign up for The Arrow, their free biweekly newsletter, by sending email to subscribe@onestraightline.com.

When considering a tattoo, it is important to do some research on the tattoo parlor before deciding to hire them. There are several questions that every customer should ask before even considering hiring a tattoo artist. How long has the tattoo parlor been in business? Have there been any complaints lodged against them with the local Better Business Bureau (http://www.bbb.com)? If you have friends who also have tattoos, who do they recommend and what was their experience with the artist? It is very important to follow up with references, along with an extensive background check of the company. The background check may be to simply make sure the company hasn’t switched names a number of times or moved around frequently within the same area, which may indicate poor service. All of these factors must be considered before selecting a tattoo parlor and/or artist.

In your research, try to find out which businesses have the best history with making sure their equipment is clean. This is the most important thing to consider about tattoos because, if the business is not licensed or the artist is not a professional, there is no guarantee that their instruments are clean or properly maintained. Your health is your biggest concern so, if you are considering tattoos, be sure to select the best parlor for the job. If equipment is unsanitary, there is the possibility of diseases being transmitted or even infections. These can be very dangerous and should not be discounted.

A quality tattoo parlor is one that will be welcoming to the customer. The artist should be friendly and personable and not intimidate the customer. In addition, the artist should not push one design over another. For example, a customer should not be talked into getting a more expensive tattoo when the one they really wanted would cost much less. The same business practices, regarding sales and customer service, are the same with tattoo parlors and any other business. No customer likes a pushy sales pitch or an unfriendly salesperson. The tattoo parlor that a customer ultimately selects should be one that looks clean, features friendly and courteous service and has a good record with the Better Business Bureau and customer references.
The best way to locate tattoo parlors is a quick search through the telephone book’s yellow pages or via one of the many internet directories. By searching under the ‘tattoo’ category or keyword, an individual should be able to quickly locate any tattoo parlors in his/her local area.

This article is to be used for informational purposes only. The information contained herein is not intended to be used in place of, or in conjunction with, professional medical advice or recommendations for tattoo placement. Before deciding on getting a tattoo or having one removed, the patient must consult a licensed medical doctor for medical advice and/or to determine the best course of action for his/her individual healthcare needs.

Find more about tattoos, including sevaral tattoos articles and tattoo designs or submit your one tattoo for review.

It’s hard to understand all of “the rules” and fine print on all of our policies since we have limited time. But it’s imperative you take the time to become familiar with your coverage. Go through your mortgage, note, insurance, bank statements, employment contract, tax deductions, shareholders agreementat least once, then briefly once a year after that. You don’t need to review all documents at once; take one every few days until you’re done. Don’t trust others to make the right wealth building decisions for you instead of taking responsibility yourself, a pitfall too common for too many people make. You’re responsible for your own finances. Responsibility is the freedom to respond.

Case in point: One of my mentors is very well known and respected. He invested his entire retirement fund with an investor. The investor was featured in a publication and bragged a lot throughout the interview and raised some red flags. The FCC found out he was no longer successfully trading and had indeed lied to his family and the public about his company’s trading history. My mentor lost all of his savings for retirement with this investor and it took him years to get back on his feet. Eventually he was standing again, because he took responsibility.

Insuranceknow your policies intimately
Whether it’s homeowners, investment, car, health or another type of insurance, you need to know exactly what you’re covered for. There are always exclusions and it always seems like the exclusions apply to you. Know what you’ve got.

During my years of law school, I completed an internship with a New York Supreme Court Justice and second legal internship with a law firm and also began investing in real estate. Immediately upon graduating law school and passing the bar exam, I opened my own law practice. From 1988 to 2001, I practiced with my partner under the name Miles and Gillard, where I concentrated in the area of real estate and business law.

Drew Miles

Find Out More:
www.irabusinesssystem.com/

It should not be. If it is an effective newsletter, it will serve the needs of readers (employees) as much as it serves the needs of the publisher (management).

Let me explain how to ensure it serves employees as well as management, by reviewing four key points I make in A Manager’s Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results.

Objectives and reader responses:

First, state your objectives in terms of reader responses. This forces you to focus on your readers, and what they’re likely or not likely to do. Nothing brings objectives down to earth more quickly than the reality of implementation.

Now you may have self-serving objectives, such as increasing employee productivity, which is fine. But, once you state that objective in terms of reader responses, you are forced to see that objective in new terms.

For example, let’s say you want to increase productivity. The desired reader response might be that employees will participate in lunch hour learning sessions. Now, you have to plan and write articles that give readers some good reasons to attend.

Reader goals:

To find those reasons, you’ll have to identify readers’ goals, and which of them they can achieve through your organization. Chances are your organization can offer a stable income, but probably not the chance to become fabulously wealthy. Nor would you expect most organizations to be part of spiritual or family goals. So the second key point is to focus on the goals that your organization can help readers attain, and leave the rest alone.

Content in which you share an interest:

Third, select content that serves both your objectives and readers’ goals, and I emphasize the word ‘both.’ If there isn’t something that interests both management and employees in an article, then it doesn’t belong in your newsletter. You both must have something to gain or something to lose in choosing subjects for coverage.

Presentation style:

Fourth, the style of presentation should be appropriate for the characteristics readers bring to the newsletter. They don’t pick up a newsletter with their minds in the blank slate position. Instead, they bring to it emotions, degrees of involvement, and ranges of consistency with your attitudes and beliefs.

You need to do at least some basic profiling, to identify these characteristics. For example, if morale is poor, you need to address the reasons and the solutions. It makes absolutely no sense to pretend everyone’s happy when the opposite is true.

Of course, not every organization covers these four issues. Take a look at many employee newsletters and you’ll see something much different. These newsletters have objectives that serve only management, and not management and employees both.

You’ll see what amounts to a brochure, a sales pitch that does nothing to help employees advance toward or achieve their goals. And, if there’s nothing there for employees, why would they read it?

And, if they don’t read the newsletter, how will it help management achieve its objectives? It won’t, of course, and the employee, having found nothing of relevance to her interests in the newsletter, will assume it is management propaganda.

In summary, an effective employee newsletter addresses the needs of both the publisher (management) and readers (employees). And, ironically, a newsletter can only achieve its self-serving objectives by serving the interests of readers, too.

Robert F. Abbott is the author of A Manager’s Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results, which explains how to create effective newsletters, newsletters that get the desired responses. Learn how to start a newsletter, with real-life examples, at:
http://www.managersguide.com/articles.htm

An estate agent is one who is involved in the sale of houses and land. The job of estate agent is not new. But with a rise in population, the task of estate agent has gained momentum. With increasing number of people there are more houses and lands to be sold and purchased. This article will thus mainly deal with the job profile of an estate agent, the requirements to enter this business and an evaluation made by enumerating the pros and cons of it.

What basically is the Job of Estate Agent-

An estate agent can work independently or under a broker. There are many agents working under a broker. Most often agents are confined to the estates of a particular area. This job is best suited to those who have excellent interacting skills or those who like communicating with people. Estate agents have the advantage to work liberally. But it requires acute capital investment and endurance. Outlay comes in the form of opening an office, advertisements and making contacts.

What it takes to be an Estate Agent -:

Any 18 year old or above individual can become an estate agent. In order to be so, an individual has to join a training college, which will not only impart usual knowledge (rules and regulations and strategy to work) and skills to this business but will also facilitate him with a license. There are many colleges and courses available in this regard. However, try to join the best or eminent college in your area and the course that meets all your essentials. There is ample of information online and in yellow pages with respect to this.

Any individual meeting the age criteria and can apply for a license. The license is given on the grounds of performance in a test. In order to take the test, fees has to be paid. The amount of the fees and the format of the test vary from state to state. But everywhere this test comprises of questions on English, Math and your wisdom about the job of an estate agent. This license thus procured has to be renewed within a span of time like two, three, four years or so. The duration also depends on your state government.

The merits and demerits-

Like every job or business, the task of estate agent too has several pros and cons attached to it.
• There is an opportunity to work democratically as an estate agent. There is no pressure by seniors and thirst to impress your boss here but on the same hand large amount of money is needed to make your business a success story.

• Working independent makes you the sole master of your earnings. There is no sharing of it with other agents. But lot of risk is involved in running your own business for it is quite possible that even after some years of your work you may not be able to incur any great profits.

• The job of an estate agent requires you to be clever and hard working. There is lot of competition in this area. It is upon you that how you make the deal possible by outwitting the rest of the agents of your area.

• Those agents who endeavor to make money by hook or by crook do not flourish for long. Being adroit in business does not implicate cunningness. The state laws should be followed throughout and one should never aim to deceive the client or government. The amount of margins is fixed and legal on a deal. To accrue benefits apart from that is illicit in any case.

Mansi gupta writes about real estate. Learn more at www.goforrealestate.com