It's really important to embrace them saying 'no,' it means you're going far enough and deep enough.
John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter - Maria Popova - Entertainment - The Atlantic
New York
November 10, 1958Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.
First -- if you are in love -- that's a good thing -- that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don't let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second -- There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you -- of kindness and consideration and respect -- not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply -- of course it isn't puppy love.
But I don't think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it -- and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone -- there is no possible harm in saying so -- only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another -- but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I'm glad you have it.
We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.
And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Love,
Fa
Strategy Essentials You Ignore at Your Peril - Joan Magretta - Harvard Business Review
Michael Porter, the world's leading authority on competition and strategy, is sometimes the victim of his own success. We use his terminology every day — competitive advantage, the value chain, differentiation, value creation. We think, therefore, that we "know" his work. But in fact, most managers don't. They talk the talk, but they have turned his powerful ideas into business buzzwords. Competitive advantage, for example, is often used to mean "anything we think we're good at." Any plan or program is called a strategy. Managers confuse differentiation with being different.
That's more than just too bad. I've had the rare opportunity to see Porter with fresh eyes — rare because when I approached him some time ago with the idea of writing a concise, practice-oriented guide to his work on competition and strategy, he agreed to give me complete access to his most current work as well as the original classics. My premise in writing Understanding Michael Porter was very simply that clear strategic thinking is essential for any manager in any setting, and Porter's work lays out the basic principles and frameworks you need to master.
My goal was to present the essential Porter in a form that could be more easily digested and put to work than the original. Having worked directly with Porter for almost two decades, and having applied his ideas during my years as a strategy consultant, I was arrogant enough to believe I wasn't going to learn anything new. Wrong. When you put that body of work all together, when you integrate the new with the old, you tap into a rich vein of practical and often surprising insights. Not least among them is that most companies think they have a strategy when they don't.
So as I worked on this book, I kept a list of those insights. Here it is.
- Competitive advantage is not about beating rivals; it's about creating unique value for customers. If you have a competitive advantage, it will show up on your P&L.
- No strategy is meaningful unless it makes clear what the organization will not do. Making trade-offs is the linchpin that makes competitive advantage possible and sustainable.
- There is no honor in size or growth if those are profit-less. Competition is about profits, not market share.
- Don't overestimate or underestimate the importance of good execution. It's unlikely to be a source of a sustainable advantage, but without it even the most brilliant strategy will fail to produce superior performance.
- Good strategies depend on many choices, not one, and on the connections among them. A core competence alone will rarely produce a sustainable competitive advantage.
- Flexibility in the face of uncertainty may sound like a good idea, but it means that your organization will never stand for anything or become good at anything. Too much change can be just as disastrous for strategy as too little.
- Committing to a strategy does not require heroic predictions about the future. Making that commitment actually improves your ability to innovate and to adapt to turbulence.
- Vying to be the best is an intuitive but self-destructive approach to competition.
- A distinctive value proposition is essential for strategy. But strategy is more than marketing. If your value proposition doesn't require a specifically tailored value chain to deliver it, it will have no strategic relevance.
- Don't feel you have to "delight" every possible customer out there. The sign of a good strategy is that it deliberately makes some customers unhappy.
Do these seem self-evident when you stop to think about them? Or do you find, as I do, that they run counter to the way most managers think and behave? That's why I'd argue that Porter's work, while never trendy, has never been as timely for so many people working in both the private and public sectors as it is today. Amidst the enormous economic upheaval in many industries and countries around the world, strategy itself has come under fire. Porter's fundamentals keep you grounded. They explain not only how companies sustain competitive advantages for decades, but also why strategy is even more important — not less so — in turbulent and uncertain times.
More Military Dogs Show Signs of Combat Stress - NYTimes.com
After Duty, Dogs Suffer Like Soldiers
Bryce Harper for The New York TimesDereck Stevens bonds with his military working dog before a practice drill at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. More Photos »
By JAMES DAO
Published: December 1, 2011
SAN ANTONIO — The call came into the behavior specialists here from a doctor in Afghanistan. His patient had just been through a firefight and now was cowering under a cot, refusing to come out.
Apparently even the chew toys hadn’t worked.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, thought Dr. Walter F. Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine at the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base. Specifically, canine PTSD.
If anyone needed evidence of the frontline role played by dogs in war these days, here is the latest: the four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts.
By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are developing canine PTSD. Of those, about half are likely to be retired from service, Dr. Burghardt said.
Though veterinarians have long diagnosed behavioral problems in animals, the concept of canine PTSD is only about 18 months old, and still being debated. But it has gained vogue among military veterinarians, who have been seeing patterns of troubling behavior among dogs exposed to explosions, gunfire and other combat-related violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like humans with the analogous disorder, different dogs show different symptoms. Some become hyper-vigilant. Others avoid buildings or work areas that they had previously been comfortable in. Some undergo sharp changes in temperament, becoming unusually aggressive with their handlers, or clingy and timid. Most crucially, many stop doing the tasks they were trained to perform.
“If the dog is trained to find improvised explosives and it looks like it’s working, but isn’t, it’s not just the dog that’s at risk,” Dr. Burghardt said. “This is a human health issue as well.”
That the military is taking a serious interest in canine PTSD underscores the importance of working dogs in the current wars. Once used primarily as furry sentries, military dogs — most are German shepherds, followed by Belgian Malinois and Labrador retrievers — have branched out into an array of specialized tasks.
They are widely considered the most effective tools for detecting the improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, frequently used in Afghanistan. Typically made from fertilizer and chemicals, and containing little or no metal, those buried bombs can be nearly impossible to find with standard mine-sweeping instruments. In the past three years, I.E.D.’s have become the major cause of casualties in Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps also has begun using specially trained dogs to track Taliban fighters and bomb-makers. And Special Operations commandos train their own dogs to accompany elite teams on secret missions like the Navy SEAL raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Across all the forces, more than 50 military dogs have been killed since 2005.
The number of working dogs on active duty has risen to 2,700, from 1,800 in 2001, and the training school headquartered here at Lackland has gotten busy, preparing about 500 dogs a year. So has the Holland hospital, the Pentagon’s canine version of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Dr. Burghardt, a lanky 59-year-old who retired last year from the Air Force as a colonel, rarely sees his PTSD patients in the flesh. Consultations with veterinarians in the field are generally done by phone, e-mail or Skype, and often involve video documentation.
In a series of videos that Dr. Burghardt uses to train veterinarians to spot canine PTSD, one shepherd barks wildly at the sound of gunfire that it had once tolerated in silence. Another can be seen confidently inspecting the interior of cars but then refusing to go inside a bus or a building. Another sits listlessly on a barrier wall, then after finally responding to its handler’s summons, runs away from a group of Afghan soldiers.
In each case, Dr. Burghardt theorizes, the dogs were using an object, vehicle or person as a “cue” for some violence they had witnessed. “If you want to put doggy thoughts into their heads,” he said, “the dog is thinking: when I see this kind of individual, things go boom, and I’m distressed.”
Treatment can be tricky. Since the patient cannot explain what is wrong, veterinarians and handlers must make educated guesses about the traumatizing events. Care can be as simple as taking a dog off patrol and giving it lots of exercise, playtime and gentle obedience training.
More serious cases will receive what Dr. Burghardt calls “desensitization counterconditioning,” which entails exposing the dog at a safe distance to a sight or sound that might set off a reaction — a gunshot, a loud bang or a vehicle, for instance. If the dog does not react, it is rewarded, and the trigger — “the spider in a glass box,” Dr. Burghardt calls it — is moved progressively closer.
Gina, a shepherd with PTSD who was the subject of news articles last year, was successfully treated with desensitization and has been cleared to deploy again, said Tech. Sgt. Amanda Callahan, a spokeswoman at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
Some dogs are also treated with the same medications used to fight panic attacks in humans. Dr. Burghardt asserts that medications seem particularly effective when administered soon after traumatizing events. The Labrador retriever that cowered under a cot after a firefight, for instance, was given Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and within days was working well again.
Dogs that do not recover quickly are returned to their home bases for longer-term treatment. But if they continue to show symptoms after three months, they are usually retired or transferred to different duties, Dr. Burghardt said.
As with humans, there is much debate about treatment, with little research yet to guide veterinarians. Lee Charles Kelley, a dog trainer who writes a blog for Psychology Today called “My Puppy, My Self,” says medications should be used only as a stopgap. “We don’t even know how they work in people,” he said.
In the civilian dog world, a growing number of animal behaviorists seem to be endorsing the concept of canine PTSD, saying it also affects household pets who experience car accidents and even less traumatic events.
Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, said he had written about and treated dogs with PTSD-like symptoms for years — but did not call it PTSD until recently. Asked if the disorder could be cured, Dr. Dodman said probably not.
“It is more management,” he said. “Dogs never forget.”
Борис Пастернак - Разлука
Разлука
С порога смотрит человек, Не узнавая дома. Её отъезд был - как побег. Везде следы разгрома. Повсюду в комнатах хаос. Он меры разоренья Не замечает из-за слёз И приступа мигрени. В ушах с утра какой-то шум. Он в памяти иль грезит? И почему ему на ум Всё мысль о море лезет? Когда сквозь иней на окне Не видно света божья, Безвыходность тоски вдвойне С пустыней моря схожа. Она была так дорога Ему чертой любою, Как моря близки берега Всей линией прибоя. Как затопляет камыши Волненье после шторма, Ушли на дно его души Её черты и формы. В года мытарств, во времена Немыслимого быта Она волной судьбы со дна Была к нему прибита. Среди препятствий без числа, Опасности минуя, Волна несла её, несла И пригнала вплотную. И вот теперь её отъезд, Насильственный, быть может! Разлука их обоих съест, Тоска с костями сгложет. И человек глядит кругом: Она в момент ухода Всё выворотила вверх дном Из ящиков комода. Он бродит и до темноты Укладывает в ящик Раскиданные лоскуты И выкройки образчик. И, наколовшись об шитьё С невынутой иголкой, Внезапно видит всю её И плачет втихомолку.
Boris Pasternak - PARTING
The man is staring across the threshold
And cannot recognize his home.
Her going had been like a flight.
Havoc has left its traces everywhere.
Chaos prevails in all the rooms.
He cannot judge the devastation
Because his eyes are blurred with tears,
Because his head is pounding.
Ever since morning his ears have been ringing.
Is he awake or having a bad dream?
And why do thoughts about the sea
Persist in coming to his mind?
When one no longer sees the day
Because of hoarfrost on the panes
The hopelessness of grief redoubles
Its likeness to the sea’s vast desert.
He drew her every trait to him
Even as the sea draws near it
Each of the many littorals
Throughout the stretch of its incoming tide.
Even as reeds go down beneath
The rough seas following a storm
So every line of her had gone
To the bottom of his soul.
In years of hardships, in the days
Of an unthinkable existence
She had been cast up from the depths
By a high wave of destiny.
Amid innumerable perils,
Avoiding every reef and shoal
The wave had borne her on and on
And brought her close.
And now, this flight of hers.
Perhaps It had been forced upon her.
This parting will consume them both
And grief gnaw clean their bones.
His eyes take in the whole scene.
At the moment of her going
She had upset the contents of
Every compartment in her dresser.
He paces aimlessly and till dark comes
Keeps putting back inside a drawer
The scattered scraps of cloth,
The crumpled sample patterns.
And having run into his hand
A needle left in some unfinished sewing
He suddenly sees all of her.
And falls to sobbing. Softly.
More great Posterous themes at themes.posterous.com.
