Wednesday, August 22, 2007

My Latest Favourite Music
Koop - Summer Sun

Monday, August 20, 2007

Premiere League last night made all Man U. fan disappointed. Now, Man City topped the Premiere League scoreboard and made our ousted PM Thaksin a bit more outstanding. (don't get me wrong .. i'm not favouring him) I still think that he is a very smart guy with incredible vision but, on the flip side, he is too confident and too agressive to listen to other people's opinions.
It is hard to predict whether Man City will be the champion this season or not. If it is, he will surely look better in the eyes of British government and British people. In my opinion, it's not bad to have a Thai businessperson to be successful in an international setting. (again i'm not favouring him) .. Just hope that he will enjoy his position in Man City and will not come back to his political role as he promised.

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NEWS FROM FINANCIAL TIMES

Why Sven’s team tactics should win fans at the office
By Stefan Stern

Published: August 20 2007 17:30 | Last updated: August 20 2007 17:30
Does football (or soccer, if you must) provide the perfect metaphor for the art and practice of management? Maybe management provides the perfect metaphor for the art and practice of football – who can tell? But as another English football season metaphorically pulls on its boots and runs out on to the pitch, I would be failing in my columnist’s duty if I did not point out that, once again, the beautiful game has something to teach us about the business of managing people and organisations.

Consider for a moment the underperforming and almost perennially disappointing phenomenon that is Manchester City Football Club. (Non football fans: stick with this, you might learn something.)

Manchester City FC (sky blue shirts) is the less famous and hugely less successful local rival to Manchester United (red shirts). While Man U’s list of greats contains such legendary names as Bobby Charlton, George Best and Dennis Law, Man City’s heroes, considerable players in themselves, have almost never achieved a similar fame.

As with the rivalries between Glasgow’s two major football clubs, Rangers and Celtic, or between Liverpool and Everton, or Roma and Lazio, the red and blue sides of Manchester look on each other with a mixture of loathing and disdain.

But while, in the other local feuds, fortune seems to favour first one side and then the other, in Manchester only the “Red Devils” have had anything to celebrate in the past 30 years, and for most of the two decades before that as well. Not for nothing did one City fan title his memoirs of growing up in the divided town Manchester United Ruined My Life. (Inferiority complex? Surely not.)

But as the new season dawns, the city that brought us the industrial revolution and provided the inspiration for Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx is playing host to a minor footballing revolution. Globalisation, in the form of ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and new team coach Sven-Göran Eriksson, has come to Manchester City. And, so far, the fans like what they see. Eriksson, the former England manager, has built a new team by buying footballers he has never actually seen play in the flesh. Video clips of Brazilian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Italian, Swiss and Croatian players, supported by eyewitness accounts from football scouts, were all the Swedish manager required to decide on these acquisitions. He has been bankrolled by Thaksin, who bought the club for £81.6m earlier this year, and who has now given Eriksson another £40m with which to build the new team.

Sceptics doubted that this approach would work. “Lonely men have purchased wives from the Philippines on a similar basis,” the football writer David Lacey observed. But City won their first two games of the season and, after Sunday’s conquest of the old enemy Man U, the Man City faithful are happier than they have been for many years. They are sitting on top of the league.

Building a team by video clip would seem to run counter to what human resources gurus and psychologists have been advising all these years about hiring staff. Why should it be any different for footballers? Fans might reasonably ask: Who are these guys, and how will they operate together under pressure? And then there is the question of communication. With little or no spoken English, the new team members might struggle to understand each other.

But Eriksson is undaunted. “We’re giving them all teachers,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “One or two have already started, I think. But before that we’ll try to teach them ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘wait’, ‘come on’, ‘look out’ – the common language of football. It’s not like in 90 minutes you have a big conversation with your team-mates. But in the long term they have to learn properly, not just for football but also to feel at home in their new country.”

Good advice, of course, but not necessarily advice that Eriksson himself followed. As a manager in Italy and Portugal he learnt to communicate quite effectively. But in English Eriksson has always come across a bit like Chauncey Gardner, the Peter Sellers character in the film Being There: banal statements of the obvious were taken (in his honeymoon period with the national side) as profundities. In the end the England team, as well as its manager, were exposed as being simply banal.

Never mind. Today Eriksson is turning years of theorising about teams on its head. He is echoing the ideas of Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, who says that the best teams are characterised by a co-operative mindset, an ability to span boundaries, and the successful igniting of purpose. Even people who work remotely from each other can collaborate to great effect.

And as for the management of Manchester City FC, the performance appraisal from fans is positive, for the moment at any rate. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear them register their approval in song (to the tune of “I’m H.A.P.P.Y.”):

I’m City till I die,

I’m City till I die,

I know I am, I’m sure I am,

I’m City till I die.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

This is a real Deja Vu' I watched this TV show more than 10 years ago and James Dean Bradfield is still pretty cool now.