by Alexia Parks | Mar 13, 2016 | 10 Traits, Article, Leadership Opportunity, Sustainability, UN Women, United Nations
The story of women from the dawn of human history to modern times, evolved in community and at the hearth. Because of this, the social mind of the female brain has evolved in ways that are uniquely suited to manage the complexities of today’s volatile, interconnected world. The social mind of today’s modern women, like women over history, is able to understand the unmet, unspoken needs of others, and freely express emotions. Women, are highly skilled at social communication to the benefit of the larger community. Over millennia, the skills associated with social networking, including a woman’s ability to interact with, collaborate with others, and balance out the diverse interests of others. Why are these skills urgently needed in the world today? Because the networking, community-building, social skills of the female mind makes it easy for women to cooperate and collaborate with others. They are able to interacts with others and balance out the diverse interests of others. A story in the Huffington Post on the rise of an empire of women as community leaders in Syrian refugee camps offers a modern day example of this and calls out to our humanity, our human-kindness, for support. To date, The Kayany Foundation, led by its founder Nora Jumblatt, and in partnership with the American University of Beirut and UNESCO, has built five schools so far, including an all-girls high school. The all-girls school was created in the summer of 2015, in partnership with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafza on her 18th birthday. Alexia Parks, author and Virtual Mentor with the United Nations, is founder of Alexia Parks 10 TRAITS Leadership Institute....
by Alexia Parks | Jan 22, 2016 | 10 Traits, Article, Leadership Opportunity, Sustainability, UN Women, United Nations
In reporting on the fate of the bitcoin in The Washington Post, Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and the author of R.I.P. Bitcoin, may want to add two additional factors to its possible demise. The first is the fact that a number of unknown hackers around the world had found a way to temporary disrupt corporate communications and databases. Their target was small corporate businesses around the globe and they were demanding that the ransom be paid in bitcoins. In one corporate case I studied while studying the impact of corporate leadership to unexpected crisis, the ransom fee was 1,000 bitcoins. It wasn’t the small amount of the ransom, I was told. Instead, it was the fact that bitcoin’s so-called “pirates” were also making similar demands of other businesses they had hijacked. Their strategy: hack into a corporate database, interrupt the flow of their business services and then demanding immediate payment, in bitcoins, in exchange for restored service. The hackers rightly reasoned that the automatic response would be: “OK, its a small fee, go ahead and pay it. Let’s move on.” Many did just that. In this case, the CEO divided the workforce into two groups. Group A would dive deep into the system to find the leak, and plug it. Group B focused on making contact with every customer to explain what happened, and when they could expect to have the disruption of their online service repaired. That is, the job of the group assigned to customer outreach was to tell each customer exactly what was going on, and what...
