It’s a weird world

     


Isn't it a weird world…always has been, I guess. 
     Suarez at the World Cup gets slain for a lousy act, sure, but others have done much worse, is banned…only to be magically resurrected by an enormous deal that takes him from Liverpool to Spain.
    The big football tournament goes on with signal elements of the infrastructure efforts squeeking through – I'm referring to the stadiums. Not so for some other rapid-delivery roads and transport projects, part completed and now in various states of collapse or inability to deliver – destined to be ongoing liabilities rather than just white elephants. The unhappiness of some locals won't go away but if Brazil does win the Cup, what party there will be.
    In the week we saw the detail of the fraud that Lance Armstrong committed, thanks ABC – and by the way, did those cycling officials who knew ever really hit the dirt? – we hear of one of the Orica Green Edge team pulled off  their Tour de France team after tests revealed banned substances.
    AFL and Essendon and who bothers any more to guess the others, are all up in arms at being wrongly accused again, wrongly treated, misunderstood…I'm sure they were only sucking humbugs.
    General Motors added to its 2014 recall of cars – and the number, globally, is now over 20 million. Now one of the two top car producers in China, how will their mea culpa be seen by the market? Chances are their openness will yield for them in a way that Tiger Woods and others have resumed their earlier prominence.

How do we  gauge people's reactions and responses?

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you're ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.

In his TED talk, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert  tells us that 18 year-olds expect to change only 50% as much as 50 year-olds do…and at every age people under-estimate how much they will change. We over-estimate stability. Time changes our values, preferences and opinions but we only appreciate that looking back in time, not looking forward, even if we do so with imagination. The one constant in our lives is constant change. Gilbert notes that we set goals for the people we are when we set them, rather than for the people we become when we reach them.

Eric Winton

Director, New Millennium Business

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