The greatest shot in the arm is encouragement.

This is so important, and seems to me to be so basic! Whether it is encouragement from inside your family, or in the workplace, encouragement is vital.

However, there seems to be such a large number of people, both in families and in the workplace, who don’t seem to understand this. 

I appreciate that Mom and Dad want their children to be the best that they can be. Yet I hear so many times, both from parents and from young people who want better relationships with each other, saying that they feel criticized by their parents, or their parents are telling me that they can’t help themselves but to indirectly make negative comments about their children’s exam results. 

Maybe if we were to motivate ourselves and stay focused on helping people to be the best that they could be, including ourselves, maybe we’d be giving more encouragement. 

Every little boy and little girl is constantly adopting a behavior of ‘Watch me, Mommy’, ‘Watch me, Daddy’.  We want applause, we want to be recognized. So why don’t we do this, and in such a way, help people to the next step of being the best that they could be?

Please think about three people that you could give words of encouragement to, over the next thirty days, and let me know about your results.
Thank you.

How to be beautiful:

I have learned that beauty doesn’t make you confident but confidence can make everyone beautiful.

Guidelines for Happiness:

Four ways to value people:

He who helps others, helps himself. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. 

Feed a man a fish and you feed him for one day.  Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for life.

People need persistence.

Never give up, never, never. Most people give up just before they are about to succeed.  I’ve seen this happen so many times.

Of course failure is pretty much an absolute guarantee in life at times, because if you never failed, how could you ever succeed? 

How would you know happiness, if you didn’t know sadness?

So don't be afraid of failure. Keep trying. Be persistent, persevere, and it will pay off for you.

How to advance in business:

No matter how much work you can do,
No matter how engaging your personality may be,
You will not advance far in business if you cannot work through others.

- John Craig, author.

In this world, change is unavoidable. Nothing can stop changes.

List some changes you would like to see made in your life.
You have the freedom to do that. You have the power to do that. To get a pen, to write it down.

You have a choice, choose.

I have recently been preparing for my three week trip to China, where I will give a series of seminars to business leaders and to talented Chinese bureaucrats.  I always love going to Shanghai, which I consider the world’s most exciting city.  It reminds me of Tokyo in the mid-seventies, when there wasn’t a great deal of sophistication, but a lot of exciting raw energy.  I can feel that electricity when I arrive in Shanghai. 

Many people have negative comments to make about China, but I personally marvel at how a society with 1.4 billion people seems to focus so effectively.  Of course, I can imagine what some people will say, but nevertheless, China as a nation does an outstanding job.  In all of the time I have been going to China and on almost every visit, I have lectured to groups of bright and up-and-coming bureaucrats and China’s future leaders.  I’ve never been told what to say or what not to say.  I’ve been told to express freely my views on leadership, which I have done.

What I really enjoy about the Chinese, is that they are willing to challenge themselves with new things, and are constantly out of their comfort zone.  If it works for them they keep it, and if it doesn’t, then they forget about it.  It’s an experience from which they’ve gained a lot of value.  I’m always reminded of Thomas Edison, and his ten thousand ways of not making a light bulb, before he discovered how he could make a light bulb.

At the end of last year, I was invited to be a keynote speaker on a leadership forum in China for senior ranking officials.  I heard the term "revolutionary restructuring", in relationship to China’s constant need to change itself.  I rather liked the terminology, revolutionary restructuring, I thought it was appropriate and many companies should be doing this. 

China tends to use the method of facilitate and control. As China expands its power in the world politically, and China’s citizens continue to become more prosperous and abundant, they will be given more choices and therefore officials will need to be more flexible.  I have mentioned this several times in my lectures to Chinese officials. More Chinese people become more educated and demand better jobs, and to retain that talent China will, over time, need to change its style to nurture and empower its citizens.

As the chairman of the Japan New Zealand Business Council, I am very conscious of the numbers of small and medium enterprises in both Japan and New Zealand and the contribution that they make to the economy.  I was quite amazed when I recently read some statistics on China’s small and medium enterprises in the private sector.  They have been the strongest force in the economy for more than 15 years.  Small and medium enterprises and private companies constitute more than 60% of China’s GDP. They realise over 70% of urban employment, and above 60% of all the patents.  It is interesting to note that this is the least policy-supported, the worst bank-funded, and the most obstructed sector of the economy. 

China’s leaders, who are very astute, will be conscious of keeping focus on this sector of China’s economy over the next several years and I’m sure that they will look to enhance this sector, as they are very smart.  They have methods for making quick decisions, which wasn’t always the case.

This will definitely be a sector of China’s economy to watch for.