Conflict Management Strategies

Multicultural Project Management
Globalized Work Teams Present Opportunities and Challenges
In today’s global economy, multicultural project management is key to the success of many multinational corporations. This is particularly true for manufacturers that assemble components and parts from many countries around the world.
Many international trade consultants agree that the globalization of business will also accelerate in sectors such as engineering, financial, legal and medical.
Highly educated workforces from developing countries including Brazil, Russia, India and China provide a ready supply of less expensive project resources for profit-minded companies in more developed nations.
Multicultural Project Team
Forty years ago, many work teams were homogeneous groups of employees who, like a group of German bankers, shared similar backgrounds.
Today, most project teams are multicultural groups with two or more members from each culture. Each multicultural group has its own unique beliefs, norms, values and observable behaviours.
Multicultural project teams can be highly effective or ineffective.
Guidelines for Multicultural Success
An effective project manager is an essential ingredient that drives a successful multicultural group initiative. The multicultural project manager:
• Must help the team identify and stay targeted on its overall goal.
• Provide positive feedback to the group.
Multicultural project team members can be young or old, male or female and thus represent a wide range of backgrounds. The project manager must select members who:
• Have proven task-related abilities.
• Recognize and are able to adapt to cultural differences.
• Are comfortable with equal power and show a high-level of respect for other team members.
Advantages of Multicultural Diversity
In general, multicultural teams are more effective in solving project tasks that require creativity and innovation.
This is because globalized work teams:
• Generate more and better ideas.
• Are less likely to go along with status quo thinking, also known as Group Think.
• Enhance creativity which leads to better decisions as well as more effective and productive performance.
Potential Problems with Multicultural Diversity
Not all multicultural project teams are successful. One potential problem is that some team members may mistrust other colleagues who behave differently based on their national cultures.
For example, British and German speakers communicate precisely, choosing exactly the amount of words to efficiently communicate the message. These more precise communicators tend to perceive that more elaborate and detail-minded speakers from Arabic countries exaggerate, and that speakers from more succinct Asian cultures who articulate fewer words are ambiguous.
Perceptions and preconceived stereotypes can also lead to communication problems and interpersonal bias.
Not all Chinese team members want to specialize in mathematics. In fact, some Asian business analysts have very strong documentation skills.
And while North Americans use direct eye contact to show honesty and respect, some Asian cultures interpret sustained eye contact as staring and disrespectful.

Improve Relationships, New Friends

Improve Relationships, New Friends
Expand Friendships & Family Relationships in Stage Four Growth Plan
Improving Relationships
During changing situations, those impacted are better prepared to accept and contribute if they are informed and given the opportunity to participate. Though it may be tempting to treat a personal growth plan as a private matter, family and friends will be better positioned to contribute and be supportive if they are informed.
How much should one reveal? That will depend on the relationship. In cases where the level of support is suspect or unknown, a brief indication that work is underway on some aspects of personal development may be appropriate.
Strengthening Current Relationships
During this phase of personal growth, one works to consciously assess and strengthen existing relationships. The strongest relationships are characterized by openness, trust, and mutual support.
The seven components of strong relationships are: Freedom, Respect, Support, Equality, Healthy conflict resolution, and Trust.
Strong Support Network
Personal growth is an exciting journey, but not one without its share of rough spots. Shedding old habits, beliefs, and behaviors can be difficult. A network of people who are willing and able to help is an invaluable asset. One should give conscious thought to existing friends and family members who can be counted on to form the nucleus of a support network. Think of this network as a board of directors for the corporation of personal development.
While reflecting on the desired board of directors, notice those family and friends who seem to be determined to halt or diminish the growth progress. Though difficult, it may be necessary to begin, in a caring and considerate way, to limit interactions.
Attracting New Friends
A positive aspect of giving up old relationships is that the process makes room for new people who will naturally be attracted because of similar interests and stages of growth.
One should be open to new relationship opportunities. As growth manifests itself in new ways of thinking and new behaviors, the process will naturally attract people whose vibrational energy is similar.
Personal Growth Plan Stages
This personal growth plan and model involves seven stages. Though a person does not move linearly through the stages, considering them linearly is helpful and focuses attention to the different activities and growth steps of each stage.

7 Steps to Good Relationships
Improve relations and be happier
All of life's experiences are enhanced when shared with friends and family. These seven steps of a good relationship will help regain and strengthen ties to loved ones.


Improve Relationships
The joys and pains of relationships are never as pronounced as during Holiday periods. With Thanksgiving and Christmas fast approaching, use these seven steps as building blocks to strengthen your relationships. You'll have a more satisfying and joyous Holiday period, and so will those close to you.
Although the approaching Holidays provide an immediate incentive, there are also long term benefits to be gained. Reputable studies show a strong correlation between happiness and high quality relationships. It's therefore in our best interests to nurture and build strong relationships for this Holiday season and beyond.
From many articles and studies of the characteristics of strong relationships we can distill the following list of seven important steps or components; think of these as relationship building blocks.
• Commitment
• Freedom
• Respect
• Support
• Equality
• Healthy conflict resolution
• Trust
Committed Relationship
Fundamental to a strong relationship is commitment. Commitment to making the relationship strong and healthy is the foundation on which it can grow. Relationships take work. They take effort. Like life itself, relationships are dynamic, ever changing because we are ever changing. A strong relationship requires continuous nurturing, and that takes commitment.
Commitment to the relationship means unconditionally caring about maintaining and improving the relationship, even during times of anger or disappointment. There may be times when you aren't even sure you like the other person, but if you're committed you'll spend the effort to sustain the relationship during tough times.

Freedom to Be Me
Freedom may be the toughest component of all to implement. But it may also be the most important after commitment. All humans desire freedom; more than desire, freedom is a drive we have to be ourselves. From the two-year old who proclaims, "I can do it myself!" to the twenty-two year old who forgoes the family business to go her own way, we all want freedom to do it our way.
While we each crave and value our own freedom, we often have just as strong a drive to control others. Call it a carryover from parenting or a way of assuring our own freedoms, controlling another person is a sure way to weaken and damage a relationship.
Granting another person the freedom to be themselves, to stretch and grow or to wither and stagnate, is the ultimate result of love--unconditional love. The freedom inherent in unconditional love may sorely test our own feelings of self confidence and self esteem, yet it's so important for us to realize that we bring people toward us when we let go of any inclination to control.
Respect Others
Respect, R-E-S-P-E-C-T as Aretha Franklin sang it, is a critical component of freedom. It's the partner of freedom in that respecting another person's competence and individuality provides the positive support so important to freedom.
A contrast makes this point: suppose someone grants you the freedom to follow your dream with an underlying current of disrespect. It might sound something like, "Go ahead if you must, I'll be right here after you've chased that dream." In other words, the person thinks you'll fail and you'll come crawling back.
The same scenario with respect might sound like, "Go ahead, I know how important this is to you and I support you 100%. I know you can do it!" Obviously, we'd all like to hear this latter response because of the inherent respect and support it conveys.
Support Those You Care About
Support is an important factor in any relationship. As we stretch ourselves, as we encounter rough spots and obstacles, a supportive relationship gives us strength and reassurance. Support rejuvenates and re-energizes. Aren't we all attracted to people who are supportive of us?
Treat Everyone as an Equal
Equality is the enabler that says we're both equal partners in this marriage, partnership, or friendship. A parent-child relationship is fine for teens and below, but among partners, friends, and adult children and their parents, without the underlying recognition of equality, respect is limited, support is more controlling than supportive, and commitment is probably more toward control than growth.
Learn Healthy Conflict Resolution
Healthy conflict resolution is a component that smoothes the rough edges of relationships. Rough edges will occur. There will be disagreements, differences of opinion, and even disappointments of behavior. A knowledge of techniques and dedication to resolve conflicts with respect, support, and equality can actually strengthen a relationship. Unstated is the recognition of "look what we've gone through together. We're strong."
Trust is a Relationship Glue
Trust is an attitude that could have been the first step mentioned. For without our inherent trust of each other, we will be unable to grant freedom, to treat each other with respect and equality, and be supportive. Some say that trust is earned. But trust must be an assumed attitude that is fundamental to commitment to the relationship. If someone distrusts you until you prove trustworthy, you cannot provide the freedom, respect, and support that nurtures and strengthens a relationship.
Obviously, the seven steps of a strong relationship do not come serially, one after the other. They are all important and must be simultaneously present. It is helpful, though, to consider them as step by step tools for building a strong relationship. And commitment does come first, as the foundation for stable and strong relationships. When we commit to something, it happens.

Aphorism

"Where there is a human being, ther is an opportunity for kindness" Seneca

Meliora!!!
We change things to Better!
We bring Colors!
We share your sentiments....

The myth of genius
The myth of genius — which promotes the artist as a lone, pioneer – emerged when craftsmen first strove to become respected members of an elite. But before designers get too excited about winning artist status, perhaps some caution is required.

In an essay entitled “God’s little artist”, (1) art historians Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock examine how the myth of the genius as a creative individual is tied to the emergence of a new meaning for the word “artist”. Until the eighteenth century the term was applied to an artisan, craftsman, or someone who displayed taste. Parker and Pollock maintain that the modern perception (which developed from the Enlightenment onwards) of the artist as imaginative, creative, unconventional – a bohemian and a pioneer – is a constructed idea that came into being as certain craftsmen strove to become more respected members of the cultural elite.

In an interesting parallel, graphic design is increasingly encroaching upon the thought processes and spaces once designated for art, and its practitioners are calling themselves artists. This is bound up with the desire, over the past twenty years, to earn for graphic design the status of a “legitimate” discipline, a liberal art alongside respected fields such as architecture. Giant leaps have been made towards uncovering its history and bringing critical theory and other rigorous methods to bear upon it. As this has progressed, there has been a tendency to blur the boundaries between graphic design and art. (2) Critical discussions on this subject have often focused upon “graphic authorship”, one of the most prominent coming from Michael Rock in “The designer as author” (Eye no. 20 vol. 5). Rock states: “The figure of the author reconfirms the traditional idea of the genius creator; the status of the creator frames the work and imbues it with mythical value.” Rock compares this with film’s auteur theory which emerged at a time – the 1950s – when film and film critics were seeking to elevate its status from popular entertainment to work of art. The basic assumption was that if one can identify an “artist” behind a work, then one can call the product art.

Despite Parker and Pollock’s view, the figure of the maverick graphic designer is a cliché that’s hard to delete. Even when the word “genius” is not uttered, its myths are everywhere, reproduced by design critics, journalists and designers themselves. John A. Walker’s Design History and the History of Design notes that the process of canonisation first requires an increasingly high profile and suggestions of future greatness from a number of sources. True canonisation occurs once a single positive source resonates within the design community. (3)

Genius checklist
Characteristics routinely associated with genius include the following:

1 the creator – usually artist, writer or scientist – who rises above the ordinary mortal, acquiring a semi-divine status, in past times as a messenger for “the original creator”, God
2 the individual – a pioneering, solitary non-conformist
3 the madman – links between genius and madness are legion
4 the intuitive person – whose work is “natural” and unlearnt and hence cannot be analysed
5 the pioneer – who is ahead of his or her (but rarely “her”) time and possibly a misunderstood or tortured soul (see 3 above)

The author as editor
In “What is an author?”, (4) Michel Foucault says we are “accustomed to presenting the author as a genius.” We see the author as the “genial creator” of work in which he gives us, “with infinite wealth and generosity”, an inexhaustible world of meanings. (Being “creative” always has a positive ring, whatever is produced!) Foucault says that the author does not “precede” the work: ideas and meanings are already there and the author’s role is to “choose”, to filter and synthesise to create output. (Foucault also emphasises “limiting” and “excluding”.) The author’s role is to limit the proliferation of meanings and present a personal view of the world. Yet the “genius author” is represented as a continual source of invention – the opposite of his genuine function.

Michael Howe, in Genius Explained (5) suggests genius is not natural, but the result of hard work, perseverance and the stubbornness to struggle on where others give up. Fran Cottell, in her essay “The cult of the individual”, (6) says “the idea perpetuated by the art market that individual geniuses arrive out of nowhere . . . is convenient but untrue. Artists invariably arrive at artistic solutions as a result of . . . social influences as well as for intellectual reasons.” Innate talent, the “fresh eye” that artists are supposed to have, has been debunked by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1996 book The Rules of Art , (7) suggesting it is the result of early upbringing or training. Brigit Fowler paraphrases Bourdieu’s most challenging idea that “the whole history of Modernism has been one in which only those avant-garde artists who were centrally located and who had the time to spend on their experiments were the ones who won out.” (8) Women and non-Western artists have been largely excluded. Between them, feminists and postmodernist theorists have pretty much debunked the myths of genius. But has that made a difference? In graphic design practice, as opposed to theory, the genius idea is still accepted, and convenient, with little sense of being a myth.

Big men, any women?

Within the personal projects by graphic designers we so often see the same striving for genius status: the wish to be seen as inspired visionaries, individuals, self-taught ingenues, pioneers and / or simply mad. So, although personal expression has become increasingly prevalent in graphic design, the personality behind the work is more often important than the so-called personal “content”. Scribbles in a sketchpad don’t have the same appeal if you can’t attach a “name” such as Ed Fella. And though there have always been big names within the industry, it was the 1980s that created the “design star”. Now designers such as Tomato, Bruce Mau, Peter Saville, John Maeda, Fuel and the “brand-named” Mr Keedy are the consumerables. Neville Brody, who for a while seemed to have been consumed by his own myth, has remodelled himself as a visionary with his post-linguistic alphabet systems. The same applies to art world figures, too. Graphic design is not simply drifting towards art, but both art and design are merging somewhere in the media world.

David Carson, the übermeister of celebrity graphic design, is often discussed as pandering to the “great artist” myth, though his work doesn’t so much exhibit personal content as personalise the way he works, through “intuition”, or spiritual insight. All designers use this to some extent, but for Carson it is the whole process. His book 2ndsight 10 gives the process authority with phrases such as “what gives unity and coherence to intuition is truth,” and cites an issue of New York magazine 11 in which a headline declared Carson to be God. (Helpfully, the book points out that this is not true.) Therein lies Carson’s great talent: he draws on the myths of genius with the handy disclaimer that, since “intuition” is not an academic theory, it is not something you can analyse. Carson is presented as being self-taught, working alone – in particular when living in the one-horse (surely one-designer) towns of Del Mar and San Diego, California – and uninfluenced by the aesthetic emerging from Cranbrook at around the same time. 2ndsight tells us that if anything, he only had a spirit in common with Hard Werken in the Netherlands and Terry Jones at id in the uk, of whom he had little knowledge at the time. What is interesting about Carson – or any other design star – is that, just as theoreticians often pander to authors, the design world panders to him because the way he presents himself and his creative process is often cannibalised by his very presence as a charismatic figure. As with the academic world, names and theories (Carson’s talk about his working method is just a theory) may change, but the way in which we are dazzled by each one will not.

So that’s what you mean by body of work

Many examples of graphics with “personal vision” deliberately avoid drawing attention to the individuals behind them, lest they obscure the idea – in particular ideas that spring from personal convictions but where the focus is on society’s betterment. The contemporary feminist collective Cunst Art works on this theory – their work is similar in spirit to the Atelier Populaire, who self-produced impromptu posters during the May 1968 revolution in Paris. The Guerrilla Girls have exposed male domination of the art world, notably in the poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” As their name suggests, the work is anonymous / collaborative, though their gorilla masks helped gain the cause recognition in the celebrity sphere.

Yet despite the equality – in terms of numbers – promised by celebrity culture, a parallel with the poster can be drawn in that it’s still largely a woman’s body, not mind, that is available for consumption. Many artists of the past 30 years have used the body to address this in a critical way. These ideas often sprung from the feminist saying “the personal is political”. Traditionally the domestic sphere was seen as female and “trivial”, while male concerns and interests were “of the world”. So the personal and domestic is equally important because it is the arena in which the inequalities of the world are played out.

Exploring these areas has been a part of the liberation project – but not the only one – and in a wider sense the body has been used as a symbol for personal concerns. Yet in tune with the mainstream media, focusing upon the body always attracts the most attention. April Greiman, who has recently become a Pentagram partner, has been a force in graphic design for three decades, but the one image of her work to which everyone returns is her poster for Design Quarterly (12) where the dominant image is her naked body. Turn to the “Cutting Edge” (13) book on Greiman: it is the first image on the introductory page.

The personal is political

Where a designer might once have waited a generation to have their work canonised (except for Paul Rand), designers now race to establish a persona within the industry by publishing their own projects. Look at Attik, ded, and any number of youngish designers following the Tomato / Fuel model. Milk’s Sneakers: Size Isn’t Everything (14) was a self-initiated project which ended up as a collection of visuals and writing on trainers by more than 100 contributors where Milk played the role of . . . designer / art directors. To pull the project back to focus upon themselves, Milk included a taxi-cab conversation in which the idea was first mooted. Evidently written after the event, the dialogue showed their need to “personalise” a project that was anything but. This contrasts with designers or activists such as Reclaim The Streets, who use underground tactics to challenge the mainstream monopoly – not just get into it. In a culture where the persona is merely pr, perhaps anonymous graphics can be more personal than a signed statement.

In a reversal of the genius myth, feminism is now part of the canon in academic circles but hideously unfashionable in the design industry. But the idea that “the personal is political” is important: it is surely as much at the root of the desire for personal expression in graphics as the art metaphor usually cited. In fact, it allows us to see “personal work” in a way that is more positive and productive than the self-aggrandising and ultimately conservative myth of genius.

John Lennon said it this way: “I know you, you know me. One thing I can tell you is you’ve got to be free.”Jesus said it better: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”The truth can set you free in a lot of different ways. But one sure way to remain bound up tightly in a little bundle of ‘yourselfness’ is to hide the real you from the people close to you.If I let you know me, I don’t have to hide. That sets me free from the cage where I’m hiding my secret self. I can’t keep my secret self locked out of sight without the rest of me being stuck in there too.It works better, of course, if you let me know you too. It sets your secret self free from its little cage as well.
Two uncaged souls getting to know each other, now there’s some freedom.But while Lennon had some trippy ways to describe his view of knowing each other, Jesus had a simple if-then. “If you stick with this, living out what I tell you…then you will know the truth.” And knowing the truth about each other is simple, but not easy.

It’s not just about dumping all your junk in somebody else’s lap and going home. It’s about opening the door to your junk room, and giving someone you trust a pass to go in, snoop around, and ask questions.

Seeing all your issues, all your ‘junk’ through the eyes of someone you trust, is often enough to start the process of dealing with it. Inviting that friend to regular inspections of your ‘junk room’ helps you keep it clean.

Then when that friend gives you a pass to his junk room, it gives you the grace to deal with that friend’s stuff gently, humbly. You can’t act ‘holier-than-thou’ when all you are is forgiven.

Come together. Be accountable.

The Seven Habits - An Overview

Our character is a collection of our habits, and habits have a powerful role in our lives. Habits consist of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge allows us to know what to do, skill gives us the ability to know how to do it, and desire is the motivation to do it.

The Seven Habits move us through the following stages:

1. Dependence: the paradigm under which we are born, relying upon others to take care of us.
   
   
2. Independence: the paradigm under which we can make our own decisions and take care of ourselves.
   
   
3. Interdependence: the paradigm under which we cooperate to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently.

Much of the success literature today tends to value independence, encouraging people to become liberated and do their own thing. The reality is that we are interdependent, and the independent model is not optimal for use in an interdependent environment that requires leaders and team players.

To make the choice to become interdependent, one first must be independent, since dependent people have not yet developed the character for interdependence. Therefore, the first three habits focus on self-mastery, that is, achieving the private victories required to move from dependence to independence. The first three habits are:

• Habit 1: Be Proactive
• Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
• Habit 3: Put First Things First

Habits 4, 5, and 6 then address interdependence:

• Habit 4: Think Win/Win
• Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• Habit 6: Synergize

Finally, the seventh habit is one of renewal and continual improvement, that is, of building one's personal production capability. To be effective, one must find the proper balance between actually producing and improving one's capability to produce. Covey illustrates this point with the fable of the goose and the golden egg.

In the fable, a poor farmer's goose began laying a solid gold egg every day, and the farmer soon became rich. He also became greedy and figured that the goose must have many golden eggs within her. In order to obtain all of the eggs immediately, he killed the goose. Upon cutting it open he discovered that it was not full of golden eggs. The lesson is that if one attempts to maximize immediate production with no regard to the production capability, the capability will be lost. Effectiveness is a function of both production and the capacity to produce.

The need for balance between production and production capability applies to physical, financial, and human assets. For example, in an organization the person in charge of a particular machine may increase the machine's immediate production by postponing scheduled maintenance. As a result of the increased output, this person may be rewarded with a promotion. However, the increased immediate output comes at the expense of future production since more maintenance will have to be performed on the machine later. The person who inherits the mess may even be blamed for the inevitable downtime and high maintenance expense.

Customer loyalty also is an asset to which the production and production capability balance applies. A restaurant may have a reputation for serving great food, but the owner may decide to cut costs and lower the quality of the food. Immediately, profits will soar, but soon the restaurant's reputation will be tarnished, the customer's trust will be lost, and profits will decline.

This does not mean that only production capacity is important. If one builds capacity but never uses it, there will be no production. There is a balance between building production capacity and actually producing. Finding the right tradeoff is central to one's effectiveness.

The above has been an introduction and overview of the 7 Habits. The following introduces the first habit in Covey's framework.

FROM DEPENDENCE TO INDEPENDENCE

Habit 1: Be Proactive

A unique ability that sets humans apart from animals is self-awareness and the ability to choose how we respond to any stimulus. While conditioning can have a strong impact on our lives, we are not determined by it. There are three widely accepted theories of determinism: genetic, psychic, and environmental. Genetic determinism says that our nature is coded into our DNA, and that our personality traits are inherited from our grandparents. Psychic determinism says that our upbringing determines our personal tendencies, and that emotional pain that we felt at a young age is remembered and affects the way we behave today. Environmental determinism states that factors in our present environment are responsible for our situation, such as relatives, the national economy, etc. These theories of determinism each assume a model in which the stimulus determines the response.

Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. While in the death camps, Frankl realized that he alone had the power to determine his response to the horror of the situation. He exercised the only freedom he had in that environment by envisioning himself teaching students after his release. He became an inspiration for others around him. He realized that in the middle of the stimulus-response model, humans have the freedom to choose.

Animals do not have this independent will. They respond to a stimulus like a computer responds to its program. They are not aware of their programming and do not have the ability to change it. The model of determinism was developed based on experiments with animals and neurotic people. Such a model neglects our ability to choose how we will respond to stimuli.

We can choose to be reactive to our environment. For example, if the weather is good, we will be happy. If the weather is bad, we will be unhappy. If people treat us well, we will feel well; if they don't, we will feel bad and become defensive. We also can choose to be proactive and not let our situation determine how we will feel. Reactive behavior can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By accepting that there is nothing we can do about our situation, we in fact become passive and do nothing.

The first habit of highly effective people is proactivity. Proactive people are driven by values that are independent of the weather or how people treat them. Gandhi said, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them." Our response to what happened to us affects us more than what actually happened. We can choose to use difficult situations to build our character and develop the ability to better handle such situations in the future.

Proactive people use their resourcefulness and initiative to find solutions rather than just reporting problems and waiting for other people to solve them.

Being proactive means assessing the situation and developing a positive response for it. Organizations can be proactive rather than be at the mercy of their environment. For example, a company operating in an industry that is experiencing a downturn can develop a plan to cut costs and actually use the downturn to increase market share.

Once we decide to be proactive, exactly where we focus our efforts becomes important. There are many concerns in our lives, but we do not always have control over them. One can draw a circle that represents areas of concern, and a smaller circle within the first that represents areas of control. Proactive people focus their efforts on the things over which they have influence, and in the process often expand their area of influence. Reactive people often focus their efforts on areas of concern over which they have no control. Their complaining and negative energy tend to shrink their circle of influence.

In our area of concern, we may have direct control, indirect control, or no control at all. We have direct control over problems caused by our own behavior. We can solve these problems by changing our habits. We have indirect control over problems related to other people's behavior. We can solve these problems by using various methods of human influence, such as empathy, confrontation, example, and persuasion. Many people have only a few basic methods such as fight or flight. For problems over which we have no control, first we must recognize that we have no control, and then gracefully accept that fact and make the best of the situation.

SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN HABITS

Habit 1: Be Proactive

Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long-term goals based on personal principles.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win

Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertantly rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one's own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening empathically for both feeling and meaning.

Habit 6: Synergize

Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

All we know urbanism is the study of cities, their geographic, economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the impact of all these forces on the built environment. Urbanism is also a species of urban planning, focusing on the creation of communities for living, work, and play. Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. All over the world, past and present, these settlements have behaviors and cultural elements that separate them from otherwise comparable rural areas. "urban" is often used as a euphemism to describe modern culture of inner city life. Typically, it contains street dancing or break dancing, hip hop music or rapping, house or techno music, or other activities developed in inner-cities and made popular through commercialization. Urbanists distinguish urban areas from rural areas by their higher population density. They maintain that the difference in population entails a difference in the social and political order as well. Initially, some scholars denied the social and political differences between rural and urban areas, and insisted that there was no point in a specifically urban studies; but this debate has been largely resolved in favor of urban studies, and it is now widely accepted that cities need to be studied separately from the country.Having established that cities are genuinely distinct from rural areas, we know that scholars have studied cities according to three different perspectives: the internal perspective, which looks at spatial and social order within a city; the externalist perspective, which views cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows; and the interstitial perspective, which attempts to reconcile the two perspectives through understanding how the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city is influenced by global, external forces, and how it influences them in turn. For example, in The Ordinary City (1997), Amin and Graham argue that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.Urbanism in its wider sense will also include the study of the interaction between the city and the rural hinterland. No city can exist without a hinterland to supply it, but, because of communications technology, this hinterland may be less easy to identify than it was in pre-industrial, agrarian societies, and furthermore the conception of how the hinterland relates to the city may change throughout history. In the Roman Empire and ancient Greece), for example, the municipium and polis were considered to consist of both "urban" centre and hinterland, with which they formed one unified social, political and economic entity. The word urbanism is also used as a qualitative complement to the description of various urban and rural forms i.e.: informal urbanism, new urbanism, self-sufficient urbanism, sustainable urbanism, centralized or decentralized urbanism, neo-traditional urbanism, transitional urbanism, other urbanisms, etc. Urban, city, and town planning is the integration of the disciplines of land use planning and transport planning, to explore a very wide range of aspects of the built and social environments of urbanized municipalities and communities. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a less detailed level. Based upon the origins of urban planning from the Roman (pre-dark ages) era, the current discipline revisits the synergy of the disciplines of urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture, varying upon from the inter-lectural strategic positioning from university to university. Another key role of urban planning is urban renewal, and regeneration of inner cities by adapting urban planning methods to existing cities suffering from long-term infrastructural decay. Urbanization is the physical growth of urban areas from rural areas as a result of population immigration to an existing urban area. Urbanization is closely linked to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of rationalization. Effects include change in density and administration services. While the exact definition and population size of urbanized areas varies among different countries, urbanization is attributed to growth of cities. Urbanization is also defined by the United Nations as movement of people from rural to urban areas with population growth equating to urban migration. The UN has projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008..The rapid urbanization of the world’s population over the twentieth century is described in the 2005 Revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects report. The global proportion of urban population rose dramatically from 13% (220 million) in 1900, to 29% (732 million) in 1950, to 49% (3.2 billion) in 2005. The same report projected that the figure is likely to rise to 60% (4.9 billion) by 2030.Urbanization rates vary between countries. The United States and United Kingdom have a far higher urbanization level than China, India, Swaziland or Niger, but a far slower annual urbanization rate, since much less of the population is living in a rural area.People move into cities to seek economic opportunities. In rural areas, often on small family farms, it is difficult to improve one's standard of living beyond basic sustenance. Farm living is dependent on unpredictable environmental conditions, and in times of drought, flood or pestilence, survival becomes extremely problematic. Cities , in contrast, are known to be places where money, services and wealth are centralized. Cities are where fortunes are made and where social mobility is possible. Businesses, which generate jobs and capital, are usually located in urban areas. Whether the source is trade or tourism, it is also through the cities that foreign money flows into a country. It is easy to see why someone living on a farm might wish to take their chance moving to the city and trying to make enough money to send back home to their struggling family. There are better basic services as well as other specialist services that aren't found in rural areas. There are more job opportunities and a greater variety of jobs. Health is another major factor. People, especially the elderly are often forced to move to cities where there are doctors and hospitals that can cater for their health needs. Other factors include a greater variety of entertainment (restaurants, movie theaters, theme parks, etc) and a better quality of education, namely universities. Due to their high populations, urban areas can also have much more diverse social communities allowing others to find people like them when they might not be able to in rural areas. These conditions are heightened during times of change from a pre-industrial society to an industrial one. It is at this time that many new commercial enterprises are made possible, thus creating new jobs in cities. It is also a result of industrialization that farms become more mechanized, putting many employers out of work. This is currently occurring fastest in India.

There is also suburbanization. It is a term used to describe the process of population movement from within towns and cities to the rural-urban fringe. It is one of the many causes of the increase in urban sprawl. Many residents of metropolitan areas no longer live and work within the central urban area, choosing instead to live in satellite communities called suburbs and commute to work via automobile or mass transit. Others have taken advantage of technological advances to work from their homes, and chose to do so in an environment they consider more pleasant than the city. These processes often occur in more economically developed countries, especially in the United States, which is believed to be the first country in which the majority of the population lives in the suburbs, rather than in the cities or in rural areas. Proponents of containing urban sprawl argue that sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower income residents in the inner city. Suburbanization can be linked to a number of different push and pull factors. Push factors include the congestion and population density of the cities, pollution caused by industry and high levels of traffic and a general perception of a lower quality of life in inner city areas. Pull factors include more open spaces and a perception of being closer to "nature", lower suburban house prices and property taxes in comparison to the city, and the increasing number of job opportunities in the suburban areas .Improvements in transportation infrastructure encourage suburbanization, as people become increasingly able to live in a suburb and commute in to the nearby town or city to work. Developments in railways, bus routes and roads are the main improvements that make suburbanization more practical. The increase in the number and size of highways is a particularly significant part of this effect. Government policies can have a significant effect on the process. In the United States, for instance, policies of the Federal government in the post-World War II era, such as the building of an efficient network of roads, highways and superhighways, and the underwriting of mortgages for suburban one-family homes, had an enormous influence on the pace of suburbanization in that country. In effect, the government was encouraging the transfer of the middle-class population out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, sometimes with devastating effects on the viability of the city centers. However, some argue that the effect of Interstate Highway Systems on suburbanization is overstated. Researchers of this vein believe city center populations would have declined even in the absence of highway systems, contending that suburbanization is a long-standing and almost universal process. They primarily argue that as incomes rise, most people want the range and choice offered by automobiles. In addition, there is no significant evidence directly linking the development of highway systems to declining urban populations. Insurance companies also fueled the push out of cities, as in many cases, it redlined inner-city neighborhoods, denying mortgage loans there, and instead offering low rates in the suburban areas. More recently, some urban areas have adopted "green belt" policies which limit growth in the fringe of a city, in order to encourage more growth in the urban core. It began to be realized that a certain amount of population density in the center city is conducive to creating a good, working urban environment. Race also played a role in American suburbanization. During World War I, the massive migration of African Americans from the South resulted in an even greater residential shift toward suburban areas. The cities became seen as dangerous, crime-infested areas, while the suburbs were seen as safe places to live and raise a family, leading to a social trend known in some parts of the world as white flight. This phenomenon runs counter to much of the rest of the world, where slums mostly exist outside the city, rather than within them. With the increasing population of the older, more established suburban areas, many of the problems which were once seen as purely urban ones have manifested themselves there as well. Some social scientists suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism. Recent developments in communication technology, such as the spread of broadband services, the growth of e-mail and the advent of practical home video conferencing, has enabled more people to work from home rather than commuting. Although this can occur either in the city or in the suburbs, the effect is generally decentralizing, which works against the largest advantage of the center city, which is easier access to information and supplies due to centralization. Similarly, the rise of efficient package express delivery systems, such as (in the United States) Federal Express and UPS, which take advantage of computerization and the availability of an efficient air transportation system, also eliminates some of the advantages that were once to be had from having a business located in the city. The overall effect of these developments is that businesses as well, and not just individuals, now see an advantage to locating in the suburbs, where the cost of buying land, renting space, and running their operations, is cheaper than in the city. This has led to another recent phenomenon in American suburbs, the advent of edge cities in suburban areas, arising out of clusters of office buildings built around commercial strips and shopping malls. With more and more jobs for suburbanites being located in these areas rather than in the main city core that the suburbs grew out of, traffic patterns, which for decades centered on people commuting into the center city to work in the morning and then returning home in the evening, have become more complex, with the volume of intra-suburban traffic increasing tremendously./Historically it was believed that living in highly urban areas resulted in social isolation, social disorganization, and psychological problems, and that living in suburbs would be more conducive to overall happiness, due to lower population density, lower crime, and a more stable population. A study based on data from 1974, however, found this not to be the case, finding that people living in suburbs had neither greater satisfaction with their neighborhood nor greater satisfaction with the quality of their lives as compared to people living in urban areas./ The second part of research work is Socio-cultural evolution. It is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure, the values of a society, and how and why they change with time, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and social change. Most 19th century and some 20th century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development. At present this thread is continued to some extent within the World System approach. Many of the more recent 20th-century approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea of directional change, or social progress. Most archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the framework of modern theories of socio-cultural evolution. Modern approaches to socio-cultural evolution include neo-evolutionism, sociobiology, theory of modernization and theory of postindustrial society. Anthropologists and sociologists often assume that human beings have natural social tendencies and that particular human social behaviors have non-genetic causes and dynamics (i.e. they are learned in a social environment and through social interaction). Societies exist in complex social (i.e. with natural resources and constraints) environments, and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change. Specific theories of social or cultural evolution are usually meant to explain differences between coeval societies, by positing that different societies are at different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure, or values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change. Early socio-cultural evolution theories—the theories of August Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously but independently of Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century uni-lineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories (mainly uni-lineal ones) have led to much criticized theories like social Darwinism, and scientific racism, used in the past to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery, and to justify new policies such as eugenics.The 14th century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun concluded that societies are living organisms that experience cyclic birth, growth, maturity, decline, and ultimately death due to universal causes several centuries before the Western civilization developed the science of sociology. Nonetheless, theories of social and cultural evolution were common in modern European thought. Prior to the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on Earth were in a state of decline. European society held up the world of antiquity as a standard to aspire to, and Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome produced levels of technical accomplishment which Europeans of the Middle Ages sought to emulate. At the same time, Christianity taught that people lived in a debased world fundamentally inferior to the Garden of Eden and Heaven. During The Age of Enlightenment, however, European self-confidence grew and the notion of progress became increasingly popular. It was during this period that what would later become known as "sociological and cultural evolution" would have its roots. We also should pay attention to urban morphology. It is the study of the form of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation. The study seeks to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the process of its development. This can involve the analysis of physical structures at different scales as well as patterns of movement, land use, ownership or control and occupation. Typically, analysis of physical form focuses on street pattern, lot (or, in the UK, plot) pattern and building pattern, sometimes referred to collectively as urban grain. Analysis of specific settlements is usually undertaken using cartographic sources and the process of development is deduced from comparison of historic maps. Special attention is given to how the physical form of a city changes over time and to how different cities compare to each other. Another significant part of this subfield deals with the study of the social forms which are expressed in the physical layout of a city and conversely, how physical form produces or reproduces various social forms. The essence of the idea of morphology was initially expressed in the writings of the great poet and philosopher Goethe (1790); the term as such was first used in bioscience. Recently it is being increasingly used in geography, geology, philology and other subjects. In American geography, urban morphology as a particular field of study owes its origins to Lewis Mumford, James Vance and Sam Bass Warner. Peter Hall of the UK is also a central figure. Urban morphology is also considered as the study of urban tissue, or fabric, as a means of discerning the underlying structure of the built landscape.