DEVELOPMENT HANDBOOK
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ยก YOUR DEVELOPMENT MATTERS TO US! You can use the self-development guides to focus on the competency that you would like to work on this year. This is an excellent opportunity to develop your potential! There are countless actions you can carry out to strengthen your competencies. In the following pages you will find guidance and materials that will be useful for your development plan. This tool will allow you to focus on your actions to develop the competency you have selected. HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE Many of the activities we carry out in our daily basis can be an opportunity to develop competencies. You will find options for reading, films and extracurricular activities in this guide that will help you develop behaviors linked to the competency you decide to work on. The activities or reading materials mentioned here, do not need to be the same as those you do or plan to do, but rather useful suggestions. You can either choose some of them or opt for similar activities that you prefer. We also suggest that you bear in mind that developing a competency implies changing behaviors and this takes time, so intent and perseverance are key elements in ensuring successful selfdevelopment. We encourage you to explore this guide and track the activities you choose in your self-development plan. ยกYour success is up to you!
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2 QUALITY AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT CONTENT
Activities
Films
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ACTIVITIES Many activities we develop in our daily lives can be opportunities to develop quality and continuous improvement. The following are 12 ideas you can adapt to your own preferences and interests:
SELF-MANAGING A PROJECT
Having the initiative to self-manage a project (be it research, a business, a community intervention, etc.) is valuable. In addition to allowing the development of processes and the achievement of objectives through concrete and planned actions, it also brings into play many skills and behaviors required to make the project both possible and sustainable. Not only should there be a new and innovative idea, but there should also be the necessary predisposition and initiative when it comes to taking short-, medium- and long-term decisions to implement the project, with the aim of making possible and facilitating the attainment of the planned goals and anticipating possible obstacles.
PLAYING AN INSTRUMENT
Beyond your teacher’s recommendations and motivation, it is necessary to know that you must establish your own goals and that willpower and discipline are fundamental to achieving them. Assuming a proactive, original and autonomous attitude in this sense, those who dedicate themselves to playing an instrument must make an effort and work hard to gradually improve their technique and style, incorporating creative approaches and nuances that enhance their music and allow it to stand out. The passion with which you dedicate yourself to this activity will be the most important element in achieving good results and a good performance.
RADIO PRESENTING
Presenting a live radio (or television) program implies having great spontaneity and a great ability to deal with unexpected events (errors, silences, etc.). The way that events develop and the different situations that emerge require the presenter to come up with answers, comments, conclusions, observations, etc. that need to be provided with the necessary speed and eloquence and the appropriate manner or style.
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RAFTING
Practicing rafting in a team implies synchronizing efforts and energies with a view to overcoming the different challenges and obstacles that emerge along the way. In this respect it is not only necessary for each team member to have knowledge and experience of the techniques to be used; they must also be willing to adapt and work according to the conditions around them, anticipating and overcoming any changes that take place. The secret to a good performance lies in the ability and speed with which each person, and the group, can respond to the changing demands of the terrain. In this respect, it is essential to develop new ideas and techniques before starting so they can be put into practice to achieve new nuances in the way things are run.
CHILD ENTERTAINMENT
Due to their spontaneity, countless concerns and boundless curiosity, anyone who comes into contact with children must have a great capacity to resolve a large number of minor situations with the same spontaneity: answering questions, making up stories, consoling tearful kids, resisting whims, avoiding fights and many other possible problems. If you are providing the entertainment for a children’s party, it is not only necessary to have a great number of resources, activities and games “up your sleeve”; you also need the capacity to come up with new solutions and quick and easy-to-implement alternatives to help resolve adverse situations. Being a highly esthetic sport, all those who practice artistic gymnastics must pay attention to and improve their performance in relation to each of their movements, all of which must be precise and graceful at the same time.
ARTISTIC GYMNASTICS
TENNIS
To achieve the right performance in this sense, it is essential to be really committed to the activity and have a great capacity for hard work. It is vital to bear in mind the need for ongoing practice and improvement of the different techniques and “modes.” When choosing a sport to practice, tennis has various unique characteristics. It is an individual and highly competitive game that demands a great amount of effort and training to win each point. Players should not only be physically fit; they must also train in the precise movements for each stroke and should know the game’s tactics if they want to be able to defeat an opponent that is dominating the game. Once the rudiments of racket management and moving across the court have been mastered, however, a player will be able to execute shots with precision and intelligently choose the right tactics.
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SINGING
Although certain people have a natural talent for singing, all good singers have spent long hours studying and putting in the required effort. The initial efforts may not always be very encouraging, and a great deal of perseverance will be required to focus on the objective through practice and training sessions, but those willing to put in the work will see evident improvements in their pitch and vocal capacity over time. However, when it comes to a performance, the long hours of study and practice will only stand out if the implementation is precise and the singer achieves a great commitment to the work, he or she is performing
WRITING
Writing literature is a passion for many. Contrary to what people may think, obtaining satisfactory results is not a simple matter of sudden inspiration or raw talent, but rather the result of sustained work and many hours of effort, training and correcting previous attempts. Many prefer to develop this activity in a literary workshop with a coordinator or teacher who provides guidance and establishes goals. However, the effort to obtain the proposed goals will crucially have to do with achieving the expected quality.
CARPENTRY
MARATHON RUNNING
DART
Anyone who starts carpentry must plan and focus each action to achieve the plan sketched out for the work in question. Long hours of work are required to produce the product (and achieve the objective). It would perhaps be positive during the first attempts to produce a product that complies with the minimum functionalities and is solidly and durably built. But the quality of the finish, the presentation and the design will quickly start to become a central element in attaining a satisfactory result.
In many of the world’s cities, various open marathons are held every year in favor of some cause or, frequently, just to promote the practice of sports among the population. Physical preparation, previous training, suitable clothing and appropriate concentration are some of the activities and attitudes that help produce a good performance. A marathon runner must be both physically and mentally prepared and focused on achieving the target of reaching the finish line. To attain this, the runner must train, establishing challenges that are higher than the standard ones in order to better his or her own time and maintain a high level of performance and competitiveness.
The area to aim at is clearly delimited. The whole body must be used to achieve your results, perfect your aim and hit the bull’s eye. Those practicing this game must have a highly precise technique and, with the aim of attaining increasingly better results, establish challenging goals that require them to optimize and maintain a high-performance level.
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READING MATERIALS Certain reading materials can provide an excellent opportunity to reflect on the competency of commitment to results and your own behavior. The following are six suggestions:
DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT Author: Jurgen Wolff
This book forcefully presents the idea that if you are going to keep on doing what you have always done, you are going to continue ending up where you have always ended up. Its basic premise is therefore that if you want to achieve more, you must do something different. The book contains many proposals about how to take control. It is full of examples of entrepreneurs that looked at the market and their competitors from a different point of view and decided to stretch themselves and do something a little bit surprising. As a result, they were able to push their products and companies forward. Do Something Different will teach the reader how to “break the mold� and find the path to greater success. Jurgen Wolff, the author, is professor of creativity at the University of Southern California and runs the business creativity bulletin Brainstorm.
An essential book for businesspeople, company managers, advisers, professionals, and students willing to research and understand the intrinsic nature of business and its profitability. TOP PERFORMANCE Author: ZIG ZIGLAR
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(In Spanish) This is a book about innovation, based on an analysis of business reality and an understanding of the weak points of the dominant management styles, with the aim of orienting them toward business innovation and improvement.
INNOVATING IN THE FIRM Author: Roberto Carballo
GETTING THINGS DONE Author: David Allen
It is about how to improve the managerial and leadership function in organizations, how to introduce a human and group dimension, and how to make the organizations cross the threshold of numbers, finance, technologies, organigrams, the wealth of people and groups, and the emotional side of things. In short, it is about human beings.
(In Spanish) A practical work organization system that allows us to reduce stress, attain the results we want and makes us more effective in all aspects of life. Personal productivity is based on the idea that the nature of work has profoundly changed in the information age. Our tasks are no longer evident, and we do not really know when they have finished. Nor are they stable or predictable and, more importantly, they are not proportional to the time we have available to do them. Everything is new more often. These changes have generated a situation of growing and general stress among us all. All too frequently we have the feeling that something is not going well and will cause us problems, but we do not know either what it has to do with or when it might all blow up, let alone what consequences it might have.
This book provides fascinating and useful ideas about how organizations can develop and keep leaders that obtain results. Results-Based Leadership challenges conventional wisdom on leadership. The book’s authors, who are world-renowned in the areas of human resources and leadership development, argue that it is not enough to judge leaders by their personal characteristics (character, knowledge, style and principles) and that leaders know how to link their attributes to results. This book shows how to obtain results in the key areas—employees, processes and organization, customers, and shareholders—allowing value creation in line with the company’s objectives. RESULT BASED LEADERSHIP Authors: Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger and Norm Smallwood
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Do you have problems defining your goals? Would you like to focus on your objectives and pursue them until you obtain the best possible results? The importance of setting goals was one of the stand-out conclusions of a famous study conducted in Stanford University in the 1920s.
THE MAGIC LAMP Author: Keith Ellis
A total of 1,500 “gifted� children were monitored to research the relationship between intelligence and subsequent success in life. The study revealed that together with perseverance and selfconfidence, one of the most important features for achieving success was the tendency to set goals. The Magic Lamp offers a path in that direction, demonstrating how to make achieving your objectives both easier and more stimulating. It is a very simple trick, which consists of linking our desires with our objectives. Desires have the force of emotion, providing the freedom to dream and the power to make our dreams come true.
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FILMS CAST AWAY The difficult and extreme situation that the film’s main character (Chuck Noland) has to endure means that he must continually come up with new and different solutions based on the resources he has in order to resolve each problem or dayto-day situation he faces in his life on the island where he is a castaway. Throughout the film, his creativity and capacity to adapt and innovate are some of the personality characteristics that are fundamental to allowing him to keep himself alive. Without these competencies it would be difficult for him to feed himself, remain hydrated and therefore keep himself safe and sound. A number of scenes show his capacity to “reinvent” various elements and tools using the resources at hand (which he exploits to the maximum), including: a knife, shoes, a net, a spear, a mirror, a solar calendar, rope, a raft and a sailboat. These and other things will in a certain way be the “steps” that allow Chuck to reach his goal. . APOLLO 13 Faced with a situation as extreme as the one in this film, the capacity to act in a flexible, effective and innovative way becomes a highly important competency. Apollo 13 is a film that places its characters in front of a constant flow of extremely conflictive and stressful challenges and situations. In this context, the capacity to come up with new and different solutions to a diversity of situations is the competency that must be employed by both the Apollo crewmembers and the specialist teams providing support and knowledge from Earth. Many parts of the film explicitly dramatize this, although two scenes stand out in particular: the one in which the team of specialist technicians has to sit down to produce solutions under extreme pressure; and the one in which Ken gets to work to find a way for Apollo to reduce its energy consumption in order to pass through the atmosphere and make it back to Earth.
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EL AVIATOR Howard Hughes was a person whose initiative and innovations were very influential at the time. He was an intelligent industrialist and a producer of glamorous films. This movie focuses on one of the most prolific parts of Hughes’ life, when his boldness to do things and his passion for flying pervaded his efforts as a pioneer in both aviation and film making. When still just an adolescent, Howard Hughes took the decision to use the fortune inherited from his father to film an epic air combat movie that was different from any other, doing his own extravagant high-risk scenes, designing special airplanes for the purpose. Hell’s Angels made Hughes a celebrity. After founding Hughes Aircraft Company and audaciously breaking a number of aviation speed records, Hughes became the most famous US aviator. GOODBYE LENIN October 1989 was not the best moment to go into a coma if you were living in East Berlin. But that is what happened to Alex’s mother, a woman who was proud of her socialist ideals. Alex finds himself in a complicated situation when his mother suddenly comes out of the coma eight months later and the doctors recommend avoiding any shocks that might affect her weak heart. Nothing could affect her more than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism in her beloved East Germany, so Alex does everything possible to stop his mother suffering a new relapse if she discovers all of the changes that have taken place in the country she helped maintain. As a result, he goes to great lengths to keep her shielded from the news whose consequences continually reveal themselves in their daily life, so he has to employ all his ingenuity and determination to achieve his objective and save his mother.
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THE STRAIGHT STORY Based on a true story, The Straight Story shows the incredible journey of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who lives a quiet life in a small provincial city. When his brother—who lives in another state and who he has not seen for many years— becomes seriously ill, Alvin decides to put their differences aside and visit him. Driving a small, old tractor, he sets out on his own on a long journey covering thousands of kilometers just to see his brother again, if it is the last thing he does.
FRIDA Frida is a biographical film about the incredible life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who overcame the serious injuries that left her in a wheelchair to become one of the most important painters in Latin America and the world, channeling her own story and tumultuous life into her artwork and achieving extraordinary results. Frida portrays the artist’s life from the moment she and her partner, the famous painter Diego Rivera, take the art world by storm.
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ROL MODEL A role model is someone who has stood out throughout his or her career in a certain aspect and to whom we can look as a model and a source of inspiration for our own activities. The following contains information about the exemplary career of a true role model in the area of quality and continuous improvement.
LADISLAO JOSÉ BIRÓ (1899-1985) In 1851 a journalist wrote in Scientific American that the whole world wanted a replacement for the pencil and the fountain pen, but this wish was not realized until 1938, when two Hungarian brothers, Ladislao and Georg Biro, invented something that achieved worldwide success: the ballpoint pen. The story started when celebrated inventor Ladislao José Biro asked himself how a more practical writing instrument could be made. His resolve led to the development of the ballpoint pen, or biro, which consisted of a steel ball at the end of a cylinder full of special ink that was drawn down by gravity and dried immediately on the paper. Biro found it hard to secure support from his contemporaries and colleagues, so he had to go it alone to overcome the complications that emerged during the invention process. In addition to technical problems, the inventor faced economic difficulties when investors did not want to finance his project any more... until he managed to perfect the pen’s production system and it began to be marketed with great success. Biro patented a rudimentary model of the ballpoint pen in his country, in France and in Switzerland in 1938, and then later in Argentina (1943), where his invention received financing to be marketed and industrialized for the first time. In 1944, Biro sold the patent to Ever sharp-Faber in the United States for USD 2 million and to Marcel Bich (who manufactured BIC pens) in Europe. Ladislao Biro is the paradigm of the truly multifaceted “professional inventor” (he made 32 inventions in the most varied areas). He was an explorer of the unknown. His curiosity was insatiable; his vision ahead of his time; his judgment critical and challenging; his willpower sustained. As a result, in Argentina the “Day of the Inventor” is celebrated on his birthday—September 29—in homage to his talent and his capacity to “seek and find something” (which is the etymology of the word “invent”).is based on Intel being valued at around USD 120 billion on the stock exchange, being the world’s main microprocessor-producing firm.
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MICHAEL SCHUMACHER (1969 - today) “Total of 52 victories in F1”; “Schumacher won in Belgium and is a record holder”; “Michael Schumacher continues winning and breaking records in F1”; “Schumacher won in the F1 opening race.” Why did Michael Schumacher win everything?” “New record for Michael Schumacher”; “Michael Schumacher the fastest again”: these is just some of the headlines referring to the countless victories and successes achieved by the German star in the world of motor racing and Formula 1. In race after race and championship after championship this driver achieved superlative performances and demonstrated his indisputable superiority. He holds the records for the Grandest Prix won, the most victories in a season and the most points won in a championship. In 2004, he won his seventh world title. The German driver achieved impressive record times, drove his car to the limit and revolutionized the meaning of race strategy, attaining very good results through this innovation (as shown by his number of victories). It is true that Schumacher had an excellent car (the tool he used to achieve his targets and victories), but it is also undeniable that he had special and unusual skills that made it possible for him to achieve victory even in apparently “adverse” situations. In 1994 and 2000, his car was performing worse than those of rival teams (Williams and McLaren, respectively), and yet Schumacher managed to impose his superiority and win the races. On one occasion, the high temperatures meant that only nine of the competing drivers finished the race, and Schumacher was not only one of the nine, but also finished first on the podium, winning the competition just a few meters ahead of the car behind him. Schumacher is undeniably the number one in the world of speed and in terms of obtaining results
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