A Note From The President

Avil Beckford, President

I have been thinking about change and how best to adapt to it. In the article, "Getting the Monkey off Darwin's Back: Four Common Myths About Evolution" in the June 2005 issue of Skeptical Inquirer stated "…There is no single key to long-term success, because we never know how our selective environment is going to change. For humanity, then, the only hope for success, for survival, is in remaining flexible and adaptive…." I extracted the information, and have taken it out of context because we can still look at it in a context that relates to us. As I was reading the article I was thinking that there are no guarantees for personal and professional success because life changes so quickly - governments enact new laws, your customers move on to the next big thing, new technology makes an industry obsolete and so on. Despite this, if we are flexible, can adapt to changes and know how to ferret out the next trend, we'll be okay, we'll survive and even thrive.

Skeptical Inquirer is not a magazine that I usually read, but in the interest of expanding my thinking, I have been reading magazines and books that I normally wouldn't read. How much could we expand our thinking, if just once a month we read a magazine or even an article that we wouldn't normally read? How many new ideas could we get from that one small action? And, it doesn't have to cost us. Please refer to the Ambeck Tips section of this newsletter to see how. For me, I decided to choose the group Science and Learning from magatopia.com, and I came across the journals Skeptical Inquirer and How Stuff Works, both of which had very good information. We are on a journey together, a journey that allows us to broaden our horizons. To embrace change, we need to make old ideas new and be willing to take chances.

It's the summertime and most people are taking vacation. Spend some time thinking about the best vacation that you never had, why you haven't taken it, and start to make plans to take that fabulous vacation shortly.

Book Review

Review of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Niccolo Machiavelli worked in politics from 1498 to 1512, but his political career ended in shame, with him arrested and imprisoned for 22 days. Machiavelli refers to Lorenzo Medici as the Prince. In his forced absence from politics, Machiavelli wrote The Prince hoping that given his republican credentials, he would be re-employed with the Medicis, thus returning to a position of power.

The Prince was written nearly 500 years ago, but some of the ideas are still relevant today. In The Prince, Machiavelli deals with the rise and fall of states, and the measures that a leader can take to ensure the states' continued existence. The author's focus is on how societies actually work. The book is very technical, and focuses on how to grasp and hold power, and offers advice on what worked and what did not work in advancing a political career. For example, Machiavelli states "A man who is made prince by the favour of the people must work to retain their friendship; and this is easy for him because the people ask only not to be oppressed. But a man who has become prince against the will of the people and by the favour of the nobles should, before anything else, try to win the people over; this too is easy if he takes them under his protection… it is necessary for a prince to have the friendship of the people; otherwise he has no remedy in times of adversity."

Machiavelli was nicknamed "Old Nick," another name for Satan, and the Jesuits called him "the Devil's partner in crime." While reading The Prince, I was often very shocked because some sections are very dark. However, once you get past that, it is filled with many parallels and contrasts to today. If you dig beneath the surface of what he is saying, the information can be transported to our time and used. For example, "As for intellectual training, the prince must read history, studying the actions of eminent men to see how they conducted themselves during war and to discover the reasons for their victories or their defeats, so that he can avoid the latter and imitate the former. Above all, he must read history so that he can do what eminent men have done before him…." We could make this more relevant to us by interpreting it to mean that we must read history and study the actions of successful men and women to discover the reasons for their successes and failures to imitate their successes.

Machiavelli's political thesis can be summed up as "I also believe that the man who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not."

Five +2 Great Ideas

When trouble is sensed well in advance, it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself, any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable

1. Men willingly change their ruler expecting to fare better
2. When states are acquired in a province differing in language, in customs, and in institutions, then difficulties arise; and to hold them one must be very fortunate and very assiduous. One of the best, most effective expedients would be for the conqueror to go live there in person. This course of action would make a new possession more secure and more permanent.
3. Whoever is responsible for another's becoming powerful ruins himself, because this power is brought into being either by ingenuity or by force, and both of these are suspect to the one who has become powerful
4. Governments set up overnight, like everything in nature whose growth is forced, lack strong roots and ramifications. So they are destroyed in the first bad spell
5. A man who becomes a prince with the help of the nobles finds it more difficult to maintain his position than one who does so with the help of the people. As prince, he finds himself surrounded by many who believe they are his equals, and because of that he cannot command or manage them the way he wants
6. Prosperity is ephemeral; if a man behaves with patience and circumspection, and the time and circumstances are right, he will prosper, however, if circumstances change and he doesn't adapt his policy to reflect the change, he will be ruined.
   

I recommend that you read The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli just to see how far and sometimes not so far that we've come.

August's Book List

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Survey Results

Did you know that laughter is the best medicine for stroke patients? Psychologist, Ilona Papousek conducted research at Graz University in Austria to determine the benefits of laughter.

• Thirty patients in the study were split up into two groups. One group took part in regular "Laughter Yoga" sessions over a six-week period, while the other practiced movement exercises only
• The laughter therapy combined laughing techniques with breathing exercises and patients involved in the test took part in three half-hour weekly sessions
• Blood pressure levels remained roughly the same in the movement group but dropped significantly in the laughter group

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Scientists looked at 9,000 families in Britain throughout the 1990s. During the decade, a number of the people had windfalls of hundreds of thousands of pounds, enabling the researchers to observe the impact, and here is what they found:

• Overall the more [money] you get, we find, the cheerier you'll become. Large sums are better than small sums
• Less than £1m is unlikely to have a lasting effect on a person's happiness and experts found a strong marriage and good health were more likely to make people feel content than money
• The research found that women tended to be happier than men, and people in their 30s were least likely to be content
• There is a strong link between financial windfalls and being happy and having much better psychological health
• Happiness followed a U-shaped pattern, with people beginning life happy but becoming discontented in their early 30s, before their happiness recovered and continued, increasing into their 60s

Source: http://www.platinum-celebs.com/technology/news/2004_03_11.html
BBC News, January 9, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1750337.stm

How Did They Do That?

Brandon Klayman, Conscious Commerce http://www.consciouscommerce.cc

Challenge: Controlling Our Emotions: Have you ever been in a situation where one of your colleagues simply got on your nerves? On the outside we said one thing, but on the inside we did something different. We had underlying feelings that we were not talking about. There were boundary issues around who did what and who got what. It started to interfere with the way that the work got done. The bottom line was how does my colleague and myself discuss issues without getting upset and becoming dysfunctional?

Solution: I decided to be transparent, honest and state my feelings. I stopped and addressed the boundary issues. This allowed for a real solution to occur, we both got to the underlying issues and happily moved on.

Lessons Learned:

1. How to control my emotions
2. How to harness freedom and not be controlled by others
3. How to communicate more effectively
4. How to have patience and communicate exactly what I have to say
   

What Can Ambeck Do For You:

Ambeck Enterprise provides diverse business research and analysis services to senior level executives, through the relevant distillation of diverse facts and data. For your business information needs call 416-929-2882.

Formula For Success

Brandon Klayman

Being guided by a core set of principles creates the context for your success. Basing these core guiding principles, or "conscious values" in your heart is the most powerful place for them to be. Having a clear vision and holding it in your mind automatically manifests it. For me personally, I have "conscious values" which are called WHATSO. Taken as a whole, it means that I have to be observant and see what's in front of my eyes. I look at what is working and what isn't. Taken separately, WHATSO stands for wealth, happiness, awareness, transparency, sustainability and oneness.

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