Delegation. Why and How.

Delegation is a major skill that every manager or leader should master. Delegation is one of the main factors that result in great success not just in your business but in managing your life and family relations. unfortunately many people lack the delegation skill which makes them lose a lot of time, money and opportunities that they would have benefit from.

Delegation is a skill that needs practice, managers need to have confidence assigning tasks to their subordinates, and they have to accept failures but that doesn’t mean to quit delegation and go back doing everything yourself again. No, it just means to take a step back and learn what went wrong ? what they learned from this trail that they shouldn't do it in the next trail.

Delegation is one of the top challenging skills that managers take time to acquire and it is definitely worse it. One of the main benefits of delegation is having time to think of strategic decisions, because working on tactics and technical tasks always leads to the loss of the overall vision so they manager will feel that he is making progress while he is moving in the wrong direction in the first place.

Some other benefits for delegation are

1. Develop your team skills and experience
2. Increase your team efficiency and effectiveness especially if you are not good at certain tasks.
3. Have more time to focus on other strategic decisions.
4. Makes the best out of your time and skills

Why Managers don’t delegate.

Most managers lack such skill and they have a lot of fake excuses not to delegate tasks, some of these fake excuses are

1. It takes more time to explain the delegated task
2. There are things I should not delegate.
3. My employees are already busy working on ......
4. My employees are not ready to accept more responsibility
5. Employee mistake can be costly
6. My Employees lack the required knowledge and experience

I am not going to provide a response for each of these reasons but I am going to state some of the real reasons behind such fake excuses.

The main first reason is the fear of losing power, some managers feel that when they delegate their tasks to their subordinate, they will have nothing to do and then they become dispensable, and so, someone else may take their job.

Another main reason related to the feel is power, is the idea of sharing knowledge. All human consider knowledge as a source of power and if I share all I had, I will have no power so they don't delegate some of theirs tasks to make sure no one knows their way of doing things and so they feel important “I am the only one who can do that >:)“.

There are other reasons such as the lack of trust in their subordinates, so managers fear that tasks won’t be done in the right way “his way”. Some managers also feel the lack of control over their subordinates, especially if they are abroad, so they fear un-expected results while some other managers don’t have enough self confidence to think they can direct others. Some managers don’t delegate because they fear that their bad management skill would become clear against his colleagues, so they try to hide.

It is clear that managers need to get over these fears because it will block your way towards success.

Now lets discuss what you should delegate, well, if possible try to delegate everything but that can’t be always the case, so at least you should delegate tasks that

1. Recur every once and while.
2. Are not critical to you and someone else have the knowledge to do it.
3. You are not good at.

And finally I would like to give a couple of tips for every managers going to delegate some of his work to his subordinates

1. Make sure to regularly check the progress and don’t just wait for end results.
2. Don’t accept incomplete work and complete it yourself, because that will cost more time and effort and you are sending a wrong message to your subordinate that “it is ok to deliver in-complete work”.
3. Make sure your subordinate has the time availability and the required knowledge before handing over tasks to him.
4. A simple training or just more detailed explanation for the requirement can be very helpful for your subordinates to know what they should do and will save you time checking his work when he is done.

Finally, delegation is just one skill that managers should master and not the only one, and don’t expect any of these skills to be easy, so a general advice would be to try it, expect failure and build your self confidence one small step after another till you master these skills.

Looking forward for your comments, Thanks

Globalization

While I am reviewing this article before posting it, i felt that i have gone a bit extreme with globalization, but i wasn't sure about that, so please write your opinion if you read the article till the end.

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First I would like to write how I see Globalization from my point of view, I apology that it is not going to be a scientific definition. Globalization is a World without Borders or (lines on maps, that’s how I see it), single language, single currency and single law. I don't expect all people to have some culture due to the difference in geographic locations and climate changes. So I expect difference in the styles, subcultures and so some regulation difference. To cut it short I just see the whole world as one country.

So I believe globalization, as a pure concept is a great and I really advocate the concept, but the problem I have with the current globalization thinking is the real motivations behind it and how it is implemented.

I don't like the way globalization is now being forced on different countries, not because I don't like globalization, but because the globalization by the current way (real world way) is forced by multinational company and their primary and most important goal is to increase sales and profit, they are just greedy. These multinational companies are not pushing globalization to reduce unemployment, or to increase cultural exchange and so increase innovation, not to maximize resource utilizations. They are just rushing for more cash by removing trading barriers and customs on products; you can see a lot of countries removing barriers against each other on products but so far I see a very small set of countries removing barriers on human movement, culture exchange and natural resource exchange. And that’s why a lot of people oppose globalization in its current form, it badly affect small and local business, it forces culture shift and not culture exchanges in small and developing countries and yet it doesn't seem to solve unemployment, poverty, educational problems in these small countries.

Anti-globalization movement (counter-globalization movement), is a movement that tries to oppose the current globalization trends by big companies like McDonalds and Starbucks. This movement is trying to aware people about the disadvantage of the current globalization model, how it is going to affect small business owners, make a culture shift probably towards a bad direction like adopting American fast food culture, higher dose of caffeine in a regular cup of coffee.

Another option that I don't agree with but I will demonstrate in this essay, was introduced with someone with military background (US high rank officer), what he dislike about globalization is that it groups “bad guys” together, his opinion is that drug traders, weapon traders, terrorism and cyber-attacks criminals benefit from this border removal and they will group together and make a big thread against single countries with low resources to fight all these combined enemies together. I disagree with this opinion because these “bad guys” appeared because of poverty, unemployment and ignorance spreading that is a result of greedy globalization trends. So they are not the problem that should be fought, they are just the result of multinational companies doing things in the wrong way, so that way should be revised again.

Trying to show the opposite point of view, some Multinational companies like McDonalds, did a lot of improvement in a country like India, when McDonald decided to invest in that country because of its large population. McDonald was committed to work with local suppliers and farmers to source all its requirements and spent 6 years and around Rs. 450 crore to set up the food supply chain even before opening its first restaurant in the country. Such investment lead of a big improvement in India agriculture system, but my question, what if the some India Brand for example IndiaDonalds did take that step instead of McDonalds and did what McDonald did, which would have a better return on India? Can’t India achieve that on its own? Does McDonalds use some of its profit to invest in other sectors in India like R & D, just like it does in USA? In the pure globalization concept the answer to this question should be yes, because after all, we just live in one country.

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Hope you don't forget to share your opinion about the way i demonstrated globalization in this articles and Thanks in advance 

Sustainability

Sustainability is the idea of maintaining the current status of a system or process in its existing status. In old days, human population was small compared to the natural resources available, also their needs where humble and limited, so the treated the natural resources for granted. They thought that natural resources are unlimited resources that will keep renewing itself and they will never feel in shortage, till one day they noticed that the already have consumed two third of the planet resources and if they keep moving in their industrial direction, these resources will vanish and their children and grandchildren will suffer their parents and grandparents actions.

The previous way, multinational organizations was using natural resources, was leading the whole planet to extinction, problems like climate change, rising of sea level, fresh water shortage, pollution levels is hitting the roof in some of top industrial cities around the world. This foolish consumption will not affect humans only but all creatures in our planet.

So a new model for industry was required, a model that takes environment and future into consideration, a model that doesn’t care only about profit and producing more but also cares whether resources were used efficiently during the production, how we are affecting the environment and how our products will be disposed. So instead of the regular model from “from cradle to grave” a new model was introduce, “from cradle to cradle”, which cares about how the product will be manufactured with the least resources ever and how they can recycled at least once after their initial use.

Now, some big organizations like Nike are encouraging customer to donate their old shoes so they can be re-used again in industry or for some other charity form, Nike designer went back to the first principles again, trying to make new shoes as recyclable as possible. And the result, they made shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. More and More cloth companies are adopting such way of thinking, and in the near future, Puma says, it will produce a new line of T-shirts and sneakers that can be ripped up and buried in the ground as fertilizer.

One of the other big organizations that is taking sustainability seriously is Coca-Cola company, Coca-Cola is working together with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and is targeting some serious sustainable goals to achieve before 2020, the company is committed to focus on sustainable management of water, energy, and packaging use as well as sustainable sourcing of agricultural ingredients. Some of there detailed goals are, improving water efficiency by 25%, reducing CO2 emissions embedded in ‘the drink in your hand’ by 25%, reaching a 75% recovery rate of bottles and cans in developed markets.

As you can see big organization started to take responsibility for their actions, they know that if they didn’t start paying more attention to the environment right now, they will be losing money in the future and it will be late to react to the problem.

Making your First Game (2)

Episode 2

Still talking about making your first Game and the guidelines to take care of

Make a relation between the player of the game and the character inside it. Build up your game character before you tear them down. Make their loss count. Try to bond the your game player with the characters to feel the loss when it happens

Try to know the motivations of your game character (what does the character is trying to do and why), that will help you determine what your character should say / act and will result in much richer character. for example, a prince trying to save his princess should be in hurry , impatient guy, he don't stop to open a treasure but he kicks it to open it, he jumps right into a fight and kill enemies in a hurry.

Naming your character is a very important, Names carry weight, it is important to give your character the right name. Baby books are a great place to start looking for names. try to find names that have some significance to the character personality or what their occupation. and Most important never give your character a name that gives away the ending of your story, ex : don't name it devil killer :)

When making a game for kids make sure game don't suck, most common mistake while making a kid's games is making its story very simple, consider stories from kids books, if it is good enough for a kid's book , it is good enough for kid's game. another advantage for making a game for kids it that you can teach them stuff while playing That can be called "edutainment" 

Stay tuned up for Episode 3 :)

Making Your First Game

After making my mind to make my first game , i discovered that i have no idea about making a one, i don’t know what to take care of, i don’t know what should be taken into consideration, what are the guidelines , what are the Dos and Don’ts.

After searching for a nice book about making games, i found this book named Level Up, the guide to great video game design, it was my first book to read about game but so far -i am still going through it- i think it is a great one.

As i went through the book, i found a lot to learn and i decided to make this post and record everything that i consider interesting / useful in it, to help myself and others keep track about what i have learned so far.

I have decided to write this post after reading a couple of chapters in the book, so don’t count on it as a detailed guide or an alternative for the book.

So, lets get started :)

When making your game, you have to decide “who your game idea is for” / your audience, whether it is for hardcore players or casual ones, it was noted that usually 8 year kids like to play game make for 10 years old kid and 10 years old kid want to play game make for 13 years old kid

Apply the theory of un-fun, “start with a fun idea when you start developing your the game, if you find something in the game that is not fun, then remove it right away. when you have removed all of the un-fun then all that should be left is the fun”. the sermon, don’t be one of the developers who make a game with bad gameplay and ugly art and broken cameras, because they didn’t remove the un-fun once discovered and after a while they get used to it and could not recognize them as problems anymore.

Try brainstorming to get your game idea but there are some rules that you need to set

• There is no such thing as bad idea
• Join people with from other departments (no gaming experience) in the brainstorm to get diverse idea
• Everyone in the brainstorm should have an idea about making games or else you will waste a lot of time on unrealistic ideas
• Write the ideas on a big whiteboard / Post-It notes, Index cards to record your ideas

Choosing your game title, there are different type of game titles

1. The literal title
• Easy to figure what is the your game about, it can be the main character / main location of your game ex: mario game
2. The action / cool title
• Capture the spirit of your game without mentioning any characters or locations ex: Gears of war
3. The punny title
• Makes you appreciate the cleverness of the title ex: Half life
4. The purple cow
• Makes your customer stop in their tracks and stare, make the reader wonder why that title was chosen, how is it related to the game ex: Resident Evil

I guess this is the end of the first session, i really hope to continue posting more and more as i continue reading through the book

Wish me luck :)

Keep your spirits high

There is a lot of moments in my life when I lose my inspiration,determination, my will. when this happens I get off my track and lose my tactic plans. I know this is my worst personality character. and it is part of human nature but I also know that if I managed to decrease how often such habit repeats I will be able do more and achieve more success.

In my pursuit for such goal, I have developed several methods, and that was my last, I decided to create a YouTube playlist that has all the videos that I need to watch when I enter such state of desperation. I know this won't be my last method and I am still looking for more because as I already mentioned, I need to decrease the rate of such bad habit as much as I can.

Method 1: YouTube Playlist

Custom UITableView that slides up / down with the keyborad

After working with Apple iPhone SDK within the previous couple of years, i found that the only reason - in my opinion - to use UITableViewController is to take advantage of the default UITableView scrolling when the keyboards rises up and goes down.

But unfortaunty to get this advantage you will have to give up some main features that you probably need in most of your iPhone applications, becuase if you used UITableViewController, the UITableView takes the size of the whole iPhone screen which means the following
1- you can't add other controls to the View
2- you can't customize the UINavigationBar View

After suffering this disability while developing a couple of my apps, i have decided to make my custom TableView that scrolls automatcially when the keyboard slides up, to do so i found it make more sense to make a custom UITextField , to override the start editing method (when the keyboard goes up) and the end editing methods (when the keyboard goes down)



Personally , i don't think my implementation is 100% perfect but at least it fed my needs with my next app, my implementation only supports the portrait view , contains a static variable which something i am not pride of.

You can download the source code from this link , it is recommended to be downloaded from firefox browser

Looking forward for anyone who can take this code and enhance it to support the landscape view / enhance the coding style