Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Author: Thang Nguyen 555

  • Empathize and Energize

    You wish your co-workers are all into that. They know how you feel, and because of who they are, they take it up a notch. The virtuous cycle. Feeding into it is like fueling the fire. Passion, dedication and yes, winning. Don’t you miss working in teams with those qualities? Pettiness has no place there.…

  • The Routine

    Instinctively, we follow the path of least resistance (park in the shade, grab the nearest item on the shelves…). Marketers make it their mission to study this, the same way scientists experiment with reflexive rats in the lab.. Nike even filmed the Standford team, trained barefooted, to see the landing and movement of their feet. Creatures of…

  • Machine and Man

    The Curiosity Rover landed intact. Mission Control jumped up and down. Machine and Man. One giant step. Let’s hug, even the meanest-looking of guys. From Moon to Mars (better known as a candy bar), machine as modern-day Columbus. Something in the way she moves. Knowledge gap will be filled in the days ahead, on-screen and online. Ask…

  • Point A To B

    We make that trip all our lives. To and Fro. Back and Forth. Arriving and Leaving. The Goodbye Girl. The Run-Away Bride. The Mid-night Cowboy. All feels restless Gotta be somebody, going places. This time, point B happens to be Mars itself. Young people can muster up the courage to go to far-away wars, but dare…

  • Confidence

    2.5 per cent. That’s US growth figure. Enough? Confident? Could be better? I am glad we are growing even when it feels like we are running in place. Perception vs Reality. Like how they feel now at Microsoft, at Yahoo. Even at RIM and Facebook. Something is missing. Mojo? Passion and Pride. Exuberance and Exhilaration.…

  • Sudden Dream

    If you dropped everything and listened to all the casual remarks, you would be paralyzed. The current economy is like an elephant, perceived by four blind men: it’s going to get better, it’s like a wave form, a V-shape, a downward cyclical. They could illustrate and demonstrate. They could even persuade. But who is to…

  • Besides perspiration

    Hard work is a given, a prereq for success. But that necessary spark, the 10% inspiration, must be there. Two candidates, with  equal experience, the one with a great attitude wins. You must have the mojo. It shows up in conversation, in off-hand moments (kicking the dog on the way out or giving the finger in…

  • The limits

    If you happened to watch the Olympic men weightlifting , you would find out quickly that we have our limits. We are shaped in this body, given that much neurons and glued to the ground by gravity (tell that to the jumpers). This is an unpopular observation. We are more used to hearing inspirational messages, that…

  • Lost art of typing

    The BBC has a piece on Japan Love Affair with the Fax Machine. Older population has gotten used to that technology (which allows for hand-writing). For years, I have used email except for  Thank-you notes in writing. I can reasonably predict that even typing (as we know it) will be a lost art (speech recognition will…

  • Repo and Retro

    We don’t want the former, and wish to collect the latter. In our age of mass production, supplysiders push consumption to the  point of writing up bad loans, hence Repo. Then, and this happened to me once, products came out of the assembly line all look alike: I once mistakenly opened an identical rental car…