WHY ARE BOOKS STILL IMPORTANT
By Pat Earle, Founder and CEO of the First R Foundation, Inc.
A physical book is tangible and real. They don’t just exist in the ether. You can pick them up and read them at any time and hand them on to someone else without a concern.
I still have books that I first read when I was 5 that sit on my bookshelf above my desk and keep me in touch with my own history.
A book can be damaged or lost, but it is almost impossible to permanently erase them from existence at the touch of a finger.
Consider this: Throughout history, why did tyrants always go after the books first, burning them in large piles publicly as an example to everyone?
They were, of course attempting to suppress independent thought, deleting a major asset of humanity in the process… the stored knowledge of our creativity that has lead to our progressive advancement over time.
Now we find ourselves in a time when words in electronic files, as well as words displayed over the internet (like this article) have begun to replace physical books to an extent, although the fact of the book as an artifact still has great value in the right hands (both literally and figuratively).
When a respected member of a community takes the time to sit and read to beginning learners among us, the result is powerful.
For both sides...
Try it!
Sometimes it is the simple solutions that carry the most weight!
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The Regis Group, Inc.
102 North King Street | Leesburg, VA 20176 |
February 2012
CONVERTING YOUR CAREER
As the economy pushes toward what we hope will be the end of a particularly tough stretch, most of us hold a tangible asset that is hard for us to see because it is so close. That asset is the depth of the networks we have acquired over time and the range of our individual experiences.
In the next month the TRG team in active cooperation with the leadership of several long term allies, led by the Society for Vascular Ultrasound, will be running the prototype of a program designed to help so many turn a highly needed focus on those assets.
“Converting Your Career” has now taken shape as a most tangible way to reach into the widening world and take what would have been dropped and / vanished as soon as a “permanent” position is required by circumstance to end. Whether it is due to “Retirement”, or “Reduction in Force”, or “Dislocation”, if a next position is not readily available, and the option of non-engagement makes no sense, there is an immediate course of action available for all. Most professionals have accumulated a wide array of knowledge and skills of immediate value to fellow managers following in their path at countless enterprises.
The resulting effort could be as simple as the correct way to assess similar departments (sometimes in even in previous competitors), or as complex as developing training and/or coaching activities in allied industries.
For more details as to the nature of the offering, criteria for common presentation and initial training sites, please Contact TRG at infotrg@regisgroup.com
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Focus on the Future
Guest Predictions:
Pat Earle
Guest Predictions is a regular feature in which we ask leaders in a number of professions a set of questions that affect us all.
After 35 years in New York City working in Politics as Speech Writer, Fund Raiser and Strategist, Pat relocated to her childhood summer home in Gloucester MA. A life-long reader herself, after hearing of the disastrous cuts to the local school budgets and libraries, she began the First R Foundation, whose mission is to recruit local community leaders to read aloud and distribute books to the all Kindergarten and First Grade classes on Cape Ann. The project is now in its 10th year of successful operation, and plans are under way for offering First R as a working model for other communities around the region and the country. Pat has a life-long husband, Richard Earle, two daughters and one granddaughter.
Q: What changes in your professional environment in the past 3-5 years have you found to be the most beneficial?
A: As school budgets are constrained, school administrations are more receptive to the donation of new books for young students. Additionally, in this electronic age there is still a high benefit to both placing a physical book in a young person’s hands, together with having an adult they respect read to them. It is a statistical fact that young people who are read to develop improved verbal skills.
Q: What changes have been the most troubling to you?
A: In these difficult financial times, we, as well as our allied groups across the nation, have had an increasingly difficult time in funding the acquisition of new books to place in young hands.
Q: How will globalization affect your professional area in the near term?
A: While we are convinced that the combination of a physical book in young hands and a respected community leader engaged in reading to them are highly valuable, we are studying the best way to reach a top result by engaging the internet. While our current method is highly beneficial in the developed world, we may be forced to modify this at first in the third world.
Q: What significant challenges might be anticipated in your professional area in the next few years?
A: The increasing reliance on the internet, “apps”, and texting may convince young readers that books are obsolete, which they are not.
Q: What are the greatest challenges confronting young professionals in Western culture today?
A: Their own lack of a broad spectrum of information due to the emphasis on specialization, limiting the full range of knowledge of cultures other than their own, in turn leading to a lack of appreciation of the variety of approaches to so much of life. Example: the history and implications of tensions in the Mid-east.
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Marc Chinoy
President's Letter
YOUR CAREER AS AN ASSET
Over the past several years it has become increasingly apparent that a critical development of the twenty-first century has begun to affect so many of us who have chosen a leadership path. The inevitable result of the clock, pushing ever increasing numbers of us toward an arbitrary but inescapable concept called “retirement” is causing a dislocation of talent and capability on a large scale.
The Regis team has now joined forces with several key allied groups to offer critical tools to help us all move forward to advance those masked capabilities.
The main articles to the left point to two different and yet in many ways linked approaches to this issue, by addressing the hidden capabilities of so many being forced into “retirement”, as well as a meaningful effort to engage those at the peak of their careers directly with those just starting out in life. Both create valuable answers for generations at opposite ends of the age spectrum in a meaningful way... to which I say...
“Welcome to the future” Best regards
Marc Paul Chinoy
BizSpeak!
Winner of the Month:
Pat Earle, First R Foundation, Inc., Gloucester, MA
“Bon Voyage, Titanic!”
Definition:
Once it becomes certain that a business or social disaster is suddenly unavoidable
Related Terms:
Down the Drain, Head on Collision, Train Wreck
How it Sounds:
“As soon as the guests had begun to MOSEY IN and it was clear the abysmal odor in the A/C had not been FERRETED OUT, it was Bon Voyage, Titanic!”
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