Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Sometimes I think leaders need to sit down and read a good book on how to lead. In many of our work places leaders perform below the expected moral level. There are different explanations for their poor performances. It could also be that they struggle with understanding themselves as leaders who lead through service, moral intelligence, and with clear achievable goals. It could be that their appointment in the first place was anything, but rigged with fraud, nepotism, and misjudgment of their true character. A leader is someone who must understand the importance of team work and must maintain an attitude of respect for every member of the team. A leader is someone who consolidates the productive spirit of the team rather than someone who divides and rule. A leader works with the team, not against the team in a company or organization. In their book Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success, Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel explain what an effective leader...

The kind of person I am now is because of the decisions and actions I took in the past. The kind of person I want to be in future depends on the decisions and actions I make now. If I make the right decisions and took the appropriate action now then the outcome will be as I had visualized it. That is the kind of lesson, personal development experts like Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles. I have followed Jack Canfield’s success principles the very day I bought this book in a bookshop in Christchurch, New Zealand, 5 years ago. I had shared one of the success principles in this column some time back in the beginning of the year. Since these principles have changed my life I would like to share at least one principle from time to time. This week I would like to share part of Success Principle Number 1: Take 100% responsibility for your life. A friend of mine said to me one day that I needed to take control of my life instead of trying to please other people. I am successfu...

May 2011, the University of the South Pacific will be launching its publishing arm that will be known as the USP Press. The goal of the Press is to publish high quality research and writing on issues related to the Pacific Islands, or the islands commonly known as Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.  Toward this end, the University wishes to announce an international competition seeking manuscripts in the following categories: USP Press Literature Prize ($3000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories. The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00 Fiction ($1,000) Poetry ($1,000) Drama or Screenplay ($1,000) USP Press Non Fiction Prize ($3,000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories. The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00. History, Auto/Biography ($1,000) Sciences ($1,000) Social Sciences/Humanities ($1000) Best Children’s Book ($2,000) The competition is open to all na...

Culture and Human Resource Capital, UPNG  2010 Everywhere I go I hear the words LNG in many people’s talk. So much buzz is made on this economic promise that seems to drive a certain agenda of development. In Port Moresby and Lae there is a building boom. Lae has moved into converting old houses into multiple blocks of flats. Port Moresby has grown into a mega for multi-storied buildings. They are eye catching and startling in a way. The government is proud to see this development, quickly declaring to the people that LNG is here and Papua New Guineans have to cash into the LNG or else they stand to lose out on the benefits. The conclusion I seem to have is that the LNG excitement has also promoted an even growth in our society. I may be slow in seeing the benefits, but I am circumspect with the use of words like development, economic independence, and cost and benefits. We have to understand some of these words are used by certain people to promote a certain kind of agenda, ...

  Roadside fish market at Yonki Dam area, EHP  The general sense of a failure of the traditional safety nets in PNG can contribute to an impoverished society. The traditional forms of authority no longer matters to the post-independence generation. A host of uncanny hooliganism throws its dark shadows on what remains of the traditional structures of power. It is the perfect recipe for chaos, crime, violence, and unlimited threat to life.  Traditional safety nets support social notions of care for elderly, looking out for each other through an elaborate wantok system, communities and hauslains maintaining peace, harmony, and respect for each other and their properties, and promoting sustainable communities with happy people.  Many of our young people are stranded in the crossroad between introduced ways and traditional expectations. Young people stray into alcohol and substance abuse, aggression, and violence. Violence against women and general disrespect of...

Big Brother's Help is Social Protection The big question asked now is whether Papua New Guinea needs a Social Protection Policy? I, like many others, think that after 35 years of Independence and Statehood our people have seen the tide of change swept their villages away, created a rift in the social and cultural fabrics of life, economic necessity has driven many a village folk out of town, and created an urban chaos that threatens to normalize tribal behaviors and attitudes against the ever changing, vulnerable, and fragile modernity that many have started to embrace in a reluctant way. In the 1980s when we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our Independence we seemed to have done so with a strong sense of assurance about ourselves as a nation, young, strong, free, and with a strong population of about 3 million people. Since then the populations has tripled and the social and cultural woes seemed to have entered the stage without us noting its double edge sword. This couple...

Is it hard to see that this country needs to have its own National Language Institute to train Papua New Guineans as linguists and literacy workers to serve as custodians of our Indigenous languages and as a special task force responsible for shouldering the national burden of eradicating literacy? We no longer can afford to lose many more of our languages. We are struggling with the slow pace in eradicating literacy. Language and literacy are the two sides of the same coin that we have not invested enough resources to develop. The National Language Institute can serve other purposes as well. It can serve as the central point in facilitating research, development, symposiums, translations, and publication of such data that pertains to the status of language, the linguistic properties of our languages, and the evidence of the intellectual or epistemological foundations of our languages and cultures. The Institute can also serve as the center of cross fertilization of languages and invo...