Are You Interested To Know About Lean Consultants?

Businesses that are one without the other is destined to failure as they are built upon innovation and management. An innovative idea, without proper management, dies a painful death. Command from managers for fat pay-cheques is no wonder.

Project management mandates the application of management skills to bring a project to fruition. It basically involves defining objectives in order of their execution, meticulous planning, monitoring, project delivery and control. The whole process works as an integral whole and problems in the chain of events can stall or kill the entire project, resulting in financial and other losses.

Active Listening Skills

Are you a good listener? Wondering how to develop active listening skills? Go through this article to find out more about active listening exercises.

Active listening skills are a very important aspect of communication. Be it a conversation with your client or business partners or communication with your family, not listening properly to the other person indicates a lack of interest and respect towards him/her. Those who resist the barriers to effective listening and have inculcated effective listening skills definitely come across as sincere people. This helps them steer clear of problems that often arises in relationships at workplace or in personal life. They surely climb up the ladder of success quickly. Are you a good listener? Wondering how to inculcate active listening skills? Here's some information on ways to inculcate effective listening skills.

The ethics of death

Partly as a follow up to the saga of Kaylee Wallace at Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital and partly because I have been thinking about the issue for a while, I wrote a couple of stories published in the Toronto Star today looking at death, how we handle it and how we define it.

Dead is dead, except when it's not.

"Death used to be a little more self-evident," says Kerry Bowman, a medical ethicist specializing in end of life issues at the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics.

"Today, you're dead when the doctor says you are."

Deciding when somebody is dead or about to die is quickly emerging as one of the top ethical issues in medicine today as technology makes it increasingly possible to keep people alive who would otherwise have died not so long ago.

The public's right to private information

The health questions surrounding Steve Jobs has sparked an ethical debate about the public's right to know when a public figure's health is failing.

When it turned out the founder and CEO of Apple computers was sick, Apple fans and investors got worried. In fact, Apple shares fell on the news.

Writing in the New York Times last week, business columnist Joe Nocera says Jobs has a responsibility to come clean with his health problems, if only to soothe investor worries and stop rumours from hurting the stock.

"Last week, he said he had a “hormone imbalance.” Now it’s “more complex” than that — whatever that means. If he really wants people to stop speculating about his health, as he claims, he sure has a funny way of dealing with it. Let’s be honest here: when you are a) a survivor of pancreatic cancer; and b) the world’s most charismatic, and possibly its most irreplaceable, corporate executive, putting out a press release announcing that your problems are “more complex” is only going to fan the flames, not douse them."

Firm's consulting fees to be disclosed, not all pleased

Medtronic Inc. announced this week that it would voluntarily release how much it pays doctors in consulting fees -- the largest such company to do so.

"Through greater transparency about the nature of these relationships, we will help people better understand how important they are to developing life-saving and enhancing products for patients,'' Medtronic CEO Bill Hawkins said in a statement.

Not everyone is impressed, since the disclosure won't start for another two years.

Writing on blog.bioethics.net, Summer Johnson calls it Ethics: The Phased In Plan

Slow down there, Speed Racer! Don't go disclosing those dollar figures too quickly now! You wouldn't want to allow your company a whole two years to change your consulting amounts as to allow your company time to appear as though you didn't previously give massive amounts of cash to physicians who used and implanted your medical devices over those who did not, would you?

The kidney divorce

The disheartening case of a New York surgeon who wants the kidney he gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife -- or $1.5 million (US) in compensation -- returned to him has the caught the eye of medical ethicists.

Not the least because his demands seem to put a monetary value on human parts. Dr. Richard Batista says the $1.5 million reflects in part the value of the kidney he donated to Dawnell Batista in 2001, and he should be compensated for it.

Bioethics professor Steven Miles at the University of Minnesota, where the transplant in question took place, told his local paper that the case goes against very notion of organ donation.