HEART matters

Dear all, I've been thinking of what we've been going through as life has seen changes and challenges....and the tougher reality is that there'll be even more of them.

My lessons learned from my own reflections come to a few steps of handling changes and challenges that concern Thai 'hearts' ka:

1. Attitude ได้ใจ -- Get started to inspire the community by stressing the common goals from self and family improvement to benefits for students, organization and valuable contribution to the country. We may need to accept this upsetting fact that outsiders help much more than insiders na ka.

Discussing  with open-mindedness เปิดใจ to get into people's hearts is crucial. Yet, the most important is for all to feel the threats and the need to move on to the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complication, Ambiguity) future together! Thais seem to learn much faster when in crisis/ in shock!

In any case, the strengths the community has must be tabled out for them to balance the fear and confidence.

2. Action มีใจทำ -- Set stage to get started for all to take some actions through proactive/active collaboration, urging that each has lots to share. With dead deadlines, the ลงแขก style should be seen in some contexts so creating crisis should be healthy as well.

I know the action part is the toughest but without the hearts of the team, it'll be even tougher, right?

Speed matters so much these days but personally, patience and persistence are integrated when it comes to development of people and organization in the education circle too ka.

3. Appreciation เต็มห้วใจ -- Offer time for reflections so our team can get to appreciate lots of learning and lessons gained especially from mistakes and failure while feeling grateful to have learning platforms and more opportunities to contribute valuably.

Quite a number of people go unnoticed and unrecognized even when diversity means so much for our university community especially in terms of creativity and innovation, it's great to have support through appreciation....for each to feel good about themselves and others to express it in the open.

More often than not, we then focus mainly on actions. My own reflection shows that Attitude and Appreciation should be boosted along the way as well!

In our context, HEART matters for work and life ka!

Happy Vegetarian Festival ka.

 

International Advisory Councils

Hi to all!

I read a few articles about internationalization (IZN) and wish to share with you what I found could be useful or could reconfirm our practices ka.

Let me start from an article on, 'International Advisory Councils: A New Aspect of Internationalization' by Philip Albach, et.al., published in the International Higher Education Number 87: Fall 2016.

A few world-class universities or those who aspire to be world-class (China, France, Germany, Russia, South Korea, etc.) have set up an International Advisory Council (IAC) with 6-12 foreign experts as members, as a way to achieve highest standards of research, and for some...to include teaching. Most meet once or twice a year or additional virtual meetings. Some may pay an honorarium besides the coverage of travel and accommodation for the meetings.

The authors point out that, 'An IAC shows that the university has a cosmopolitan outlook, that it receives advice from top university leaders and scholars from world-class institutions, and that it can benchmark itself with the best international practices.'

To ensure effectiveness, the universities have to value lessons from international experiences, have their actual purpose in setting up such a council, offer clear expectations for the members, specify learning and decision-making objectives of each IAC meeting, be willing to share the challenges the universities face and listen with an open mind, etc.

In fact, these points are useful for any meeting we conduct too na ka.

Another article on, 'Internationalization of the Curriculum in Israeli Colleges, by Amit Marantz-Gal confirms to us that, 'internationalization is increasingly identified by colleges as a strategic element, which can promote research opportunities and enhance qualitative aspects of curriculum development.'

In this same issue, Jamil Salmi also writes 'Excellence Initiatives to Create World-class Universities', stressing that quite a few developed countries have 'excellence initiatives', injecting additional funding to boost the performance of the university sector, which sounds very much like what OHEC has been trying to do. Most of the excellence initiatives promote IZN as a mechanism to attract top academic talent that can strengthen research capacity and reduce inbreeding.

After all, OHEC and Thai universities must realize that IZN isn't a fad! It's one of the key strategic mechanisms for us to take up seriously for our research to be stronger, for talents to work with us, for quality of our graduates and in fact the whole academic community and our country ka.

Cheers to IZN!

Shocked, grateful, wow!

Hello all! I just got back from a fun trip with my college friends though yesterday morning (my last day out of Bangkok), my heart sank to get a call from our housekeeper that my neighbor's house across from our home, which is just one-car-lane wide, was on fire when there was nobody at that house.

The other next door neighbor saw the smoke so he called for assistance. The firemen came within 13 minutes. Thank goodness our neighbor was really prompt and the firemen were fast and efficient (though not so thorough to make sure it was truly extinguished.) In any case, my sister-in-law had her sa-ti and everything was back to normal some time later.

We all feel grateful to the help especially to our neighbor who took the immediate action. I decided to line my family members about it. They called to ask my sister-in-law and one brother stopped by..... really great moral support for our sister-in-law and our housekeeper ka!

The cause was from the old electrical system. Several neighbors talked about it and one stopped her car to chat.

What was also nice is that about 10 o'clock this morning, there was a van from the District Office, going around the whole soi to alert us all to check our own electrical systems and offer to help check as needed.

We now feel even safer living here and feel closer to our neighbors ka.

Despite the shock, the incident offered a few wow's for me loei ka!

Norm and discipline

 The past Saturday, I conducted a one-day workshop for a group of international students at Khon Kaen University on 'Global Leadership and Cross-culture'. It went well and the most fun was on me to observe and learn quite a few things ka.

Even though it was mainly focusing on ASEAN students (Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam) , they were able to draw attention from 4 other countries, i.e. Bhutan, China, Maldives, and Tanzania so the diversity was great.

Several things struck me but I'd like to tell  you about this one in particular ka!

''Norm?"

This workshop, I started by asking them the level of their energy and enthusiasm from lowest to highest. They would stick one emoticon anywhere they thought would fit their own feelings. The result was really interesting ka.

We saw the emoticons along the straight line we drew as if no one had the same levels of energy and enthusiasm. Only one emoticon was stuck quite high above the straight line.

What nationality could you guess this youth is from mai ka? Singapore ka. When asked why he did so. His answer was, 'there's no rule not to do it!'

Immediately, I was thinking about the 'norm' and our education systems (that could mean other countries in our Asian region too!). Even this was a really small exercise, these are what I thought ka:

Have we not encouraged our students enough...not to think too strictly along "the line"? 

Haven't we tried harder for them to even question when unsure, and to be bold to do something different? 

Do our kids in fact have questions in mind why they're asked to do what they have to do and why?

Could we learn more from Singaporean kids how they think and act?

One more question I had was that,' While we tend to follow the norms as a collective society, can we link it with 'discipline'?. If we have proper norms, we should be able to have more disciplines as favorable habits to function better for personally, professionally and publicly!

Happy Monday ka.