Basyl Macías

Valencia, marzo 30 (REDACTA).- La Asociación Civil Liderazgo y Visión y Red Vecinal Venezuela presentaron este domingo, en el auditorio del Centro Cultural "Eladio Alemán Sucre" la obra Manojo de Sueños, protagonizada por Dixon Da Costa, Adriana Villalba, Arnaldo Mendoza y Nieri Seijas, bajo la producción y dirección del dramaturgo Carlos Sánchez Torrealba.

Manojo de Sueños es una obra inspirada en el libro Un sueño para Venezuela, de Gerver Torres, miembro de la junta directiva de la A.C. Liderazgo y Visión, y cuenta con el patrocinio del Banco Venezolano de Crédito.

La muestra teatral intenta transmitir al público, dentro de un esquema de parodia, música, juegos, cantos, títeres y risas, lo maravilloso que es poder soñar, tener ideales, proponerse metas y el deseo de ser cada día mejor.

LIDERAZGO Y VISION

Es una asociación civil sin fines de lucro que se dedica desde 1995 a la formación de los venezolanos para el afianzamiento de valores democráticos y ciudadanos, así como la promoción de un liderazgo visionario, constructor y responsable, a través del Programa de Organización Comunitaria y Formación de Multiplicadores.

Un grupo de personas provenientes de distintos sectores de la sociedad caraqueña promovió un programa orientado a elevar la calidad del liderazgo emergente en Venezuela.

Alonso Domínguez, directivo de Liderazgo y Visión, destacó que, hoy en día, "Un sueño para Venezuela" es concebido como una estrategia de pedagogía social que aborda los problemas del país desde una perspectiva amplia que incorpora, por ejemplo, la dimensión cultural e institucional.

-Por medio del programa de pedagogía social "Un Sueño para Venezuela" estamos orientados al logro de tres objetivos fundamentales: desarrollar una visión de país a largo plazo, que pueda ser compartida por amplios sectores de la sociedad venezolana; promover un conjunto de valores y creencias que nos permitan crecer y desarrollarnos como sociedad, haciendo especial énfasis en la responsabilidad y la solidaridad, y fomentar el desarrollo de las instituciones como mecanismo para la generación de bienestar y mejoramiento de nuestra calidad de vida, indicó.

RED VECINAL VENEZUELA

El doctor Paúl Escovar explicó que hace cinco meses, en Valencia, nació la Red Vecinal Venezuela, integrada por un grupo de personas que de alguna manera entienden que la única forma de salir de la crisis es a través del fortalecimiento de los parámetros educativos.

-Por ello hemos creado dicha organización, para dar estructura a cualquier iniciativa tendente a cristalizar y fortalecer el progreso de la nación sobre bases sólidas, por medio de la educación ciudadana, la equidad, la libertad y la justicia. Todos debemos entender que juntos debemos ser piezas de una gran estructura para la reconstrucción del país sobre la base de los valores familiares, subrayó.

-Sabemos que no es una labor sencilla ni de corto plazo; no depende de un liderazgo, sino de un cambio de actitud, y nosotros lo que estamos tratando de lograr es ese reencuentro de valores nobles que se encuentran como enquistados en el grupo familiar, pero que hoy, más que nunca, queremos que se expandan en la sociedad civil en pro de una verdadera cultura democrática, denotó el doctor Paúl Escovar.

"Cuando los dirigentes de este país entiendan que ellos son los encargados de establecer esa madurez hacia el ciudadano, sólo así la habremos encontrado", significó.

Las redes vecinales se han venido extendiendo en distintas ciudades del país, donde se forman facilitadores y donde todo el que quiera formar parte de esta idea es bienvenido, lo cual puede hacer a través del contacto directo o de la página web.

Por su parte, el doctor Sergio Ramos comentó que lo más importante es que dentro de la misma no existe ningún tipo de identificación partidista, sino el deseo de un pueblo de organizarse y de luchar por ser mejores ciudadanos, apoyando las propuestas que surjan de la misma comunidad.

NOTA: Para organizar una presentación de la obra de teatro "Manojo de Sueños", por favor comuníquese con Adriana Villalba al correo electrónico choroni17@hotmail.com o con Luisa Ramírez al correo electrónico info@liderazgoyvision.org

Business 2.0 By Erick Schonfeld, Gary Hamel, April 2003 Issue April 1, 2003  

Resources are cheap. The competition is paralyzed. The last thing you should do right now is play it safe.

R.J. Pittman is a classic business daredevil, a 33-year-old with a new technology and a taste for adventure. Larry Brilliant is a more established quantity, a four-time entrepreneur who co-founded the Well, the prototypical online community, in 1985. Though the two haven't met, the novice and the veteran are united in an act that, in this forbidding business environment, isn't just daring. It's practically unnatural. They are starting businesses.

Pittman is launching Groxis, which is built around software that makes Web searches more efficient. While some may question the appetite people have for such a product right now, Pittman thinks this is a far more auspicious time for entrepreneurs than, say, 1999. "Office space is cheap, and talent is available," he points out. "And the signal-to-noise ratio is much better now that all the junk dotcoms are out of the picture." Brilliant, for his part, recently founded Cometa Networks, a joint venture that is planning a nationwide system of wireless broadband Internet access spots. Building out yet another communications network may seem like the errand of someone who missed the memo about the telecom bust. But Brilliant dismisses any doubts. "The irrational exuberance of the 1990s has been replaced by an irrational lethargy," he says. He sees Wi-Fi as a huge opportunity, and he doesn't intend to let recession or war or corporate paralysis keep him from it.

This entrepreneurial bravado, so common just a few years ago, stands in marked contrast to the apprehension that seems to grip so many hearts in business today. Wherever you look, the forces of retrenchment are on the march. During the past two years, capital investment has declined about 11 percent -- more than during the 1990-91 recession and almost as much as during the recession of 1981-82. Billions of dollars are disappearing from balance sheets as companies write down the value of poorly conceived acquisitions, struggling venture divisions, and unsold inventory. The hiring slump is persisting, with more than 1.5 million jobs lost since the start of the 2001 recession. And among venture capitalists, 70 percent of current cash goes to fix problems at existing companies rather than to fund fresh ideas.

While retrenchment is a perfectly understandable reaction to an unexpected drop in revenues, at too many companies it threatens to become a habit. The trick in tough times is to downsize your cost base without downsizing your future. Even as your company sweats off fat, it needs to bulk up on some of the courage and faith in innovation shown by Pittman and Brilliant (tempered, of course, by a healthy dose of prudence). No company ever beat a bear market by starving itself.

You can't move forward when you're cutting back. Like a crash diet, retrenchment may help you look less like an inflated marshmallow, but the improvement will be temporary unless you commit yourself to better nutrition and a sustained exercise regime. "Denominator management" -- whacking away at head count, paring down inventory, and slashing capital budgets to buttress your financial ratios -- can take you only so far.

Retrenchment doesn't fundamentally transform a company's cost structure; it simply establishes a new, lower equilibrium between revenues and expenses. It doesn't create competitive advantage -- not unless you're taking costs out a lot faster than your competitors are and doing so in ways that don't imperil long-term success. In other words, retrenchment can buy you time, but it can't buy you a future.

At some point, in fact, it becomes retreat. Studies suggest that this point often comes sooner than most businesspeople expect. A Mercer Management study of 116 companies that aggressively cut costs in the 1990-91 recession, for instance, determined that only 29 percent of them grew profitably in the latter half of the decade. A more recent study by Strategos, the Chicago-based consultancy chaired by author Hamel, demonstrated the limits to a single-minded focus on cost cutting. It showed that while a company can grow earnings faster than revenues for a few years -- a sure sign of denominator management -- one that grows earnings more than five times faster than revenues for more than three years in succession is almost certain to see a subsequent collapse in growth. The point is simple: Retrenchment makes you smaller, not better. Story continued on next page Article Page: 1 2 3 | Next >

 Format for Printing  E-Mail This Article Write to the Editor Recent Features Articles  • The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business - Apr 2003  • The New Military-Industrial Complex - Mar 2003  • That's Advertainment! - Mar 2003  • Can a Metaverse Have Inflation? - Mar 2003  • Your Next Customer Is Virtual. But His Money Is Real. - Mar 2003  • Read More Features Articles

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MEDIA NOTES  By Jimmy Guterman, March 19, 2003 <a href=www.business2.com>Business 2.0 To: Managers of News Sites

On Sept. 11, 2001, few Americans got their breaking news online. Even after stripping ads, graphics, and scripts from their front pages, most major online news sources received so much traffic that visitors had to either wait minutes at a stretch for text to load or hit the "Refresh" button repeatedly until something other than an error message appeared on the screen.

That experience led you folks to reconsider how much bandwidth is adequate for times of emergency and what the role of online news is, compared with that of more entrenched electronic media like television and radio. In the 18 months since the 9/11 attacks, you have learned about features like "burst" capacity, additional bandwidth that becomes available when unexpected traffic threatens to slow a site to a crawl or take it down entirely.

I'm writing this column on Wednesday, March 19. By the time you read it, the United States and Britain may be at war with Iraq and people will be desperate for up-to-the-second information. Just keeping sites up in the early days of a war will be a challenge, but that's only the beginning. If you are to compete effectively with your more entrenched electronic brethren, you need to pay close attention to how you're using broadband and how broad your content sources are.

Deploy broadband sparingly. Even with additional capacity, your sites may be fighting to keep up with traffic, and there's nothing like a lengthy video file to slow access and send visitors elsewhere. And let's face it: No matter how you promote your broadband offerings, small, jerky streaming video feeds inside a RealPlayer or Windows Media Player are nowhere near as compelling as video seen on a 25-inch screen that was built for video. Some video files will be necessary to give your visitors a broad array of services, but if people want immediate access to breaking video, they will opt for television.

Use weblogs to jump-start discussion. The easiest way to get the greatest number of voices and the freshest opinions on a site is to point to the best of the thousands of diverse weblogs on the war being updated obsessively. To ward off potential charges of bias, give equal footing to all views; the least expensive way to do that is to provide a safe way through the minefield of independent opinion on the Net. Use tools like DayPop, the speedy weblog search engine, and its kin to keep up with war reports and opinions from unlikely places. The more voices, the better, particularly in the earliest days of the conflict, when much of the content you'll receive -- and perhaps all of the broadband content -- will be coming from or filtered through official sources. Best of all, the content's free. It's a great starting point for your visitors to join in the discussion. Those sites that foster active communities will come out of the next couple of weeks with a better reputation -- and more traffic.

Jimmy Guterman was the editor of Media Grok and its successor, Media Unspun. He has written or edited for more than 90 periodicals (some of which still exist), has written five books (half of which are still in print), and has produced CDs for every major record label (all of which have consolidated). He is the founder and president of a consultancy, the Vineyard Group.

Business 2.0 By Thomas Mucha, April 2003 Issue

Alan Pearson is replacing Soviet-era accounting ledgers with a 21st-century computer network.

When Afghanistan's fledgling government needed to rebuild part of the country's war-ravaged infrastructure, it didn't turn to the United Nations, a relief agency, or a military man. It went straight to a management consultant.

Alan Pearson is a 58-year-old Aussie who's leading an eight-person team from BearingPoint (BE) (formerly KPMG Consulting) to build a computerized financial-management system that will help Afghanistan rejoin the 21st century. To mark the start of Afghanistan's fiscal year, the new system will enter service on March 21.

The financial network will allow the war-torn nation to manage the $4 billion in foreign aid that's expected to arrive in coming years -- money that's needed to pay for roads, schools, hospitals, and other reconstruction projects. The computerized tools will be a vast improvement over the country's current approach to financial management -- a dusty handbook on accounting principles written in 1965.

Pearson has been working in Kabul's drab concrete Ministry of Finance building since August. There weren't any computers on hand when he arrived, so he bought a handful of PCs that had been cobbled together on Kabul's streets by crafty entrepreneurs. Electricity is spotty, so a generator was brought in to run the equipment. To maintain telephone service, Pearson installed a satellite dish.

His team also had to train local workers, most of whom had never before laid eyes on a computer. "You start with the on/off switch and take it from there," he says. But within three weeks, most workers were able to input data and perform basic tasks. The new system, which Pearson describes as "deliberately simple," is built around Windows 2000, a few Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Compaq servers, and a Cisco-based (CSCO) local area network.

Safety has been an ongoing concern. Two deadly car bombings have struck Kabul since Pearson arrived, yet the dangerous work is just beginning. The project's next phase will extend the system to Afghanistan's unruly provinces. And you thought you had to worry about job security.

In the Spotlight Military Weapons U.S. troops are armed with the most advanced weapons systems the world has ever known. Backed by cutting-edge technology from familiar names like General Dynamics and Raytheon, as well as defense newcomers IBM and Hewlett-Packard, the military's current arsenal is faster, lighter, and smarter than ever. Our staff got the lowdown on some of the more impressive weapons in our recent story "The New Military-Industrial Complex." Our Web Guide features additional information on the military's top manufacturers of airplanes, combat vehicles, and weapons, plus essential research on biological and chemical warfare.

<a href=www.abs-cbnnews.com>ABS-CBN Today News Phillipines

By ESTRELLA TORRES and MIA GONZALEZ TODAY Reporters

In an effort to fully destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein, Washington is pressing foreign governments to expel all Iraqi diplomats stationed in their countries and freeze their bank accounts.

In Manila, Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople said his department will study Washington’s request, noting that the Philippine government exercises sovereignty on the matter of expelling diplomats.

“We are not going to be stampeded into acquiescing to any request of a friendly foreign state. We have to study this in the light of our own interests,” Ople said in an interview with Malacañang reporters before the oath taking of newly appointed ambassadors at the Palace Ceremonial Hall.

In a separate interview with diplomatic reporters, Ople recalled that, “I expelled an Iraqi diplomat. Nobody requested it but in the interest of national security, it had to be done.”

He added, “It is the prerogative of a sovereign country to do so.”

President Arroyo said in an ambush interview that she was “leaving that [US request] for Secretary Ople to handle.”

Karen Kelley, first secretary and press attaché of the US Embassy in Manila, said the US State Department has requested foreign countries hosting Iraqi missions to expel the Iraqi diplomats.

“There is a worldwide request [from the US] where there are Iraqi missions. We have a formal request to have Iraqi diplomats suspended on a temporary basis and to take steps to assure their prompt departure [from those countries],” said Kelley in a telephone interview Friday.

Washington also plans to seize all the documents and records of the Iraqi officials located in the foreign governments.

“But the US State Department asks foreign governments to respect and protect property of the Iraqi diplomats and prevent destruction of records and documents of the Iraqi mission,” Kelley said.

The US government has also asked the foreign governments to freeze the bank accounts and assets of Iraqi diplomats being kept in the name of the Iraqi government.

Kelley said the request was made to foreign governments, including the Philippines, because of Saddam’s refusal to disarm and withdraw its weapons of mass destruction.

According to an earlier report from Washington, the US wants to expel some 600 Iraqi diplomats deployed in 30 countries, including the Philippines.

Relatedly, Ople said the DFA has not been directed to make a position on the possible US military use of Philippine airspace during war in Iraq, as there has been no request.

He indicated that the request, if it is ever made and granted, is not likely to draw opposition from Congress, as it had been done during the attack on Afghanistan.

He said the likelihood of such a request “is not great because all of their assets appeared to be already massed in the Persian Gulf in the vicinity of Iraq.”

Fearing retaliatory attacks, around 22 US embassies and consulates all over the world have shut down while 12 other posts have authorized their staff and their families to return home.

Kelley said the closure of the embassies and consulates were not based on the directive of the US State Department but decided upon by the respective ambassadors in every post.

“As a result of military action in Iraq, there is a potential for retaliatory actions to be taken against US citizens and interests throughout the world,” stated the US Worldwide Caution dated March 20, 2003.

According to a report on CNN website, the US embassies and consulates that closed down their operations are located in the cities of Almaly, Khazakstan; Amman, Jordan; all posts in Australia; Bucharest, Romania; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cairo, Egypt; Caracas, Venezuela; Damascus, Syria; Istanbul, Turkey; Kabul, Afghanistan; Lagos, Nigeria; Paris, France; Nairobi, Kenya; Oslo, Norway; all posts in Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Savanna Yemen; Skopje, Macedonia; all posts in South Africa; Surabaya, Indonesia; Tel Aviv, Israel and Jerusalem.

In Manila, the embassies of Canada and United Kingdom renewed travel advisories for their traveling citizens.

“The travel advisory is necessary because of the history of many incidents that travelers should be aware of,” said Paul Dimond, British ambassador to Manila.

“Heightened tensions as a result of the Iraq situation, together with increased threats globally from terrorism, put Canadians at greater risk. Canadians should maintain a high level of personal security awareness at all time as the security situation could deteriorate rapidly without notice,” stated Canada’s travel advisory dated March 21.

As for the Filipino workers in Kuwait, an area nearest to Iraq, Ople said they are already out of harm’s way.

He said some have crossed the border to Saudi Arabia, where they were received by a special team created by the Philippine foreign affairs department in Riyadh.

“The Filipino workers are more concerned about the panic reactions of their relatives in the Philippines,” Ople said.

Ople said the President has decided to retain Ambassador Bayani Mangibin in Kuwait “by popular demand.”

The President earlier disclosed a plan to send Mangibin to Iraq after the conflict because of his expertise in after-war construction.

“We have an excellent foreign service and we have a very deep bench in the Department of Foreign Affairs. So, if we send an ambassador to Baghdad, you can be sure that he will be very first class. He doesn’t need to be Ambassador Mangibin,” he said.

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