Aqua Career

DUBAI—Brad Dennis, an accountant from Chicago, more than doubled his salary by leaving the country. Dennis (those are his first and middle names) came to Dubai two years ago after being headhunted by a global firm. He now makes $250,000 a year and drives a Mercedes-Benz provided by his company. At night, he gets past the velvet rope at some of Dubai’s hottest clubs, each time accompanied by a different woman.

Life is obviously good for Brad, just as it is for the thousands of other Americans and Westerners who have come to Dubai in recent years to seek their fortunes. The combination of high salaries paid to professionals and executives driven by Dubai’s exploding growth, luxurious housing and transportation allowances, and the fact that there are no local taxes has proved an irresistible lure to many.

"Dubai has become a magnet for ambitious young people who want an environment where they can make a lot of money and also have fun," says Kashif Arbab, a Briton of Pakistani origin who trades for equities firm Killik & Co. in Dubai.

The expat scene has traditionally been dominated by Britons because the U.K. controlled the region until 1971. But as Dubai’s profile in the U.S. grows and more American companies open offices here—oil-industry-­services company Halliburton, for one, relocated its global headquarters from Texas to Dubai in 2007—the accents heard at some of Dubai’s hottest spots and most luxurious stores are increasingly American.

Among the new expats is Mare Elston, who was one of the few Americans in Dubai 10 years ago but who left and returned again recently. She works as a specialist in communications and event planning, and while she wouldn’t reveal her salary, it’s likely she takes home at least twice what she would earn in a comparable job back home in the U.S.

"There are many more Americans than ever before here these days," says the 36-year-old ­Elston. "The economy is expanding rapidly, and companies cannot seem to find enough qualified professionals to fill middle- and upper-management jobs."

In order to attract those professionals, firms in Dubai are paying top dollar. According to one C.E.O. of a major bank in Dubai, the average compensation package for an expat working at his bank is around $150,000, and he expects that number to grow in the coming years as competition for employees increases. In addition, firms typically give housing allowances of up to $10,000 per month to their top executives, in addition to transportation budgets of another $5,000 per month. Further sweetening the deal is the fact that none of that income is taxed in Dubai, and Americans are not required to pay any taxes on their first $80,000 earned abroad.

A wide range of industries in Dubai are hiring, especially those being hardest hit in the U.S. and Europe. New sovereign wealth funds are being created, real estate companies are expanding, financial-services firms are sprouting like palm trees, international banks seem to be opening branches here almost daily, and the hospitality industry is growing exponentially.
 
That means more midlevel and upper-management executives are needed in the United Arab Emirates, particularly in Dubai, which has been exploding at warp speed.
 
"The region has a shortage of qualified executives," says Patrick Satamian, head of Kraft Foods in the Middle East. "Companies are continually looking for talent."
 
Hence the Dubai-bound traffic of youthful executives in search of El Dorado. And these well-heeled expats have plenty of places to spend their riches. There are miles of shopping malls with stores representing every major luxury brand. There are long waiting lists for Ferraris and Lamborghinis—even Gulfstream jets. The exclusive Polo Club is besieged with applications, as are several golfing facilities in and around Dubai.
 
On any given evening, you can see the high-end sports cars parked near the bars and restaurants of places like the Marine Resort or Brad’s favorite haunt, Boudoir, a ­restaurant-cum-dance bar. Those who frequent places like these do not seem to mind that the prices for food and libations are at least as high as those in the toniest joints in New York or London or Paris.

As Elston points out, "Dubai has certainly become a city of single young Americans who make big money and who like to party."
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Think “conflict” is a dirty word, especially for top-management teams? It’s actually valuable for team members to roll up their sleeves and spar (figuratively, that is)—if they do it right. Constructive conflict helps teams make high-stakes decisions under considerable uncertainty and move quickly in the face of intense pressure—essential capacities in today’s fast-paced markets.

The key? Mitigate interpersonal conflict. Most conflicts take a personal turn all too soon. Here’s how your team can detach the personal from the professional—and dramatically improve its collective effectiveness.

The Idea in Practice
The best teams use these six tactics to separate substantive issues from personalities:

•    Focus on the facts. Arm yourselves with a wealth of data about your business and your competitors. This encourages you to debate critical issues, not argue out of ignorance.

Example:
Star Electronics’* top team “measured everything”: bookings, backlogs, margins, engineering milestones, cash, scrap, work-in-process. They also tracked competitors’ moves, including product introductions, price changes, and ad campaigns.

•    Multiply the alternatives. In weighing decisions, consider four or five options at once—even some you don’t support. This diffuses conflict, preventing teams from polarizing around just two possibilities.

Example:
To improve Triumph Computer’s* lackluster performance, managers gathered facts and then brainstormed a range of alternatives, including radically redirecting strategy with entry into a new market, and even selling the company. The team combined elements of several options to arrive at a creative, robust solution.

•    Create common goals. Unite a team with common goals. This rallies everyone to work on decisions as collaborations, making it in everyone’s interest to achieve the best solution.

Example:
Star Electronic’s* rallying cry was the goal of creating “the computer firm of the decade.” Premier Technologies’ was to “build the best damn machine on the market.”

•    Use humor. Humor—even if it seems contrived at times—relieves tension and promotes collaborative esprit within a team. Practical jokes, Halloween and April Fool’s Day celebrations, and “dessert pig-outs” relax everyone—increasing tactfulness, effective listening, and creativity.

•    Balance the power structure. The CEO is more powerful than other executives, but the others wield substantial power as well—especially in their own areas of responsibility. This lets the whole team participate in strategic decisions, establishing fairness and equity.

•    Seek consensus with qualification. If the team can’t reach consensus, the most relevant senior manager makes the decision, guided by input from the others. Like balancing the power structure, this tactic also builds fairness and equity.

Example:
At Premier Technologies*, managers couldn’t agree on a response to a competitor’s new-product launch. Ultimately, the CEO and his marketing VP made the decision. Quipped the CEO: “The function heads do the talking; I pull the trigger.”

Purchase the full-length Harvard Business Review article.

The change imperative facing Ford Motor Company was massive: integrate 340,000 employees separated by fiercely independent fiefdoms spread across 200 countries. Synchronize all teams, divisions, and regions into one global entity. Instill in all employees the need to think and act as if they owned the whole company. Why? So that Ford can excel in the global economy, and satisfy increasingly demanding consumers.

How did Ford create such “corporate DNA that drives how we do things everywhere”? How does it ensure that every individual understands the why and how of Ford’s new direction?

Surprisingly, by teaching. But not academically, with consultants in classrooms. Rather, with in-house leaders reaching out to every corner of the company with teachable points of view—“documents written by people to explain their theories about competition and success.” Ford uses these all the time—in story-telling, in project planning, in teaching programs reaching over 55,000 people; and in e-mails to 100,000 employees.

The Idea in Practice
The Teachable Point of View

Noel Tichy, a consultant to Ford, thinks of the teachable point of view document as the “antidote to the ‘black box’ … that conceals the origins of good ideas and important insights.” Teachable points of view include:

• Ideas—beliefs a leader holds about what will make the company profitable
• Values—personal values as well as values the leader uses to set business goals (for example, sharing knowledge across divisions)
• Emotional energy—how to motivate people (for example, by explaining the competitive context of their work)
• Edge—an individual’s distinctive thought processes for making tough calls (for example, how to make decisions about an unethical employee)

The Power of Teaching
This type of teaching makes leaders’ implicit knowledge explicit. It opens it up for questioning and refining. And it rapidly reaches thousands of people. Nasser articulated his teachable point of view, taught it to 200 leaders, who taught it to 1,500, who taught it to 55,000—all within a few years.

Living and Breathing Change
This type of teaching also enforces the discipline of change. “Once you start to teach … with your own people leading the effort, the teachers themselves have no choice but to behave differently. You’ve gotten up in front of your people, and said, ‘This is what I believe. This is how we should run the business.’ After that, it’s very hard to disown yourself from the change process.”

Capstone: One of Ford’s Teaching Programs
During a teaching program called Capstone, four strategic challenges are assigned to small teams of executives. To start the process, Nasser and his team share their teachable points of view. They also have team-building exercises, 360-degree feedback, coaching, and intense conversations about the challenges. When the teams complete their work, each participant receives extensive feedback on his or her performance from fellow participants as well as the top team.

“That intensity is energizing. And when it’s all over, the Capstone participants are asked to create their own teachable points of view. . . . Capstone is about learning, but its results have been anything but academic…. With [all] the teaching programs we’ve used over the past three years, our people have delivered $2 billion to our bottom line.”

Purchase the full-length Harvard Business Review article.

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Who ever thought that safeguarding the brands, assets, and customers that made your company a success would constitute risky behavior? But these days it is—if it’s all your company is doing. By conserving resources and honing operational efficiency, established companies try to guarantee that there’s never an unexpected downside. In so doing they often miss out on the real action in today’s economy—capitalizing on the upside potential of new ideas.

Companies like Cisco, Dell, MCI WorldCom, and Southwest Airlines didn’t achieve such staggering growth just by squeezing more efficiency out of their operating processes. The game they play is called wealth creation—the generation of entirely new markets, businesses, and business models. To win at this game, these companies have internalized the best practices that Silicon Valley start-ups use to foster innovation—and they’ve reconceived the way they think about resources.

The Idea in Practice
In most corporate structures, a good idea must run the gauntlet of skeptical and cautious executives. Resources are typically allocated based on estimates of where the profit margins are highest—and most immediate. This process of resource allocation is well suited to perpetuating existing businesses; it helps limit the potential downside of any project or idea. But it also tends to smother the most innovative ideas—the ones that have the potential for creating markets and businesses that didn’t exist before.

For the new corporate creators of wealth, however, the ultimate goal isn’t operational efficiency, risk management, or even incremental improvement. They’re after industry-revolutionizing concepts, and they’ve retooled their organizational structures to capitalize on these ideas. The primary mechanism here is resource attraction, which relies on the power of a good business idea to attract the necessary capital and the best talent. With the internal barriers to resources removed, an idea can run for all it’s worth.

Resource attraction requires an organizational climate with the following characteristics:

• No single person in the hierarchy can kill a great idea. Instead, power is diffuse, and there are many sources of capital.
• A good idea can come from anyone—including middle- or lower-level employees. There’s no prejudice about who is capable of producing a new business model.
• If an idea does well in the marketplace, the innovator gets rewarded—handsomely, and with equity.

Established companies can learn to internalize this free flow of ideas and corporate resources; they too can create a culture that encourages every employee to innovate.

Example:
92-year-old oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell developed its GameChanger process to enable unconventional ideas to circumvent the usual approval gauntlet. “Innovation labs” bring small groups of employees together, provide them with examples of radically new thinking from outside their business, and then encourage them to produce “nonlinear” ideas. “Action labs” then help employees develop 100-day venture plans for conducting low-cost, low-risk tests of the best ideas that get generated. Ideas that are approved really get the green light: they can receive as much as $600,000 within eight days.

Purchase the full-length Harvard Business Review article.

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Job Vacancy Career-Lowongan Kerja terbaru:
URGENTLY REQUIRED-INDOMOBIL SUZUKI INTERNATIONAL, PT

As a reputable automotive company, today we are challenging and looking for a talented, competent, and strong character individual as part of our growth and expansion plan for:

1. Junior Networking Administrator (IT-NA)

Responsibilities:

• Manage & administer networking infrastructure including hardware, software & IT peripheral devices appliance in all sites.
• Provide & maintain user account, internet & email account for end users.
• Manage and administrator local MIS/operators in all location for its operational service availability in managing IT resources.
• Provide the stable IT infrastructure with managing and leading the network administrator and system operator.
• Provide service, IT infrastructure related guidance and its technical assistance for and user.
• Design & implement networking including: planning, configuring, and security setting, LAN, WAN.
• Support the functionality of DBA (Data Base Administrator).

Requirements :

• Male, max: 28 years old.
• Bachelor Degree in IT / Computer Science from reputable university.
• GPA: min 2.8 (scale 4).
• Minimum 1-2 years Experience in IT fields.
• Excellent hardware/software and network troubleshooting skill.
• Able to maintain, administer, and set up computer networks including routers, switches, servers, LAN/WAN, etc.
• Experiences in Kerio Winroute Firewall (or other proxy/firewall), domain-based network, setting up network access-control will be a plus.
• Well proven in English communication skill (spoken & written).
• Good communication, interpersonal skills, service-oriented attitude, fast & self learner, self motivated.
• Able to work under pressure.

2. NET Developer (IT-ND)

Responsibilities:

• Develop and design rich Windows-based Applications using .NET Technology.
• Ensure systematic documentation of all functions in the source code.
• The ability to contribute with other peers for programming problem solving.
• Performing application testing (Unit, Integration, Regression, Load, Platform test).

Requirement:

• Male/Female, max. 28 years old.
• Bachelor Degree in IT / Computer Science from reputable university.
• GPA min 2.8 (Scale 4).
• Minimum 1-2 years Experience in IT fields.
• Good understanding of OOP design methodology.
• Familiar with .NET Framework and API invoking.
• Familiar with Transact-SQL and DBMS (SQL Server / Oracle).
• Able & have knowledge in Programming Languages such as: C#.
• Good knowledge in Web-Based applications programming with ASP.NET.
• Strong interpersonal skills and highly self motivated.
• Ability to learn new skills relatively fast.
• Strong desire and motivation to research and develop new ideas and features.
• A great team player. Must be able to work within a team, under pressure and tight deadline.

• Well proven in English communication skill (spoken & written).

Should you interest to perform this opportunity in SUZUKI, please submit your comprehensive resume and recent photograph not later than April 30, 2008 and please put the position code as the subject to :

HRPD-Recruitment
PT. Indomobil Suzuki International
Gedung Training Center TB1
Jl. P. Diponegoro Km 38,2
Tambun – Bekasi 17510

Email :

recruitment@suzuki.co.id