Sunday Posts

There seems to be a problem with such a straight-forward question. It is political. There are two sides on it. Battles are being fought over it. This simple innocuous question denotes the battle for the soul of the organization, though its methods are certainly less grand. The side that says NO has a simple reason: People should be working in office. Not socializing. Not playing. Facebook is playful, even immoral. Let us call this group High Priests of Scientific Management. These gurus are usually the Command-and-Control guys who believe that office work is about putting a bunch of kids in a cage and giving them some simple menial tasks to perform. This is where they get it wrong. They forget that office work is no longer like that. May be, they don't get because they are mostly managers: They don't work anymore. They sit in their cabins snooping around on other people, forgetting that it is social connections and free energies of the educated adults that determine the fate...

I just read about Galerianki , the Polish documentary on the phenomenon of mall girls, on today's International Herald Tribune . For the uninitiated, the mall girls are those teenagers, often in school, who hang around in shopping malls and try to spot wealthy individuals, draw their attention and perform sex acts in return to gifts, often in the form of expensive branded clothing, mobile phones and other accessories. Deviod of parental attention, as their parents struggle to keep pace with the demands of post-socialist Poland, these girls do not think they are prostitutes, and call their clients 'sponsors' or 'boyfriends', and sometimes 'frajer' ['loser]. This story attracts my interest because of a coincidence. I spotted the story on IHT only after having a discussion with someone in the Philippines about those girls in Philippines, young and full of girlie charm, who perform sex acts for money to pay for their exams. Yes, it is as...