Adams Avenue Street Fair-Craft and Music Combo

Street fairs are an excellent opportunity to socialize and experience the artistic talent of the area as they display everything from food to hand-crafted home decorations. Last weekend I attended the Annual Adams Avenue Street Fair with over 300 vendors and 100 live musical acts. The event lined Adams Street for the distance of approximately eight city blocks. 

This particular street fair is one of the largest in the area and occurs annually drawing thousands of visitors to the bohemian Adams Avenue Business District. This year the event was held on September 27^th and 28^th and was situated in a cordoned street right between the stores, bars, restaurants, and apartments. 

Handcrafts:

Some of the items are hand crafted such as the bottled glasswork. Not sure how the artist makes his items but it appears he melts the bottles down in some way to manipulate them into wind chimes, wall pictures, or table trays. Other handcrafted goods included jewelry, clothing, pens, and wall signs. 

Art:

Items such as paintings, pottery, and cartoons were just some of the artistic endeavors on display. A few 3D drawings caught my attention.  As you look at drawings from different angles they change shape.  

Food:

It doesn’t take long to smell the aromas from food vendors representing just about every culture imaginable.  For the first time in my life I ordered a rice milk and cinnamon drink from a Mexican food stand; pretty good stuff. A half block further I was tempted by stuffed grape leaves due to a recent cooking failure I had a week ago. 

Bands and more bands:

If you were in the mood to listen to bands they were blaring on just about every block which converted the art fair into mixed music and art affair. Rock, country, Indie and vocalists got a place on the stage. The beer garden seemed attractive to the concert goers.

http://www.adamsaveonline.com/StreetFair/

Selecting Global Managers

International organizations have a need for global managers that maintain abilities to handle the complex cultural and operational functionality of larger organizations. Global managers are highly sought after as navigators of international context and become bridges between the different cultural perceptions to foster achievement of organizational objectives.  A paper by van de Vijver (2008) helps executives better understand on how to select global managers for recruitment or development and the skills such manager’s hold. 

Success in finding the right global candidate requires understanding how the person views the world by assessing their personality. Nearly all personality assessments have flaws with some having bigger flaws than others. Few practitioners would rely on a single assessment in much the same way as a hiring manager should not look at only one aspect of a person to making an important decision. 

In the global context concepts like cultural empathy, cultural distance, and intercultural abilities have a positive impact on one’s ability to work in a multi-cultural world. Global managers who use these skills typically do so when functioning in multi-cultural teams, operating from another country, or work in an international cultural context. 

Managers who function successfully in international environments don’t often prescribe to a single ethnic identity (Ashmore, et. al., 2004). They take on varying cultural perspectives, adopt a multi-cultural identity, and are skilled when working in a multiple cultural environment. Because of their ability to understand self in different contexts they are able to function in those contexts with greater effectiveness.

The paper finds that the performance of global managers is determined by multiple characteristics. The global manager should have intercultural competence to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. They should also have the intellectual capacity to understand a complex world in which they exist.  Their ability to use both their intellectual capacity and cultural understandings make them more effective than domestic managers in navigating ambiguous environments. 

The global manager is not a person who has lost their birth culture but is a person who has adapted that culture to the needs of the business community and the world at large. They learned and developed to a point that they understand and share cultural identities with people from various parts of the world. They are open-minded in effectively dealing with and managing perspectives that are different from their own. 

The same intellectual ability that allows them to take on new cultural perspectives is the same intellectual ability that allows understands complex operations that span across different continents. Each organization is a collective of people, policies, resources, values, cultures, supply networks, financial arrangements, and interconnected vines of related networks. To understand how the tangible business operations work within the difficult to define cultures is a life time in the making. 

Ashmore, R., et. al. (2004). An organizing framework for collective identity: Articulation and significance of multidimensionality. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 80–114.

Van de Vijver, F. (2008). Personality assessment of global talent: conceptual and methodological issues. International Journal of Testing, 8.

Wine Review: Apothic Red Wine 2012

You have been invited to a dinner party and need to pick up a quality wine for supper. No need to walk up and down the aisle to find the right wine that meets both the quality and cost criteria you had in your head when you first stepped into the store. Apothic Red 2012 is a blend of Syrah, Zinfandel, and Merlot that balances the different wines for a high quality outcome.

It contains mostly sweet flavors that include raspberry, cherry, vanilla, mocha and some boysenberry. It is a smooth wine with a hardy body and a pleasant aftertaste. This would be the type of wine you would pick up for just about any social affair. Most drinkers will be satisfied with the quality, taste, and consistency of their product.

Apothic Red Wine Maker’s Blend is a winter wine by style and complements a variety of winter related foods. Meat dishes, heavy soups, and wild game regularly pair with a heavier red wine. Room temperature wine also complements hot dish foods more commonly in the cool months. 

Red wine is generally considered healthiest choice among wines. Studies have shown that red wine compounds in the form of polyphenols play a role in inhibiting lipid peroxidation, free radicals, platelet aggregation, and strengthens anti-inflammation (Natella, et. al, 2011). A glass of wine every once in a while has positive supporting effect on overall health. 

http://www.apothic.com/

Natella, F., et. al. (2011). Drinking guidance for red wine: to be taken with meals: red wine prevents post prandial increase of plasma oxidized lipids. Journal of Wine Research, 22 (2).