Marco Milani

It's Christmas and another year is closing. A lot of things happened this year, as usual some are good, some other are bad. The social psychology seems to be forged to a widespread pessimism and I'm a little bit concerned about the new year.  I have no doubt in the human ability to make good things, but I'm concerned because a so wide absence of trust will make bad things happen.

Even if I don't like to see good things where there are not good things at all, I'm in general an optimist. I'm sure that only if we all try to see some good things in the  future the economic disaster depicted by media and by some politician could be avoided.

It's quite clear that in last years a lot of companies, "business men" and "managers", tried to make money creating apparent and virtual value. This should make us reflecting in our judgement ability about what happen in the world, about the real value of things and about our ability in understanding the news from media. We are all responsible if virtual value was created from nothing and we if we didn't recognize sick business systems.

I hope that the crisis we perceive in this weeks will produce s kind of "garbage collection" in economical and financial world in order to eliminate all fake businesses.

We should always remember that real investments, and the resulting economical welfare, are completely based on confidence about the future, we risk the economical paralysis if we don't trust in future.

We should even understand that if we all think that bad things will happen, bad things will really happen.

We should trust in future, we have to trust in the human ability in finding solutions to problems. I thinks that the main ingredients toward a satisfactory solution to this crisis are:

• Patience
• Hard work
• Social solidarity
• Ethics

I'm sure that if we put these ingredients in our every-day life in 2009 we will see a completely new and better world.

Try to think positive. Merry Christmas!

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Thanks to the automatic upgrade plugin I upgraded in a few clicks without any kind of problems.
Nice!

In last weeks I attended the course "improve your negotiating skills" (in English). The course was promoted by Confidustria Lecco and organized by team lingue in Lecco.
I appreciated all the aspects of the course and I'm really enthusiast about the objectives reached.

The contents was really interesting and very well planned; the teachers, Amanda and Justine, were very prepared and really captivating; the classmates were motivated and interesting; the school was well organized and really cared about the good progress of the course.

In this course I learned some of the key aspects involved in negotiation, like how to prepare a good negotiation, some possible ways of starting a negotiation, some kind of negotiation and possible negotiators, how important is culture in verbal and non verbal communication, some possible ploys in order to get good deals.

During the lesson theoretical aspects were interleaved with practical "role plays", vocabulary investigations, some grammar inspections and nice conversations about the topics proposed. All the mix was very well balanced and effective.

In this course I mainly find two big plus that makes me so enthusiastic. A first plus is the huge amount of new words and phrase learned; even if I'm not usual to negotiate in English, I think my English improved a little bit. The second plus is the helpfulness of the main topic even for negotiations run in my mother tongue, because the key concepts discussed are mainly language independent.

I would like to advise this course to all who want to improve either negotiating skills and English.