In the latest instalment of his masterclass, photographer LESTER V. LEDESMA sets his camera-sights on all things nocturnal

A FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER ONCE REMARKED THAT THERE IS no bad light in photography… only light, and how you use it defines you as an artist. But when nature’s light gets dimmer this might seem like a rather difficult task. Night photography brings with it a new set of challenges; the whole process of picture taking is slower, forcing you to work more deliberately and methodically. When done properly, however, the results can be spectacular. Ever wonder how those breathtaking nightscapes are captured? Here’s how.

Tip 1: Plan your shot

Great night shots aren’t made overnight, so to speak. More often than not, the nightscapes you see on billboards and magazines are products of careful planning on the photographer’s part. When shooting night scenes, I scout the area around my subject a few hours, or even days, in advance to find a good angle. This picture-perfect spot could be anywhere from a plain sidewalk to the penthouse window of a tall building. Knowing your location beforehand saves you a lot of time and headaches during the actual shoot, as you’ll see later.

Tip 2: Shoot at dusk

Now here’s a real trade secret: dusk – that short period when the sky and everything else is rendered in a deep blue light – is the best time to shoot night scenes. It lasts only a few minutes, so you better be in position when it happens. Shoot too early and your image might look rather “late afternoon”. Shoot too late and you get a high contrast between light and dark areas in the photo.

Tip 3: Keep the camera steady

No, your flash can’t illuminate that whole city block, no matter how close you get. Your best bet for capturing those glitzy streetlights would be to turn the flash off and use long exposures instead. Typical night scenes involve a half-second to even a few minutes’ worth of shutter speed, so it’s all about keeping that camera steady to avoid motion blur. A tripod comes in handy in these instances (the heavier it is, the more stability it offers). Should you lack one, try placing the camera over some crumpled clothes or a beanbag.

Tip 4: Play with your white balance

A lesson in colour correction: Tungsten lights, those bulbs used to illuminate streetlamps, give off a reddish hue when captured on film or pixels. Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, possess a greenish cast. You can bet these colours will show up, one way or another, when you photograph those night scenes. Though not entirely bad for the picture (sometimes they even add to it), it pays to know they can be corrected. Film shooters might want to try the FL-D and 80-series filters, which neutralise fluorescent and tungsten lights respectively. Digital photographers can simply adjust the white balance settings on their digital cameras.

Tip 5: Watch your back

This has little to do with photography, but night time brings with it the usual characters of the dark, many of whom might find that expensive-looking camera rather tempting. If you have any doubts about safety in a particular area, bring a companion. Or better still, ask a trusted local to accompany you. Always be aware of your surroundings, especially when shooting alone. And should there be a hint of serious danger, forget that photo-op – there’s plenty more where it came from!

LESTER V. LEDESMA is happiest out in the field, writing and photographing travel stories that have appeared in countless publications throughout Asia. His stunning imagery has earned him the 2007 Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Gold Award, the 2005 Asian Travel & Tourism Creative Awards Silver Medal and the 2002 ASEAN Tourism Association (ASEANTA) Award for Excellence. Based in Singapore, he is currently the photo editor of Ink Publishing and a field editor for Asian Geographic Magazine.

Numbers that count in 2008

ECO MATTERS

To keep total planetary warming below the 2°C level – the maximum it is believed we can risk to avoid crossing tipping points that could lead to rapid warming – we need:

• An end to all tropical deforestation
• 700 new gigawatt-sized nuclear plants (plus 300 replacement plants)
• 800 gigawatt-sized coal plants with all the carbon captured and permanently sequestered
• Efficient buildings: savings totalling 5 million gigawatt-hours
• 1 million large wind turbines
• Vehicle efficiency: all cars 60 miles per US gallon
• Wind for vehicles: 2,000 gigawatts wind, with most cars plug-in hybrid-electric/pure electric vehicles
• Cellulosic biofuels: using up to one-sixth of the world’s cropland

- Dr Joseph Romm, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress

Up on HIGH

2008 WORLD AIRLINE AWARDS’ TOP FIVE AIRLINES

1 Singapore Airlines
2 Cathay Pacific
3 Qantas
4 Thai Airways
5 Asiana Airlines

2kg Total in-flight weight reduction after All Nippon Airways (ANA) introduced lighter porcelain for its first and business classes

SIX tonnes Weight of catering equipment and food on a typical long-haul British Airways flight

ECONOMIES OF SCALE

In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people and a global economy of US$7 trillion. Six decades later, the global population is 6.7 billion with a US$66 trillion gross world product

US$157 billion
Ten-year-old Google’s current market value

16 minutes 33 seconds
Average time it takes for a worker interrupted by an email to get back to what he or she was doing

“If you wait for a career to be successful, you may miss the best ideal age for childbearing.”

LEE HSIEN LOONG, Singapore’s Prime Minister, in a speech on 17 August calling on the city- state’s women to marry young and have more children to encourage population growth

A culinary tour of Japan must begin in Tokyo, reports resident foodie DANIELLE DEMETRIOU; but don’t stop there – life- extending Okinawan seaweed, Hokkaido’s sea urchin, and lotus root tempura from Kyoto are just some of the treats that await

A beautifully
presented kaiseki
spreadSUSHI – IF THERE’S ONE WORD SYNONYMOUS with Japan’s cuisine today it is the ubiquitous “S” word. But there is more to Japan’s repertoire of culinary delights than raw fish and rice. From lightly fried tempura to a-million-and-one styles of tofu, sweet unagi eel to yakitori grilled chicken, melt-in-the-mouth tonkatsu breaded pork cutlets to shabu shabu hotpots, a dizzying melting pot of dishes await the open-minded visitor.

Delicate, seasonal and fresh, the nation’s cuisine is often as pretty as a painting as well as one of the healthiest in the world. “Japanese cuisine is pure, with a singular focus on one flavour at a time, as well as light, with a heavy focus on seafood,” says James Viney, the executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Marunouchi. “It also has a sophisticated simplicity, with its zen-like presentation and attention to fine details.”

There is only one starting point in Japan for a whistle-stop culinary tour: Tokyo. The capital’s status as nirvana for food lovers was confirmed last year when it was sprinkled with a record number of Michelin stars at the Asian launch of the guide – effortlessly outshining cities from Paris to New York. While the capital heaves with more than 160,000 restaurants, among the best are low-key local establishments known as izakaya, where the food is as delicious as the prices are low.

Many popular local dishes in Tokyo date back to the Edo period, which spanned four centuries until the late 1800s and firmly shaped the city’s culinary landscape. There is chanko-nabe, a healthy hotpot of vegetables, meat and seafood, traditionally consumed in industrial quantities by sumo wrestlers. Another classic dish is fukagawa-don – a miso stew topped with green onions and asari clams – once the convenience food of choice among busy Edo-era fishermen and still a popular dish today.

But the country’s culinary highlights are not confined to the capital. The necklace-like trail of tropical islands in southern Okinawa is home to an array of delights such as the delicately mouth-popping seaweed ume budo, a bitter gourd vegetable stir-fry known as goya champuru, and succulent ashi-tibichi (stewed pig’s trotters). And they must be doing something right, for Okinawan food is also celebrated for its health-giving properties – its sparkly-eyed elderly residents boast the longest life expectancy in the world.

The art of dining – a bento
box from Marunouchi’s Ekki
Bar & Grill at the Four
Seasons Hotel TokyoAt the opposite tip of Japan, the northern island of Hokkaido is a cool green mountainous haven with its own very different specialities, including delicious cheeses, buckwheat soba noodles and raw sea urchin uni. Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, boasts its own culinary heritage with famous dishes ranging from yuba – delicate layers of soya milk skin – to lotus root tempura. Viney adds: “From region to region, food varies considerably. A typical egg omelette roll is served sweet in Osaka and savoury in Tokyo. Many fried items are from the Osaka region, whereas Tokyo has many braised or stewed dishes.”

Japan’s four distinct seasons, as well as geography, have shaped the nation’s cuisine. Chefs across the country share a healthy reverence for nature with a preference for seasonal ingredients. Springtime brings cherry blossom-infused rice, bamboo shoots and herring. With summer comes bonito fish flakes, while autumn goes hand in hand with matsutake mushrooms and chestnuts.

Another common culinary denominator is the nation’s love affair with rice. The basis for almost every meal, the staple emerges in every shape and form – from gohan rice bowls to mochi rice cakes via rice-distilled sake.

Unlike the sizzling Sichuan cuisine of China and the spine-tingling hot curries of India, Japanese food is among the most delicately flavoured in the world, due to a philosophy of retaining the natural flavours of ingredients with the minimum intervention of artificial processes.

Sushi and much,
much moreWhile meat is consumed widely today across the country, seafood and fish remain most prominent – an enduring legacy of Japan’s Buddhist history of banning meat consumption. Buddhist cuisine – known as shojin ryori – is still served today in temples as well as numerous increasingly fashionable restaurants across the country. Based on a strict fundamental principle of not killing any living beings, meals are intricately presented and use fresh, seasonal produce traditionally featuring five flavours – sweet, spicy, salty, bitter and sour – and five colours: yellow, black, white, green and red.

Another cherry on Japan’s culinary cake is kaiseki cuisine, which also has its roots in Zen Buddhism. Frequently served today in traditional ryokan inns, it consists of an elegant banquet of more than a dozen beautifully presented courses incorporating a seasonal representative from the sea, the fields, the mountains and the rivers.

From local izakaya to high-end kaiseki restaurants, the nation’s enduring reverence for all things food-related remains intact regardless of the setting. As the Japanese say when they bless their food before lifting their chopsticks: itadakimase.

GLOSSARY
SUSHI Vinegar rice with raw fish
KAISEKI Traditional banquet of numerous small seasonal dishes
IZAKAYA Red lanterns hang outside the door of these local Japanese-style pubs serving tapas-sized dishes
OKONOMIYAKI AND MONJAYAKI Omelette-like mix cooked on hot plates on customers’ tables
YAKITORI Grilled chicken skewers
UNAGIYA Specialists in unagi – fresh water eel – and other eel delicacies
TONKATSU Deep-fried breaded pork cutlet
SHABU SHABU Japanese hot pot, traditionally made with thinly sliced beef and seasonal vegetables
SHOJIN RYORI Strict vegetarian Buddhist cuisine

CHRIS MITCHELL recommends four sites for sore eyes and itchy feet

Tripwolf.com

Target Market: Travellers who want to get in touch with each other and learn more about their chosen destinations.
USP: Facebook for travel junkies, combined with Wikitravel-like guide pages.
Special Features: Freshly launched, Tripwolf is one of the new breed of travel sites that tries to unify the online travel world. The site, which best caters to the European and American markets, combines Facebook-style social networking with travel tips about specific destinations that can be added to by other users. Many areas are still sparse, but Tripwolf has potential to become a useful travel compendium of ideas and information.

PrivateIslandsOnline.com

Target Market: Those looking to escape to their own private island.
USP: Listings of hundreds of available private islands for sale or rent from all over the globe.
Special Features: There’s no need to daydream about having your own tropical island – this site provides comprehensive listings of where you can rent or buy your own for surprisingly affordable prices if your heart is set on it. Find plenty of articles about developing and maintaining an island for those interested in the practical headaches as well as the romantic fantasy; there’s also a forum to meet up with other island owners.

TokyoFreeGuide.com

Target Market: Those who want to see the real Tokyo through the eyes of a philanthropic local.
USP: Puts you directly in contact with volunteer Tokyo guides who speak English and want to show you their city.
Special Features: Forget pricey bespoke tours of Japan’s capital – this portal will connect you with one of its English-speaking volunteers who will do it for free. The site is extremely basic, but provides all the FAQs and booking information you need, in keeping with the simple philosophy of this non- profit organisation.

OneBag.com

Target Market: Business travellers looking to pack everything they need into one carry-on bag.
USP: Utterly exhaustive guide on how to travel super light, but still have everything you require close to hand.
Special Features: Doug Dyment has been refining his travel-light philosophy for more than a decade. His site provides absolutely everything you need to know about what to pack in just one carry-on bag without skimping on any essentials. Spend a few minutes reading OneBag to absorb Dyment’s advice and it could revolutionise the way you travel.

Hundredth-storey views over Shanghai are now possible from an observation platform near the apex of the world’s third-tallest building

The tallest structure on mainland China, the 492m Shanghai World Financial Centre is hard to miss – especially with the futuristic aperture at its peak. To alleviate wind-pressure stress, the super-tall skyscraper, dwarfed only by Taipei 101 and the incomplete Burj Dubai, was originally designed to have a circular opening. This would have conveyed the Chinese mythology representation of the earth (with a square) and the sky (with a circle). However, some in China considered the circular shape too close a resemblance to the rising sun design of the Japanese flag. A compromise was finally reached: the circle would be replaced by a trapezoidal hole. Fortuitously, the new design allowed an observatory bridge to be built along its base. Since 30 August 2008, visitors have been able to scan the Pudong skyline from the 94th, 97th and 100th floors – the latter being 474m above sea level. And, those who don’t want to leave don’t have to: the Park Hyatt Shanghai (www.parkhyattshanghai.com) colonises the 79th to 93rd floors.

PHOTO: ALEXANDER HONOLD

ANNIE TURNER looks into the business of wireless communications and asks how this technology is changing business travel, and the way we work and interact in the region

THE DAYS OF ASTRONOMIC hotel phone bills for the bare minimum of hurried calls to the office and home are a quaint and distant memory for business and other travellers.

Now we expect to have internet access everywhere via mobile devices that allow us to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it.

Hong Kong-based Norm Lo is a good example. He travels extensively around the Asia Pacific with his job and says, “My wife and I use Instant Messaging (IM) and email all the time to keep in touch, as well as talking to each other every day. She also sends me pictures of the kids. It’s all-encompassing communication.”

Lo is vice president of Research In Motion (RIM) for the region, maker of the iconic BlackBerry device, perhaps best known for pioneering mobile email. He says, “When I travel, my office is my BlackBerry.”

Does this mean that companies are able to get rid of their offices because their employees can do everything they need to do on the hoof? No, says Lo: “Our customers generally keep their offices. Asia-Pacific business culture is one of high touch and close team interaction. BlackBerrys do reduce IT and financial needs because customers typically need fewer laptops. They also tend to be adept in their use of technology and therefore more productive.”

Wireless communications and productivity

How much mobile applications boost productivity is a thorny issue – convenience does not always mean greater productivity, though the two are often confused. Massive data roaming charges can also shine a harsh light on the productivity-versus-cost equation, as illustrated by the current investigation in Australia.

Rosemary Sinclair, managing director of the Australian Telecommunications Users Group, told the House of Representatives Communications Committee in Australia, “Roaming data rates are $20 per megabyte [US$19.1] – pretty much across the board – compared to excess charges at home of around five cents.”

This is a complaint echoed across Asia (and indeed the rest of the world), despite initiatives such as the Bridge Alliance, which announced two flat-rate mobile data roaming plans across 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2007, or the Conexus Mobile Alliance, which involved operators in seven countries in a similar move.

On the upside, Lo points out that the great thing about access to email and other messages while you are on the move is that, “There is no dead time when you’re waiting for a taxi or plane. You can use that time to avoid a backlog building up and respond to people faster.”

But isn’t there a danger of over-reliance on text and email? Lo answers, “We offer technologies to help our customers make the most of email, such as filters to prevent spam and software to categorise and prioritise email in lots of different ways. For companies, we have hundreds of policies to choose from to control what employees receive to make sure email boosts productivity.”

Even so, it is interesting to find that in Japan (with Korea close behind), the world’s most advanced wireless communications market, studies such as those by social

*Respondents to SHARE Inc’s survey who use mobile data communications “rarely” or “never” for business totalled 71% psychologist Kakuko Miyata, and more recently by SHARE Inc*, have found that Japanese people tend to send emails from mobile devices to people they are close to compared with email sent from PCs.

Put another way, Japanese people use email like most of the rest of the world uses text messages – to send short messages to people they know well; the size of the screen and keyboard makes it tiresome to send long, formal, complicated messages to business contacts.

Sharifah Amirah, principal analyst for ICT group, Frost & Sullivan: “Japan and Korea have more reliable and faster networks because of government investment. Mobile is embedded into everyday life. It is the governments’ aim to provide ubiquitous networks so that people have access to services wherever they are. This means you can do everything from paying for parking to getting the results of medical tests via mobile.”

Small screens, high speeds

Yet even the iconic iPhone, with its sleek design and outstanding user interface, cannot surmount the limitations of a small (touch screen) keypad and screen for more complex, time-consuming tasks. There are complaints that the camera was not upgraded, while the battery only stands up to three hours media streaming across 3G networks, though it is sold as a multimedia phone. Still, as all the stats show, its ease of use attracted people to the mobile internet who’d never ventured there before.

Indeed, the iPhone is much admired in technophile Japan, coming top of a recent smartphone survey, while Kevin Li, an analyst with In-Stat China, estimated in July that there are one million unlocked iPhones being used on China Mobile’s network.

Yet for heavy-duty, core-activity business data usage, there are new wirelessly connected kids on the block. In June, two Taiwanese computer makers launched cheap mini laptops. Both Asustek Computer and Acer said they expected to ship millions of units this year.

Asustek CEO Jerry Shen told reporters that the new Eee PC models had 23-25cm screens and use WiFi 802.11n hotspot technology, which means a high- definition, 30-minute film could be downloaded within a minute. They cost between US$560 and US$660 and the company claims their batteries last up to 7.8 hours.

Asustek sold at least 350,000 Eees within two months of hitting the market. Jane Tseng of the Topology Research Institute in Taipei said she expected Acer to sell up to five million units of Aspire One in Asia in 2008.

Aspire One uses an older WiFi standard, but is in discussions with Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Mobile about installing a 3G module so that the computers could use those networks too, as well as another emerging wireless technology known as WiMAX.

This is the way of the world. A baffling range of network technologies to provide us with ever faster network access will appear in the next two to three years, with more in the pipeline. Naturally Japan is at the forefront, with NTT DoCoMo already testing a network that has download speeds of up to 250 megabytes per second and 75 megabytes per second upload speeds.

By comparison, current 3G (of the GSM variety) offers a sad 384 kilobits/second for downloading, and when souped up (by HSDPA technology), 14 megabytes downstream.

The onus will be on wireless device makers to come up with batteries that can perform for longer, with greater processing power to deal with increasing amounts of data, such as real-time video recording or streaming, and combinations of different wireless technologies within one device so that the user always has the best technology for the job without having to know anything about them.

Over-interactive?

As wireless becomes the primary means of accessing the internet across the board, greater upload speeds are becoming as important as they are in fixed broadband. This is because users are increasingly interactive, uploading content they’ve found or generated to sites such as Facebook.

Businesspeople need to use such sites with care. On one hand, social networking sites provide a fantastic way of staying in touch with a wider circle of people, and the mobile ingredient adds that often missing element of immediacy. On the other, the value of preserving one’s dignity and privacy online can hardly be overstated – if in doubt about whether to post something or not, just consider how your boss, colleagues or customers would view it.

Employees need to be aware of company HR and IT policies – and adhere to them. It is also incumbent on them not to rack up massive data roaming charges streaming or downloading videos from YouTube.

For their part, employers must avoid knee-jerk reactions to apparent time wasting. Julia Lin, project manager of research data and analytics at Gartner commented, “Social networking has found new forms of expression on the internet which has helped to reshape the purpose and protocols of social networking in the online world and beyond. How to apply this in a corporate environment will be the next major challenge.”

IBM’s recent report, The Enterprise of the Future, was based on interviews with more than 1,130 CEOs and senior managers from 40 countries. CEOs cited varied reasons for changing the mixture of capabilities and knowledge of their employees; they agreed that it was very important, but also the most difficult type of change to implement.

The work-life overlap

It hardly seems reasonable to expect people to use skills they’ve acquired in their spare time for the benefit of their employer, while senior managers generally are older and less likely to be expert social networkers themselves. And of course the people who are tweens and teenagers now will soon become part of the workforce themselves; to them, social networking, using IM and having always-on access to their world will be native.

Exactly how this is going to fit into work practices is not clear, but just imagine what someone who left the workforce in 1990 would make of office life now. Clearly the approach needs to implement Web 2.0 technologies, while avoiding problems such as breach of privacy, financial costs, security, employee abuse and regulatory compliance.

Employers would also do well to remember that demanding absolute attention to work between certain hours might be shooting themselves in the foot – staff are increasingly likely to have to deal with work-related email, IM or calls outside rigid office hours to work with colleagues in other time zones.

They are more likely to be willing to do so if they can take ten minutes out of their evening to use their iPhone instead of having to stay late at the office and/or aren’t disciplined for spending 20 minutes on Facebook instead of having an old- fashioned morning coffee break.

Perhaps the biggest effect that wireless has had and will have on our lives is an unprecedented need to balance our activities and, to quote an ITU report on Korea written three years ago, to work out how to “unplug” ourselves from so many sources of information at least some of the time, and relax.

FIVE FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

1 People in the Asia Pacific spend more on mobile data than any other region in the world and usage has grown by 48% in the last year – the fastest growing region is the Middle East and Africa at 91.8%. (Informa World Cellular Data Metrics, published July 2008)

2 Data usage accounts for 24.57% of mobile spend in the Asia Pacific, ahead of Western Europe at 21.13% (Source as above).

3 The Philippines is the SMS capital of the world; to celebrate the New Year, Filipinos sent 1.39 billion text messages from a subscriber base of just 50 million. This led the country’s trade secretary to propose an SMS tax. (Source: Acision)

4 India’s mobile data use will rise from US$3 billion in 2008 to more than US$8.3 billion by 2013, according to a Juniper Research report published in July 2008.

5 India’s fourth-largest mobile operator, BSNL, announced it was cutting the cost of calls by 40-50% in June 2008.

ILLUSTRATION: MAR KABAYAN

JUSTINE COLEMAN asks managers to question their HR conduct: how good are you at getting the most out of your staff, are they enthused and engaged – and are you?

HIRING AND RETAINING TALENTED people isn’t enough these days. If your company’s skilled resources aren’t motivated and focused on the right things, you may end up like a sports team with a big payroll, a bench of sidelined stars and a losing season. “Engagement” has become the buzz word of people management, but it is the outcome of a vital equation that sees satisfied employees giving their best.

BlessingWhite recently released a global survey on engagement (defined as being “enthused and in gear”), which asked 7,500 people worldwide in a range of industries and across the corporate hierarchy about their levels of job satisfaction/contribution.

They found that in Europe, SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand, only one- quarter of employees are fully engaged. In the US, it’s slightly higher, and the highest levels of employee engagement in India, where over one-third of people are engaged.

What can managers do?
As a manager, you are a – if not the – critical ingredient in successful employee engagement. Here are 10 steps to ensure higher levels of team engagement:

STEP 1 Reflect and recharge
Where are you on the engagement spectrum? You can’t help your team if you’re disengaged. If you are, consider what matters most to you. Then consider where the firm needs you to focus your talents. Can a few job tweaks improve things? If you’re fully engaged, how can you “infect” others?

STEP 2 Hire “engage-able” team members
One HR leader interviewed underscored this point: “Our number one problem was lack of fit. We needed to hire people who could be successful. Instead of training square pegs to fit the round hole, we now try to hire round pegs.”

STEP 3 Earn trust every day
Trust provides the essential foundation for your effectiveness as a manager, whether we’re talking about engagement, innovation or high performance. To build it, you need to reveal who you are as a person. Your title and accomplishments aren’t enough.

STEP 4 Stress employee ownership
You can’t create an engaged team if your employees don’t have clear visions of personal success. Make sure they know that you’re available to provide guidance, remove barriers and help them find fulfilling work. However, they are ultimately the ones responsible for their success.

STEP 5 Find out where the bus is going – and remind people of the destination
If you’re not clear on your organisation’s strategy, find someone who can give you answers. Demand clarity – you owe it to yourself and to your team. Once you are clear, help your team understand their role, and prioritise the myriad tasks they face each day to achieve meaningful results.

STEP 6 Remember that feedback is a gift
Employees want feedback. They deserve information that can help them achieve both their goals and the firm’s. Let them know what they do well so they can keep doing those things with confidence. Suggest course corrections to help them use their time and effort most efficiently.

STEP 7 Talk and listen more
Communication (especially in today’s email-driven workplace) is often one-way. Conversation, on the other hand, is about dialogue between two or more people. Conversation drives clarity. It is by far the most effective vehicle for providing performance feedback, and is the only way to efficiently generate new ideas for increasing business results and personal job satisfaction.

STEP 8 Match projects, passion and proficiency
Every person comes to work with a different combination of personal values, talents and goals, which they are looking to satisfy on the job. They don’t necessarily want a lofty title, a higher salary, or your job. If you can help them connect what’s important to them with what’s important to the organisation, you can make a positive impact on their job satisfaction, commitment and contribution.

STEP 9 Get to know your team members
You don’t need to be their friend. You do need to know what makes them tick. Pay attention. Ask questions.

STEP 10 Tailor your coaching strategies
Once you understand where each individual in your team is at, tailor your coaching strategies to address their specific needs. Clarify performance expectations, provide development opportunities, give feedback and re-enforce standards. The truly disengaged may need to be coached out of the organisation. But don’t take those who are engaged for granted. Full engagement is hard to sustain on one’s own. Nurture them, recognise them, stretch them and develop them. Keep them involved.

By building a partnership with your team members, you can work together to get the employee engagement equation right.

For a copy of a regional overview or the full report of “2008 State of Employee Engagement” by BlessingWhite, write to: info@blessingwhiteap.com

Justine Coleman is MD of Performance Culture Consulting, and is a senior consultant with BlessingWhite in Melbourne. She specialises in talent management, workplace effectiveness and engagement strategies. justinec@blessingwhiteap.com

HELEN DALLEY sources distinctive, locally themed gifts that are worth space in your case

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA
Antique maps

Whether it’s detailed maps of Sri Lanka as it was more than 200 years ago, 19th-century landscapes of the island once known as Ceylon, or intricate ink drawings of Colombo circa 1845, the Serendib Gallery has plenty of antiquarian prints and maps for those wishing to remember Sri Lanka’s past as a British colony.

36 1/1 Rosmead Place, Colombo 7, tel: +94 (0)11 567 4578, www.theserendibgallery.com

MACAU
Jewellery from Dora Tam

Dora Tam’s silver jewellery designs are nothing if not imaginative. Her creatively titled collections such as “The Fairies” and “Magic Flute” have a Celtic influence, while “Lotus” is distinctly Chinese. Dora’s handiwork also includes silver wedding bands and cute animal pendants.

Rua Da Sé, No. 20 R/C, Macau, tel: +853 256 319, www.doratamdesign.com

VIETNAM
Passionate portraits

XQ embroidered art captures the history and culture of the Vietnamese people through its vivid and frequently moody portraits, of wistful teenagers, elderly calligraphers, and much in between. Visit the company’s historical village to learn more.

Available in shops across Vietnam, www.xqhandembroidery.com

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA
Upscale fashion from Melinda Looi

Malaysian designer Melinda Looi’s garments are more like fine art creations than clothing; her elaborate pieces feature fine embroidery, crystals, semi-precious stones and chiffon. Her clientele includes Asian celebrities and royalty, who don her dresses at red carpet events. Visit her couture showroom and Looi may welcome you in person.

279 Jalan Maarof, Bukit Bandarayam, tel: +60 (3) 2093 2279, www.melindalooi.com

SYDNEY, ADELAIDE & MELBOURNE
Sweet treats from Haigh’s

One of the few retailers in the world still making chocolate from the raw cocoa bean, Haigh’s is the oldest family-owned chocolate manufacturing retailer in Australia, and more than half its sweets are still handmade. Its Australian Collection incorporates local ingredients such as macadamia nut and honey, lemon myrtle and wattle seed.

Available at selected stores, www.haighschocolates.com

Joanna Sullivan rounds up the world’s – and Asia-Pacific’s – biggest cruise ships

In the cruise industry, size matters. Cruise lines are building ever larger ships and competing with one another to furnish their vessels with more “at- sea-first” features than ever before. With Royal Caribbean set to launch the largest vessel in the world next year, we take a look at the biggest and best liners to date. Ship size is measured in tonnage – the industry’s official indicator of size.

1 Freedom of the Seas (2006)
Currently the world’s largest cruise ship, this mammoth Royal Caribbean vessel is 339 metres long and 26 metres across. It’s the first ship to incorporate a surf simulation park and regulation-sized boxing ring. Passengers can also rock climb, take in a “round” of golf and exchange vows. In November and December, Freedom’s sister ship, Legend of the Seas, will be based in Singapore and making round-trip jaunts to Phuket (via KL and Penang) and Shanghai. www.royalcaribbean.com

2 Queen Mary 2 (QM2) (2004)
Possibly the world’s most famous cruise liner, and the largest after Royal Caribbean’s Freedom range, Cunard’s QM2 tours all corners of the world. At 345 metres, she is the longest cruise ship to ever set sail (she remains the largest ocean liner, as opposed to cruise ship, ever built), offering her passengers a modern cruising experience within an environment that harks back to a bygone era of sailing glamour. www.cunard.com

3 Diamond Princess (2004)
Designed to include a variety of small, intimate spaces in an effort to provide passengers with a “big ship choice and small ship feel”, the Diamond is the largest vessel in the Princess fleet with 18 decks and 1,337 cabins. Regularly plying the waters of Asia and Australasia, she sports an array of wow-factor quirks, from virtual golf simulators to art auctions, thus appealing to all generations. www.princess.com

4 Superstar Virgo (1999)
Star Cruises’ Virgo is one of the largest ships to sail exclusively around Asia. Regularly traversing the South China Sea, she has capacity to carry 1,870 passengers to destinations such as Hong Kong, Halong Bay and Singapore. Revealing a Wet ’n’ Wild park, a games room and a celebrity disco, Virgo is sure to keep the kids amused, while the first Indian restaurant at sea will satisfy foodies. www.starcruises.com

5 Seven Seas Mariner (2001)
Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ 700-passenger- capacity Mariner was the world’s first all-suite, all-balcony ship, and though significantly smaller than the mega-ships produced in recent years, she is one of the most spacious vessels in the industry. Catering for the top-end market, passengers can be pampered in the spa, shop in the boutiques, or listen to a guest lecturer speak on an upcoming destination. www.rssc.com

CRUISING FURTHER

Oasis of the Seas (2009)
At 43% bigger than the world’s current largest cruise ship, Oasis – the latest generation of Royal Caribbean’s “floating cities” – will be longer than four football fields, will weigh a colossal 220,000 tonnes and feature more at-sea firsts than ever before. The ship is designed around a revolutionary “neighbourhood” concept of seven themed areas, including Central Park and the Royal Promenade. Developed at a cost of US$1.24 billion, Oasis surpasses all other cruise ships in every category. www.oasisoftheseas.com

GRAPHICS: ROYAL CARIBBEAN CRUISES INTERNATIONAL/MaG InOO

On July 10, 2008, CONNECT magazine was officially launched at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. The evening gave CWT’s Asia-Pacific team the chance to meet and network with many of their clients and travel-industry colleagues.

	Aubrey Braganza (Jet Airways), Kevin Tan (CWT) & Berthold Trenkel (CWT)
	Maria Lim (Thales), Cheryl Lam (Thales), Jessie Tan-Versteeg (CWT) & Angeline Qweuk (Thales)
	Vincent Knoops (Air France KLM), Martin Warner (CWT) & Vicky Fernandez (CWT)
	CWT Singapore
	Kevin Hardy (Macquarie Bank), Lisa Goh & Olivier Spaenle (CWT)
	Cupcakes from Marmalade Pantry
	Yong Kok Wong, Jocelyn Phoon (CWT), Pamela Teo, David Hazel & Jenny Kwong (Publicis)
	Steve Limbrick (Qantas & BA)
	CWT Asia Pacific Account Managers
	Anne Boh, Chin Bee Leng (BNP Paribas) & Rebecca Tan (CWT)
	Rhoda M. (Singapore EXPO) & Axel Dinesen (TMS Asia Pacific)
	Roger Leong (CWT), Nicolas Pierret (CWT) & Peter Myers (Editor, CONNECT)
	Yan-Kit Wong (Hertz) & Teo Li Lin (Qantas & BA)
	Vincent Knoops & Ven Sreenivasan (Business Times)
	Ink Publishing’s Gerry Ricketts & Shazeen Moledina, with Shaan Moledina (Mediacorp) & Jeremy Lim (Total Sport & Entertainment - Asia)