If that person, however, takes a long time before they admit to their mistake and apologises you could take a fair while longer before you accept the white flag. You might even terminate the friendship.

Now before you roll your eyes and click off this article thinking:- yugh one of those new age articles, let me quickly reassure you otherwise and give you an example that you might be able to relate to.

The headline that caught my eye today was in the New York Times and it said that ‘Toyota has pattern of slow response on safety issues’. The immediate reaction could be that of course this is so. After all Toyota is a Japanese company and Asia doesn’t like to admit to mistakes.

This is not because Asian companies are necessarily evil. It’s because as head of the organisation you just cannot afford to make a mistake. If it’s a serious mistake you could even be expected to commit suicide. At the least you need to resign. You can see that this is not exactly an incentive to confessing to having made a mistake.

Going back to the opening question what could this mean to Toyota if it is a company that doesn’t like to admit to mistakes? The worst possible scenario probably.  It could mean losing customers. In Germany sales are already down by 20%. In the USA Ford and Chevrolet are celebrating an unexpected bonus.

Having now made this big deal about Asian CEO’s being reluctant to admit to mistakes, let’s have a look at what happens in the West. Well actually almost the same in some cases.

Cast your mind back to Arthur Anderson in their time one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. They got caught with their fingers in a rather messy scenario. Instead of immediately apologising and making a huge showing of how they are fixing the situation, they went into denial mode. Even got sued.

End of Arthur Anderson. It took about 8 months for one of the biggest firms to die. Could Lehman Brothers have survived if they had admitted to having problems instead of denying all rumours up to the day before they closed their doors.

Could Toyota die a horrible death? Unlikely. The sticky gas pedal is not a company killer. But if they had reacted sooner to the problems of the gas pedal, which it appears has been around for a while, the cost and damage to the company would have been far less serious.

There have been great examples of companies weathering serious knocks because they stood up and admitted to their mistakes really quickly. And the quicker they reacted, the sooner the story went away.

So lesson of the day, react quickly. Whether you make a mistake dealing with a friend or as a business owner even big company executive. The quicker you react, shout mea culpa and make every effort to make good the sooner you are out of trouble.

It’s difficult though. Sometimes the option of keeping quiet in the hope that all will go away seems such an easier one to take. Beware, it could end up being a lot more dangerous though!

It makes one reflect that anything is possible. Not many South Africans considered this option a possibility. And yes there was a fair amount of resistance amongst the ruling white class after its announcement. But by making this step publicly and with conviction there was just no going back.

How often do we hesitate before we take a tiny step. We agonise over the consequences, the possible fall-out, the damage to our ego and the expected personal humiliation we are sure we will be subjected to.

And none of that is significant really. When a single person can stand up and announce a huge change of direction for his country, a total reversal of all things previously fought for and held onto then our small challenges feel insignificant surely.

But it’s not only our individual small changes that become minute in comparison. It is also the foolish stances that politicians all over the world take in their determination to protect their authority or avoid losing face in their mindless effort to hang onto a bad status quo.

If one small relatively unknown politician can change the fate of an entire country, then those other little politicians can do a lot more to ensure that their subjects are offered a life of equality, justice and freedom just to mention a few of the rights many people never get to experience in their lifetime.

Well done South Africa. Well done to both W F de Klerk and Nelson Mandela for showing the leadership required to make the impossible become possible.

Of course the sports body can still sell the rights to the TV broadcast to any takers. TV has not been excluded. So why should they worry. How many viewers will flock to online rather than watch on TV?

After all, TV surely has the upper hand when it comes to showing the games with commentary and other expert opinions making it more than just a TV viewing experience. How would YouTube compete with that one wonders.

Where the YouTube experience is going to come in is the availability factor. The sport fan does not have to depend on the TV channel to decide which games they think are important to show. This is especially important for viewers when concurrent games are played.

For instance for tennis fans the Australian Open viewing can be limited to one channel. When there are countless games being played at the same time on different courts, it is up to the TV broadcaster to decide which game could be the most interesting.

Where does the viewer’s preference fit into this? Isn’t this exactly the point that is going to kill off TV in preference to the internet? The choice is now up to the viewer as to what they would like to view, rather than having to put up with the TV editor’s choice.

How glorious would this make the Olympic Games viewing for instance. You could end up watching all of the competition in your particular field of interest, never mind how remote it is from other people’s interest.  Or compensating for the 15 hr time zone difference between Hanoi and Vancouver for instance.

All of the weight lifting? No problem. What about the archery or the shooting competitions. These are often neglected for such crowd pleasers as gymnastics or athletics. Yet there are millions interested in the smaller sports and most often they are the ones having to give way to the bigger viewer numbers. All for the sake of the most powerful advertising buck.

Enter the internet where everything can be streamed because numbers are not as important. It’s this choice that is going to be the problem for TV. Viewers will be giving up the battle for the remote. It’s no longer necessary. It’s all available. And as much as the IPL’s games will be shown live, the point is that they will be available to view again and again. At whatever time you want to. And as often as you wish.

And as for watching on a small computer screen. Those days are long over as well as all gadgets start to talk to each other. Plug the computer into your data projector and your game is played out on the biggest screen you can fit into your lounge.

Now all you need is that cute little robot to bring you a never ending supply of ice cold beers and you could consider yourself in sport watching heaven. TV will have to get very creative to counter this revolution.

Or else they will need to provide all games as well. Every single one. That would mean the women’s singles game could just have a chance of being shown as well, not just the men’s. And that at any time, and for ever. Good news that.

No amount of clever commentary and post or pre-match interviews will make good the fact that right now on TV in Vietnam I have only one choice of a game in the Australian Open. And it’s not the one I want to watch. Bring on live tennis on YouTube. Please Google!

Top athletes depend on their coaches for peak performances. The top teams in basketball, ice hockey, football and more perform in line with the abilities of their coaches. Top politicians employ personal coaches, people serious about diets have nutritionists helping them.

Becoming a financial expert will be much easier if a coach is there to help. This may be an intimate one on one relationship or may be spread amongst a series of people whose advice is absorbed and followed.

The coaching relationship may include consultations or phone calls. It may just be offered via newsletters, blogs, podcasts or articles in newspapers and magazines. Find the one that appeals and that speaks at the right level of competence for easy absorption.

Add a mentor to this mix or a mentoring group of people. It is easier to try a new field if there is support. A coach might be too aggressive. A mentor might be a better choice. Either way it is important to find support to ensure that assistance is on hand.

In line with finding the right coach and mentor, it is also important to find the time to practice and apply oneself. All top performers spend more time practising than participating in their game. This is the same whether following the careers of grand chess masters or a Roger Federer on the tennis court.

These top achievers have one thing in common. They relentlessly work to improve their game.  Tiger Woods spends hours hitting the ball, David Beckham kicks the ball one hundred times and recording artists spend hours in the studio.

Practising to become financially expert is relatively painless. As an investor it is possible to set up a portfolio using readily available software and spend the year of 2010 practising investment techniques without spending one cent on buying shares.

Or alternatively allocate a small sum of money, an amount that is affordable, and invest on a trial and error basis. Learn using small steps practising along the way. However, the coach is not only essential in helping to increase the income. Learning how to budget and reduce unnecessary debt is as important in the quest to become a financial expert.

Many people might find the practice period to be boring and unproductive. Yet it is a necessary component towards financial expertise. Anticipate that some of the practice sessions will not exactly sparkle with excitement.

It’s the same with all new skills. There is a period where the basics have to be learnt and acquired whether learning to play the piano or riding a horse for the first time. None of these are particularly fun. But if persevered with, they can bring untold pleasures. This is the case with financial expertise as well.

Make 2010 the year of finding a good coach and practising a lot. It will pay off handsomely.

In an article by well-known journalist Johann Hari on the outcome of the COP15 Summit he makes one damning point after the other to expose the developed world’s quest to worship their almighty God called Profit.

Read his excellent article most appropriately called ‘They didn’t seal the deal; they sealed the Coffin’ here.

During a few days of supposed reasoned talks by world leaders what seems to have been totally ignored were the pleas by representatives of low-lying island states. It also appears that nobody paid attention to presentations by countries such as Bangladesh being swamped by rising water levels.

What about the people speaking on behalf of the drought wracked countries of Africa? Did anybody hear them? And the other pleas not any less urgent begging the leaders of the developed world to nurture the planet and its people rather than destroy it.  Did that all fall on deaf ears?

Swept aside were the objections by the developing world that they have all the disadvantages of the changing weather patterns such as floods and droughts with none of the benefits of huge profits the developed world has had while leaching the life out of this planet.

What won were the interests of big money. It’s business as usual for petroleum companies, industry that spits out poison into the atmosphere and the travel industry to mention a few of the culprits.

It’s not even a question of we didn’t know. The scientific evidence is out there. It’s even common knowledge. Everybody with some common sense and access to news has an understanding of what is at stake.

How is it that we are allowing our leaders to kill off the world? Surely leaders should represent the people’s best interest? It cannot be in the people’s best interest to allow the world to die off. Short term profit, long term disaster.

And as for the disappointment of the year? Barack Obama who offered such wonderful promises? Yes we can!  Can kill the world? Shame on you Obama. We had such hope. And don’t say you weren’t there and couldn’t make a difference. Yes you were, and no you didn’t.

As an aside and not the point of his article but something noteworthy nevertheless does this mean that if bankers and CEOs were praised more they wouldn’t need to be paid these outrageous bonuses that they are raking in? Could appreciation replace money as the motivational tool?

But back to the point here. Living in a communist country such as Vietnam it is quite noticeable that very little appreciation is handed out. It’s everywhere but especially at work.

Nobody says thank you. That is a first sign there is no appreciation given. When a young person gives up her bus seat for an older person there is no thank you offered. There isn’t even an acknowledgement that the younger person exists.

In the myriad of small transactions between human beings, whether giving change, handing over a parcel, stepping aside, climbing into a taxi, asking for directions and so much more there is never an exchange of thank yous.

Take this process to the work environment and if the above quotation is correct then because there is never any appreciation shown the work force is mostly unmotivated.

And guess what. That seems true. Many foreigners will note that Vietnamese are incredibly lazy. Well not really. They work amazingly hard for their own businesses. The shop across the alley stays open all hours of the day. The family that owns it even has its dinner in the shop so that they can jump up and serve mid-meal.

Yet it is also true that in the work environment where the Vietnamese is staff rather than owner, the work effort is dismal in many instances. Every volunteer I have spoken to so far has confirmed that in their NGO, Government Department, or other work place the staff put in a minimum number of hours of effort.

You might ponder on this and say that most Government employees in whatever country are not working too hard. That could also be true and I have seen many instances of this in South Africa but not so much in England where the civil service generally works well.

It is particularly noticeable in Vietnam though. It will take four or five uniformed traffic police to stand around nonchalantly at road intersections. One presumes they are there to put some order into the traffic chaos. But one can but presume as there is no evidence of any movement past the loitering.

Getting a stamp at the post office can be an arduous task. The lonely  customer can stand for many minutes while the staff check over the week-end photos of a colleague. As for using the state owned public bus service! If you don’t run and jump onto the still moving bus, you have the doors closed in your face while still trying to get on.

And yet it is totally understandable. Employment is based on arbitrary decisions. If you smile a lot at the interviewer you have a chance of the job. If you don’t smile enough and look interested and in awe of the boss person you could get fired with no notice. Literally.

Of course there will be companies in Vietnam where international labour laws are adhered to and where good business practices are the norm. These would be international companies having to keep international shareholders happy.

Walk into the HSBC Hanoi branch of the bank and the service is astonishing. And then you remember it’s like that in the UK and you never blink because you are used to it. It’s just so noticeable in Vietnam. Wow, somebody actually got up immediately to attend to you.

Small businesses and the non-profit sector that volunteers get access to have little time for these niceties. Some might pay lip service as they need the appearance of good business practices in order to raise more international funding.

But don’t look for appreciation amongst staff. There is none given. Perhaps that is why there are so many Opening and Closing ceremonies to even the tiniest event where dignitaries speak and a meal is served. This is the communist idea of showing appreciation.

Strange that communism that was based on the premise that everybody, even the lowliest worker, is important should cut the concept of appreciation out of its peoples’ manifesto.

But maybe I’m missing the point, being so new to communism. We will see what else I learn as I go along.

A new volunteer, that is new to Vietnam, had just experienced her first two weeks at work in a fairly remote Northern Province city. It’s a new VSO partner so virgin territory so to speak.

She had had a busy two weeks being taken around and shown off as The Volunteer. Happens all the time in Vietnam. Volunteers are considered a sign of respectability. You got one of those? Good, you’re in.

During her recounting of her work she mentioned that she had brought more books than clothes and the University she is attached to grabbed them to copy them. She sort of wondered whether that might be legal or not. She’s from a European country.

The Canadian volunteer and myself, her audience, fell about laughing. What a question to have from a European person. Copyright infringement should surely be something everybody in the developed world knows about. Or so one would imagine.

What it did do though, this outrageous statement, make us reflect on how quickly we as volunteers could get corrupt ourselves - not that we necessarily consider the new volunteer corrupt I hasten to add. There was an exercise we did during our pre-placement training which made us reflect on when our moral barometer would kick in.

At what stage did we think the particular example of corruption was now wrong and what corrupt and illegal activity did we feel we wanted to allow because it would lead to doing some good.

At what stage would we consider the end would justify the means was the question we reflected upon. At the time we all had very strong ideas of right and wrong and where we would draw the line. Yet here was a volunteer two weeks into her placement and she was already breaking an international law.

But then you (and I) would be inclined to defend her action by saying that everybody copies books, music, designs and other easy to copy intellectual property.

Well exactly.

But what’s next? Do we shrug our shoulders when we see bribery openly discussed? Or do we buy into that too?

Let me give you an example. The Centre I work at trains up young disabled people in handicraft skills and at the same time sources business to give them employment should they not find employment with their new skills.

The Director has a great vision of building a model village at a more outlying area of Hanoi and has the land in mind, and in fact is renting it already, that would serve this purpose beautifully. Negotiations are quite far along to give her the land for the Centre, an NGO,. for an extensive lease period at little or no cost.

What is stalling the process? A bribe so large that she just doesn’t have the money for it. And what’s more, we have an interested donor to pay for the buildings.  What do you do? Do you find a donor to pay for the bribe?

Do you invent a project so that you can get the money to pay the bribe? Do you even know if this is the last bribe or are there more to come?

And what makes this situation any different to many others worldwide? It’s just the bribe that looks different surely. In the USA you might need that amount of money to pay for a lobbyist.  Actually probably a lot more!

In South Africa a decent sized motor vehicle usually does the trick. In fact talking moral issues here. here’s another one for you. Should BMW allow it’s cars to be bought for bribery purposes? Good question isn’t it?

So where do you think you would draw the line? And at what stage, and with what humanitarian outcome at stake, would you bow to the dirty tricks the world constantly dishes up to us? Got you scratching your head, I would imagine.

With other words go to church on a Sunday morning, a Shul on a Friday evening or a Mosque at any one of the five times per day and at some time during your visit you will be told how to behave and what of your behaviour is to be considered a sin.

In fact the Christian churches even take it a step further. They tell you that you are born a sinner and that you need somebody in the form of Jesus Christ to have died for those sins.

The Jews and Muslims go as far as dictating what foods to eat and when you may eat and drink during holy days. With other words there are a bunch of people, mostly men, who have taken it upon themselves to determine how their followers should behave.

It is therefore with some disdain that one reads about the Catholic church in Ireland now admitting to and apologising for hiding the sins of their representatives for over a quarter of a century. In this instance it’s about the cover up of pedophile priests.

This is the same church that tells its congregation that divorce is a sin and that birth control is evil. Using a condom, even in an area where the spread of HIV/AIDS is a possibility, is also a sin.

Of course the only reason why the church has now decided to apologise is because a damning report that exposes the extent of the abuse of children and the cover up has just been published.

It might be an idea in retrospect that the Catholic church and other institutions of religion guilty of similar offenses should get their  houses in order and to do this before telling their followers how they should interpret the words of their God and the ‘laws’ they need to adhere to.

The sum of money involved is a staggering R27 billion. Even for the slightly mickey mouse aspect of the South African currency, this is still a fair amount of shekels. And all of it, it seems will be streaming into South Africa. And not only that, it will be streaming into an area that is truly desperate for investment money that is the Eastern Cape.

Although this export deal will be running over a few years, it should still be celebrated for it’s sheer size and the MD of VWSA is to be congratulated for signing it.

What did make me hesitate somewhat was the fact that according to the said same article it states that this staggering amount of money will lead to creating 685 direct jobs by June 2010.

Of course, one would I suppose have to count how many jobs will be created in the manufacturing industry that will be supplying Volkswagen with materials, components and other products and services with other words indirect jobs.

Still, it seems a huge amount of money coming into the country with this contract and the spin-off in terms of jobs at Volkswagen SA is a mere few 685 jobs. One could understand some folk asking the question whether this huge effort is worth it.

Wouldn’t it have been a lot more cost-effective to provide 685 entrepreneurs with seed money to start their own businesses? It would also mean that after 6 years when this mammoth contract has been completed that the 685 employed folk might not be at risk of losing their jobs.

One of the problems with the motor industry has been the fact that workers have been at the beck and call of the factories. No job security so to speak. And there are no major skills to be learnt that might qualify workers to find employment somewhere else.

After all you will be expert in bolting on one set of nuts to one part of the vehicle. Hardly qualifies you to find work anywhere else. Feast or famine. That’s what it brings to an area. When things are going well in the factory the folk can eat. If not, everybody starves.

But then I have to admit that current economics aren’t making sense to me. I still don’t understand how CEO’s of big investment companies are getting huge bonuses even though they didn’t exactly post huge profits in 2008.

Same sort of numbers really as the above motor industry story. Billions coming in, and very few ordinary folk benefitting. Just the fat cats getting fatter. Is this how it’s always going to end up?

It’s heavy going, frustrating and it knocks ones self-confidence right out of its comfortable spot. How can I be so stupid is the constant reminder as I struggle to remember the most basic words and concepts. It is very humbling.

But more than any of the above there has been something that came to me recently. In fact it was a strange place to have an aha moment. On the bus, which in Vietnam is an experience all on its own, I had a flash of insight.

It was a really low key moment actually. I was trying to think of some Vietnamese word. A friendly youngster had struck up a conversation with me. They love doing that here. Vietnamese so want to practice their English skills. So any foreigner will do and they happily engage you to chat.

During the course of the conversation I wanted to try out a smidgen of Vietnamese just to show that I am trying to make an effort to learn to communicate. Not that this is what he was looking for. He just wanted to speak and hear English.

In the middle of my fumbling around for a word, I suddenly found myself saying ‘sì‘. I have no idea where that Italian word had come from. I was trying my luck with Vietnamese! But my brain, fumbling around for a ‘foreign’ word had latched onto another ‘foreign’ word that was totally inappropriate.

I was absolutely amazed. Where on earth did that come from. After all I can, by now any way, speak more Vietnamese than I can string Italian words together. All I can think is that during this moment of stress when my brain was scrambling around for a word I had a short circuit. My brain blew up and produced something totally incorrect .

Wow. So that’s what happens when we put ourselves under stress and try and produce an answer or response to a situation. We get garbage out. Or at least it’s possible that we get a totally wrong answer.

In my case, the ‘sì‘ was so obviously wrong that it was easy for me to realise that my brain had short circuited. Now imagine if the answer is totally wrong but it’s not as foreign as an Italian word. Maybe it’s something that you can still understand. But it’s still totally wrong.

My question is then, how often do we as people get some weird answer that our brain pushes up for us to examine. Yet the answer could be totally wrong because our brain has just gone off the rails not being able to cope with all the stimuli it’s getting at that moment in time.

For instance think of what happens during a heated argument. Maybe your brain, during the course of the battle,  provides you with a conclusion that is totally wrong. A kind of ‘sì‘ moment. And you totally misunderstand what has been said. Yet you could believe it if it isn’t quite as foreign as a ‘sì‘ when looking for a Vietnamese word.

Or what about at work where you presumed something that you found to be totally incorrect a little while later. And you have no idea how you managed to be so wrong. Yet, it might have been that it happened during a stressful moment and your brain switched circuits.

If it can happen trying to find a Vietnamese word during an easy conversation, then surely our brains can very easily ‘lead us up the garden path’ at other times when we put our mind under pressure to come up with an answer.

Maybe the brain even works like that. If it can’t find the right answer it throws up something just to make us happy that we have an answer.

It does put a question mark as to how rational we as human beings are. Possibly most of the time we are reacting to a bunch of rubbish that our brain is producing. And rather than knowing it’s all wrong we think it’s the gospel truth. Oh dear. Can you imagine how often we could be wrong and not even know it.