Thursday, January 10, 2008

Obesity a serious threat

Obesity is at epidemic levels in the United States, and with the spread of Western culture it is fast becoming a global problem. It is estimated that over 300 million people are overweight, worldwide; and that number is rising. When I go around in my neighborhood I find many people irrespective of age – from a 7-year-old kid to a 70 year old are obese.

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the United States makes obesity a leading public health problem. The United States has the highest rates of obesity in the developed world. From 1980 to 2002, obesity has doubled in adults and overweight prevalence has tripled in children and adolescents. From 2003-2004, "children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years, 17.1% were overweight...and 32.2% of adults aged 20 years or older were obese." The prevalence in the United States continues to rise.

I started thinking how it would be if the same rate of oversization of US continues. It is shocking. Nearly one fourth of the adults in the United States are obese.Awareness of these health issues can help in understanding why it is important to maintain a healthy weight. After all, if you know what being overweight can do to your health, then you have more reasons to maintain an ideal weight.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Father Of Modern Management - Peter F Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in November 19, 1909 and died in November 11, 2005. He was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. Peter Drucker made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the few writers who predicted the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.

Drucker in 1937, moved to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a freelance writer and business guru. In 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. Drucker came to California in 1971, where he developed the country's first executive MBA program for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University. The university's management school was named the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in his honor in 1987. He taught his last class at the school in the Spring of 2002. Drucker died November 11, 2005 in Claremont, California of natural causes. He was 95.

U.S. President George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Drucker on July 9, 2002. He was the Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Leader-to-Leader Institute, from 1990 through 2002. His most controversial work was on compensation schemes, in which he said that senior management should not be compensated more than twenty times the lowest paid employees. This attracted criticism from some of the same people who had previously praised him. Mr. Drucker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1996.