this session. This is an NPTEL lecture on supply chain digitization. This particular lecture is going to talk about supply chain design and operation strategies. I will be touching upon a few of the elements of supply chain strategy that are important and operation strategy that are important. A brief introduction about myself. I am Professor Sushmita Narayan Aghalaya. I am a faculty in the operations and supply chain management area at the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai. So, along with my two colleagues, Professor Priyanka Verma and Professor Debra Pratadas. We will be taking these sessions on supply chain digitization. Now, this particular topic for today which is on operation strategy and design strategies. It is what we call as a high level topic in supply chain management. It is an important aspect of supply chain management and operations management because it determines a lot of activities that a firm is going to take up as it proceeds along the way with respect to its business, with respect to its processes, with respect to managing products, managing employees, so on and so forth. Now, if we were to consider this particular topic, obviously we want to think why is this such an important topic for us. So, as a part of my session overview, I am going to be covering some aspects of this with respect to an introduction to supply chain operations strategies, where we will first try to link it with corporate and other functional strategies. And then we are going to look into an interface between operations and finance and how it is an important aspect of consideration when we are trying to design strategies, when we are trying to implement strategies. So, we will begin with the first aspect which is the introduction to supply chain design and operation strategies. The first and foremost question that you know any firm would like to think about is we talk about so many strategies when it comes to the operations of a firm. So, why only operation strategy? Why not any other strategy? So, the first question that would come to our mind is why should a firm have a supply chain or operation strategy in the first place? What is the necessity for having this strategy in the first place? We need to understand that a firm has many functions that are going to be a part of its operations. It is going to be involved in marketing, it is going to be involved in finance, it is going to be involved in production, advertising, management of human resources. So, there are various dimensions to any firm or any organization, be it for profit, be it not for profit. Irrespective of all of these every firm is going to have some kind of an overarching strategy called as the corporate strategy or the business strategy. The corporate strategy or the business strategy essentially determines what kinds of products and services a firm is going to provide, what kind of markets it is going to be functioning in, whether it is going to be functioning in local markets, whether it is functioning in global markets, whether it is looking at price conscious consumers, whether it is looking at a very niche clientele of its products and services and whether it is even going to be functioning as a pure product oriented firm or a service oriented firm, all of these elements are part of what we call as the corporate strategy of the firm. So, we can have extreme levels to this as well. A firm might decide that it is only going to produce one type of a product and sell it in the market and that is going to be its core identity. On the other hand, a firm might decide to be in several different businesses. It may be in FMCG products, it may be dealing with automobile sector, it may be dealing with the steel sector and at the same time it would be dealing with both domestic as well as international markets as well as international vendors and clientele. Now as we can see, this is the first and foremost step that an organization needs to really think about when it is developing some kind of a business or corporate strategy. In this strategy, somehow we also need to look at the role of how we implement the vision and mission that is going to be part of the strategy. How do you ensure that you are going to supply products to a market? How do you ensure that you are going to manufacture products as per the customer requirements? How do you ensure the products that are going to be supplied also have an after sales service provided to them? How do we go about doing all of this and is this really important for the organization to really think about? So in essence when we talk about supply chain or operation strategy, it is looking at execution of the corporate strategy in some form on the ground level. And in essence what we mean is the supply chain or operation strategy is essential and it is required to implement the corporate strategy of the firm. So the firm has decided that it has to produce these kinds of products, these kinds of services, it has to function in these kinds of markets and the operation strategy is going to help achieve that particular goal. Now in other words, if we were to think about it in more layperson terms, the supply chain or operation strategy determines how the corporate strategy is going to be achieved or implemented and this is as I am mentioning over here, it is a continuous process. So why do we think this is a continuous process? A firm is not going to be functioning only for a day or for a week, it is going to function over a long period of time that is part of its vision and mission. It is going to last for let us say a few years from now on. So it is going to have certain long-term goals and ambitions. At the same time, it is going to be functioning in a dynamic market where customer profiles are going to change over a period of time. There are going to be external forces with regulatory forces or environmental aspects. All of these aspects are going to bring in a lot of different kinds of constraints as well as opportunities for the firm. If the firm has to really think about staying on course and trying to achieve its targets of supplying to a specific market or working with a certain kind of clientele, then it has to also manage all of these dynamic elements. The operation strategy is going to help that particular company or that firm or organization to manage all of these dynamic elements as it proceeds with functioning through these markets and through these industries. That is why when we speak about the operation strategy, it is not a one-time exercise that is going to be carried out. It is a strategy that is revisited year on year sometimes even once or twice a year. As a result of this, it is an important facet of consideration when we are looking at how the company is going to function over a long period of time. So, let us take an example just to showcase how the corporate strategy and the operation strategy are actually going to be linked or connected with each other. So, this is an example that I have picked up. It is a very simple example or a simple scenario that I have brought forward. Let us say that we have a firm which wants to supply a standardized FMCG product. Now, what do we mean by FMCG product? FMCG product stands for fast moving consumer goods. So, when you are going to go to the marketplace and you want to purchase let us say soaps or shampoos, these are products that are being regularly used by consumers. On the other hand, you might not be purchasing a car on a daily basis. This is a product that you would purchase once in maybe 10 years or 5 years depending upon your income status, depending upon your choices and preference. But on the other hand, an FMCG product let us say soaps, shampoos, grocery items, products that we are going to consume in cooking, products that are going to be used in healthcare, you know daily essentials that we require. These are products that are sold on a continuous basis in the market. And if you go to any retail store, whether it is a Kirana store or whether it is let us say part of a retail chain, you are going to see these products on the shelves and you can easily pick these products and you can purchase these products very quickly.  So, in such a kind of scenario where you are trying to bring in a product and sell it in the market and you want to ensure that it is going to be a fast moving product, one of the things that you would like to look at is whether this product should be extremely different from what is there in the market or something which is very similar to what consumers use. So, if you were to bring in a shampoo, a product into the market, you would like to bring in a product that is acceptable to consumers right. And that is why I am talking about a standardized FMCG product, a typical shampoo product for example, is a standardized product and it is appealing to let us say price conscious consumers. So, these are consumers who are very much interested in purchasing this product, but at the same time these consumers are also very sensitive to the kind of price you are going to place on this product when you sell it in the market. Even slight differences or variations in price, the consumers may choose to either switch to a different brand, they might not purchase your products, they may never purchase your products if they think that your product is too expensive for them. Now, price conscious consumers we need to keep in mind are not necessarily those consumers who are not of high income status, even high income status consumers can also be price conscious right. So, when you think about such a product you are bringing in a product which is extremely standardized, something which is acceptable to most of the population in the demographic of interest for you. Let us say you are talking about a specific region, let us say the north of India or south of India and you are trying to appeal to a consumer base that is price conscious. If this is what you are trying to achieve as part of your corporate strategy or business strategy, you have to think about what are the implications that it brings to your firm in terms of how you need to start planning your resources, how you need to think about positioning this product in the market so on and so forth. One of the direct implications that we can think about is in terms of what kind of profitability that we could we could expect from this particular product. One of the direct implications that we can think is if I am trying to sell a product to price conscious consumers and it is a standardized product meaning it is not extremely unique or different from others, there is a good chance that there are many other products in the marketplace that are going to be similar to this product and are also going to be priced somewhere around this price that you are placing on your product. In order to exist in this marketplace, in order to really exist in this marketplace or function in this marketplace, you would want to ensure that you have positive profit margins that means you are able to recover your costs that were you know incurred when you are trying to manufacture the product, market the product, distribute the product so on and so forth. And you would try your best to lower the costs and you would also try your best to increase the volume of product that you are selling. So, when I say volume, it means the number of units that you are going to sell in that marketplace. So, these are some of the primary implications. I am not saying that this is something that we can generalize to every company, but this is a typical scenario that we could expect when we are trying to supply a product to a price conscious consumer base. So, now let us look at it step by step. What would be the implications of having you know such kind of products to be supplied and what implication does it have on various strategies across functions. So, if you were to think about it the first one is in product design and R and D itself. If I were to consider trying to you know bring in a product to a price conscious marketplace, I would want to see to that I am also able to lower my manufacturing costs right. So, I would want to see to that my unit manufacturing costs that is how much I am going to incur per unit should be as low as possible. So, that I can actually gain positive profit margins right. So, for this purpose we would start looking at it from a design perspective or an engineering perspective. And we would start looking at how can we design the product such that when I am going to really produce or manufacture this product, I am not going to incur very high cost. So, this is designing for the marketplace that is of interest to us. So, when we look at the technical specifications of the product, we might try to use let us say recycle materials instead of virgin materials. Recycle materials have already been recovered from other used materials in the past. Let us say it is recycled paper or plastic and these will be less expensive when compared to virgin materials. Not always the case, but there is a good chance this is going to occur specifically if it takes more effort to use or to create virgin materials in the first place. So, we might make a choice on the kind of material that we are going to use when we manufacture this product. So, this could be one implication. So, one of the implications that I am talking about is from a design perspective where we are going to make a conscious choice of choosing materials that can lower the cost of our manufacturing. Now, remember we are choosing these materials and we need to ensure that these materials give us the same functionality that was there in the product with virgin materials and with recycled materials. In the sense the consumer should not be driven away from a product simply because it is made of recycled materials right. Now, in the same way this could be one example it is not again it is not a hard and fast requirement that we should be following this particular structure because sometimes even recycled materials can be more expensive if the cost of recovering, if the cost of recycling are very high, if the technology costs are very high recycling itself may be more expensive and we may move then to virgin materials. The other alternative that we could think about is if we are again trying to lower our manufacturing cost should we be using very unique or customized materials in our manufacturing should the design of the product be extremely unique or customized. We are talking about selling a shampoo bottle or shampoo product in the marketplace should be really look at making the color of the shampoo extremely unique something which is not at all available in the marketplace. If we were to do this then definitely it would attract the consumer for sure, but at the same time in order to bring in this new color or new tint or dye within the shampoo we may need to invest in additional resources and we may need to find additional suppliers who would perhaps be not located very close by to the location of manufacturing, who would also have may be limited access to dyes etcetera. So, as a result of this what would occur at the end of this exercise would be that the cost of bringing in this unique color or dye or tint to the shampoo is going to increase the cost of manufacturing. So, instead at the design level we may want to take a decision that we use standardized components or materials something which is regularly available in the marketplace and this is something that we could expect considering the fact that we are also looking at a product that is regularly used by the market by the marketplace. So, for example, if we were to think about shampoo colors we would be looking at yellow, pink or white colors which are very common very rarely you might find a fluorescent color to the shampoo right. So, it is easier for us to procure materials which are used by other competitors or other companies as well. This is going to help us lower our cost of manufacturing because it is easier to procure it is readily available in the marketplace. So, at the design level we make this conscious choice that we use standardized components of materials. Now, this is in the case of a shampoo product, but even if you were to take the case of let us say electronics or you know furniture items we see this kind of trend which occurs when companies try to reduce their cost of manufacturing. They first look at the design stage itself and they think about can I bring in some kind of modularity to the system? Can I bring in some kind of standardization such that components that are readily available in the marketplace can be assembled to create a unique offering for the consumer. So, this is not something which is very uncommon, it is actually very commonly done at the design stage in order to lower unit manufacturing costs. So, this was one example in which we are able to attack the design stage itself. Now, at the same time we may be interested in other aspects also. You have designed the product such that it appeals to your cost aspects which is it appeals to lowering your cost, but at the same time we need to ensure that the consumer who is going to purchase is also going to be willing to purchase such a product. It should not look like that the product that you have created is very expensive, it might drive away the consumer if he thinks that the product is very expensive. So, we also think at the design stage can we design the product or the packaging such that it targets the price conscious consumer. So, something which is very popular in India is the concept of using sashes which is very popular in remote locations or rural areas or with people who have low income status who are not able to afford very expensive products, but they still want to use the product. Sashes are very common you are you see this quite commonly with shampoos, you can purchase the shampoo in a large 1 liter 1 and a half liter bottle or you could make the choice of purchasing a sachet of shampoo. So, a bottle product 1 1 and a half liter is something that would be used by a family right and whereas, a sachet is something that is going to be used by an individual. It is very common in India we have seen these examples where even for a family consumers may purchase several sashes several 1 rupee sashes which you might see it in the marketplace and they are actually going to extract the shampoo and create their own bottle. So, now we have to take a call in such a marketplace the consumer is naturally inclined to not buy a bottle because they feel it is very expensive they would be very willing to purchase a sachet. Now, the few reasons for this when you are purchasing a bottle product you are also going to be paying for the bottle itself whereas, the cost of a sachet is not much and hence it is going to be much affordable for a price conscious consumer. So, we might want to think about looking at a mix of such product units for the same kind of shampoo it is the same product that we are selling it is the kind of packaging that we are trying to play around with in order to see that we attract the cost conscious consumer. So, looking at the marketplace and by understanding the marketplace we might want to see how much proportion of the products should be actually packaged as sashes and how much proportion of the products should be actually packaged as bottle products right. Now, these are what we call as design level you know strategies that can be carried out and they can be implemented in order to lower the costs of manufacturing and also to attract the right kind of consumer base. We might want to consider even implications for advertising and marketing how can you price the product so, that it can be affordable to the price conscious consumer it should appeal to the price conscious consumer. A very common strategy that is used especially in retail chains is to not vary the price of the product too much in the marketplace. If you were to visit any retail chain you would observe that the price of the product is more or less the same every day and you might even see the same kind of discount being offered on a daily basis. This will attract the customer because the customer sees that apart from the maximum retail price of the product in the channel that he is going to or she is going to purchase the product they can observe that the products are actually having low prices and some cost savings are being passed on to them by retail chains. So, this is a channel level decision that can be taken up on pricing. Now, again you want that you are going to sell large volumes of these products. So, how can we do this? One of the ways is to provide options for discounts and product bundling. Let us say you are going to sell only one unit of the product per day, but this is not large enough in terms of volumes. You want at least 10 units of the product to be sold per day. You can offer a product bundling strategy and you might say that this shampoo is going to be provided at a discount if you buy 10 units of it right. So, this is discount as well as bundling that you have provided. Now, this is a kind of decision that can be taken up at the advertising and marketing level. Now finally, let us look at what could be done at the level of operations. At the level of operations we are interested in how can we reduce the cost of operation? Reducing the cost of manufacturing was a design strategy or a design decision. We may be interested now that given that we have already decided what is a design of the product, given that we have already decided what is the price of the product and given that we have already decided how much volumes of the product we are going to sell or how many units we are going to sell, how can we further reduce the cost of operation? Here we would start looking at removing let us say duplicate processes, redundant processes. We might want to look at making best utilization of our resources. Let us say you are talking about delivering the products via vehicles or transporting them via vehicles. You might want to achieve full truckloads. You will negotiate with your vendors for lower purchase costs. You would start looking at reducing inventory through lean practices so on and so forth. At the same time your cost of operations may be very high because you are owning several assets. Let us say manufacturing equipment or vehicles. You might want to reduce all of this by reducing the ownership of these assets itself and hence you might look at the option of outsourcing. So, you can see here that for the case of a firm that is trying to sell a standard product in the market, what are the different kinds of strategies it could kind of adopt be it in design, be it in advertising or be it in operations. One of the final insights that we get from here is all of them are related to each other. Hence, when we are looking at supply chain design in operations which is over here, we cannot ignore the fact that it is going to be intertwined with what was the product design, how much we priced it in the market or how much do we plan to price it in the market and what are the kinds of operations that are going to be required in order to sell this product finally in the market. So, this was an overview or an example of corporate strategy and how it has implications across different functional strategies and how these are intertwined with each other. In the next session, we are going to look at what are the relationships between operation strategy and the financial strategy of the firm. Thank you.


The Power of Light, presented by Science at NASA. Crew members on the International Space Station, or ISS, can experience sunrises and sunsets in rapid succession. About 16 sunsets per day because the space station circles Earth once every 90 minutes. Most people function regularly on a 24-hour cycle known as a circadian rhythm. However, the space station environment creates a departure from the cycle of light and dark as astronauts are used to at home. A high workload, the need to work night shifts, the excitement of spaceflight, plus the unusual environment can disrupt astronauts' circadian clocks. These factors can combine to disrupt sleep, which can in turn affect performance. Being wide awake when they should be sleeping is in fact a long-standing challenge among ISS crew members. Studies of astronauts who flew between 2001 and 2011 on the space shuttle in 2006 through 2011 on the space station showed that astronauts slept considerably less in space than they did on Earth. About three-quarters of them reported using sleep-promoting pills during their six-month missions. Use of caffeine is also commonplace among ISS astronauts to fight off the daytime drowsies. But NASA is seeking a better way to solve the problem. The secret lies in light itself. It's known that the blue-enriched light emitted by our laptops can keep us awake at night. A new NASA study will investigate how to use that for the benefit of humankind and not just on the ISS. This light study, known as the lighting effect study, coincides with the lighting makeover on the space station. The fluorescent lights on the station are being replaced with a new system of solid-state lighting-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Not only are the LEDs more energy-efficient and safer, they can literally shed all sorts of light on the study topic. Brigham and Women's Hospital's Dr. Stephen Lockley and Thomas Jefferson University's Dr. George Brainard are the co-principal investigators of the lighting effect study. Lockley explains, light has a number of effects on our sleep and circadian rhythms, is a natural stimulant and can improve alertness and performance and also help reset the 24-hour clock when it gets out of sync. The human eye contains a light-sensitive protein called melanopsin, different from the rods and cones that we use to see which detects light in the eye and mediates these effects. Melanopsin is most sensitive to short wavelength blue light, and so by increasing or decreasing the proportion of these blue wavelengths in white light, we can enhance alertness or promote sleep, respectively. Lockley says, NASA has developed a multi-LED lighting system to take advantage of these light effects. The system can provide millions of different light spectra. We're not making the ISS into a disco, but we are going to use three different light settings. We'll use a general light setting that provides a good light to see by during normal work, a higher-intensity blue light-enrich setting that elevates alertness and can better shift the circadian clock when needed, and a lower-intensity blue wavelength-depleted pre-sleep setting to calm the brain and promote sleep. We will be studying the impact of these lights in future missions. Oh, you guys are so fancy. I think the technical term is light-functional checkout was successful, so congratulations to the light team. Results of the study are expected to help define guidelines for lighting protocols during future ISS and human space missions. Study results should make it clear exactly when and how to use these various settings of light intensity in spectrum. These results could also lead to Earth-based benefits, such as helping manage sleep patterns for shift workers, or even developing treatments for sleep disorders or jet lag. For more from the International Space Station, visit www.nasa.gov. For more news about the power of light, stay tuned to science.nasa.gov.


which has existed since at least 2004 and possibly as early as 2001. So leaving aside all the various troubling kind of racist overtones of the macro, as well as the issue of whether it's funny or not, it's extremely popular. And you're going to get raped is now this like catchphrase that's used in competitive and argumentative context. It shows up in a lot of places. So whether you like it or not, this is like, this is the major reference for the Edward macro. So this macro, these loves tenderly macro, it functions just like that you're going to get raped macro, and it doesn't function without that reference, right?  The subject of it is widely assumed to be homeless when you see people talking about the macro. And then love tenderly puts these assumptions in conversation with perceptions of Edward Cullen and Robert Pattinson, right? So most members of Twilight, when they were asked about it, agreed that Edward is abusive, and Robert Pattinson is homeless looking or a bomb in their words, right? Because they'll go to like press calls looking sort of uncountable. And these are like common complaints. This is not just on Twilight, right? Everybody who just likes twilightist themes says these things about Edward and Robert Pattinson. But the normal narrative that's being put out in the press and that people assume that twilight fans are into is that Edward is the perfect boyfriend, and Robert Pattinson is the heartthrob. So the cognitive dissonance is what's funny. And what you need to remember with this is that twilight members are behaving in many ways like fans, right? They're following obsessively everything that happens. There, I used that term. They're following everything that happens in the twilight books. They're following the actor's lives, et cetera. They just have a very different perspective on what is going on with this stuff. So the dissonance between the way that Edward is being portrayed here and the way that he's being portrayed sort of in the media is what gives the macro kind of an analytic punch. So by aligning these two things, whoever is looking at this macro is forced to think about Edward's actions in a new light. He isn't a literal racist in the books, right? He's just sort of creepy. But by aligning the idea of rape with being loved tenderly, the macro actually does make an argument.  The other thing about this is that the gaze functions really interestingly, right? So Edward is like looming and he's sort of like goofy and sort of menacing in this picture. But in the context of the macro, the viewer is given the power to say no, right?  Right? So the experience of reading a macro isn't complete until the viewer reacts, ideally with humor, right?  It may be a little bit of a stretch to bring the glasses and the douche into this, but I think that it's really valid because the point of this macro and many, many others like it is that they're challenging this expected gender role story of twilight with their laughter. So I'm going to really quickly sort of skim over the next part of my thesis in which I'm comparing these macros, which have totally been not dealt with in the literature in general, with sand bits which have been dealt with somewhat extensively. And this is actually a slide that is changing now. So sand bits and macros behave very similarly in some ways. They're both created in communities of interpretation and criticism. Communities develop methods of reading that are difficult for outsiders to comprehend, right? So if you see a sand bit and you've never seen a sand bit before, you don't know what it's doing. They can both serve as a way to mess with expectations about the male gaze. There's a lot of scholarship about that. The D in recontextualization of narrative are key components. There are some macros that take like an entire scene and recontextualize it with new captions. This last point actually has changed. Now I am working into my thesis that there are many there are many fanmids that are intended to be humorous, but they don't typically dealt with in the academic corpus. They haven't been talked about very much. And I think that there's a lot of reasons for that. I think there's a lot of reasons why things like macros, fanmids, or if we look more broadly, things like films, right? Songs that are like sort of parody but sort of just for fun that fans will sing that are based in the original the original story world. There's a lot of reasons why these things don't get talked about in the fan studies corpus very much. And I think that one of the reasons is the humor element, right? It's just plain difficult to talk about humor. As you guys probably noticed with me talking about the Edward macro, it's always either like too serious or too unserious for academic discourse. But there's another part of this which is that the fancultures that we usually study are female fancultures. And to quote Nancy Walker, humor is at odds with a conventional definition of ideal womanhood. Humor is aggressive, women are passive. The humorist occupies a position of superiority. Women are inferior. So now I want to illustrate this for you. I'm making this argument right that we're uncomfortable with the idea of finding women and this is part of why we ignore humorous productions by women. To illustrate this, the first American collection of women's humor was published in 1885. I bet that most of you didn't know that before 1885 there was a humorist that existed ever other than maybe Jane Austen. There were no collections of women's humor in English that I know of or that Nancy Walker knows of or that anybody I've read about knows of until 1976. And it was called Titters and Titters was subtitled the first collection of humor by women because the wit of women was so obscure. Furthermore, as late as the early 90s and possibly to this day, women did not appear in any major collections of significant American humor. Despite that, they're really prominent in humor scene. I mean like Dorothy Parker, you can list so many people from even just this century and yet they're not showing up in academic discussions of American humor. So I think that there's a good strong argument for the fact that they've fallen out of the academic discourse and so how do you start talking about funny female fans? Like where do you begin with that? But there's another reason that we might exclude humor from our discussion of fans.  So in fan cultures, Matt Hills, who's one of the major scholars who's writing about this right now, refuses to give a definition of fan but he privileges people who claim a fan identity and he assumes that the natural object of fan studies is self-identified fans. Cornell's San Vos, you can see quoted above, says that fandom is the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular text or narrative. And he describes the repeated consumption of any text as affection. An affection for the text. So Wallace seems to potentially include emotional investments that aren't totally positive. The rest of fans doesn't explore the possibility of frustrations and animosities towards a given text to write. He only looks at people who are like yeah, I love it. And humor you can see naturally kind of problematizes this because even the most good nature humor is poking fun at something. Even the most good nature humor is potentially, you know, saying, yeah, I'm not totally uncritical of this. How can you make a joke where there's no but of the joke? I guess it's possible but it's very hard. And this especially is problematized by things like the macros that Twilight is producing, which are also kind of biting commentary, or funny fanbids. Fanbids are traditionally understood as critique, but when they're funny it's like an extra level, like they're getting this joy and critique. And that's hard to deal with. How can you enjoy making fun of something so much and still be a fan? Is that even possible? And yet the people that I looked at in my astigraphic study of Twilight behave exactly like fans do. They look at everything that goes on in Twilight. They discuss the themes of it. They look at the actors. They follow everything they do. I found out more from them about what was happening in the world of Twilight than I did from the Twilight purely fan sites that I found. In my previous presentations about Jonathan Gray's ideas about fans which are representative of he claims that you have a nucleus which is the fan or the close reader and then you've got the non-fan which are like the electron that makes this nice little diagram of the atomic conception of fandom. And they're a step forward, right? You've now got a fan and you've got an anti-fan. Someone who hates something and they're in conversation with each other. But they're really too simplistic. And they're being taken up in wider conversation. A lot of people that I interviewed without any prompting identify themselves as oh, I'm a fan or oh, I'm an anti-fan. And this as I hope you can see, even if it is a step beyond like Hills or Sandvast saying that fans are self-identified fans who love the text, it'll buy opinions like Twilight still. It erases really complex effective engagement with texts and makes it hard for us to study critical practices like cracking serious jokes. I have considered suggesting a term that Twilight came up with which was LOL fan as in a fan who loves to make fun of something for the wills. But I think that would only mess this up even more, right? We're not going to get through this by creating more categories. Rather, I think we really need to rethink our concept of what we're studying when we're studying fans and people who are receiving a text. So my conclusions are that the term fan and the conception of my field as fan studies is deeply flawed for a variety of reasons. That Jonathan Gray's work to challenge this was a step in the right direction, but he doesn't go far enough in order to break down these artificial terms and instead be looking at the relationship of the reader to the text. That this is reflective of cultural biases against women's humor in particular and it also causes us to miss important cultural phenomena like macros and other fan's humor productions. Humor productions in general, really. It's not inherent to the way the field was constructed in its origins. Henry, for instance, talks about he talks about filks, he talks about fan humor. Ian Ahm initially did not even talk about fans in her son's work. She didn't use the term. Instead, she was focused on readers who had something to say about Dallas in her case. And it's easily runny. By commanding our gaze to all effectively engaged principle and interpretive communities that are based around popular texts and all their productions. So changing with focus from this idea of here is a thing called a fan to here is a relationship that some people have with the text. We want to study the relationship and not necessarily the person. I'm not saying. Of course, so the term fans studies is deeply flawed. What would you propose in this place? What's better? I don't know. This is a master's thesis. Let me do a sense of how that how we can circumvent kind of useful constraints. So I think the key for this I think the key for this is that fan studies is a term that's not actually like there's no program in fan studies that exists. But I know it's not cemented yet and I think what I'm really arguing against is cementing it as a field to say. I think that I'm arguing that it should be viewed I know that You criticized the analog for sort of talking about this as audience studies which I did not criticize the analog What was your comment about the analog was that she did a good thing by talking about it as audience studies. Okay, but is that the answer? I don't know if that's the answer because I feel like that's something that has I guess I I really don't know the answer to this. I think that audience studies is potentially good but I haven't I haven't I guess I just don't feel like I am in a position to say the key thing for me is that really the key point for me has been that fan studies is giving us blinders. I also wonder about audience studies because I feel like it suggests that we're looking at like the non-fans that Jonathan Gray is encouraging and I think that that's not the case I think the most people going to fan studies are interested in that aren't interested in the non-fans and that maybe audience studies suggest that there's a big broader I don't know. I'm not going I don't know the answer to that question. Okay. I want to follow up on that. I sympathize with the idea that if we focus too much on fan as a category of person that it can pull in a lot of directions and make it hard to see something and so I think the idea that to get through this or go to some next stage is very smart, very interesting and it's a question of sort of it seems to me so the answer to one of the ways to think about the answer to William's question is you know, is what are you trying to get to? Right. You're saying get through this and that's certainly true but what are we trying to get through and I hear a few things coming out and that thing's very provocative. One is a humor is very hard to deal with I'm not sure that no fans deal with humor I guess I was thinking of the football fans who put the bag over their head and I know it's different, I know it makes a lot of distinction and that's all fine but I guess it's still like it seems to me it's where you want to go with it and I do think it's interesting to say well it's about why it distracts us this term fan is that it makes it as if all fans somehow share the same kind of emotional attachment so then there's just category as a fan and you get in a certain kind of game and it seems to me you want to say that there's this more complicated relationship and I think this is always part of fans love and hate you know I do think that's part of being a fan in any situation maybe but that humor I think it's true humor is especially hard to talk about I mean I think there's something about academic discourse here that we gotta be so serious right we gotta wear all our clothes and you know these rules about what you can and cannot do during your talk I don't know if it's New Yorker question we'll get to that later so I guess that's my question that is so I'm going to totally agree with you so far but then the question is what would you want to do with it like where do you want to take this and say okay now this is I can't get to where I want to get to so I'm still having heard where you want to get to so one thing about this is that my thesis has seriously developed at first I was just doing a separate rapid study and there's even been like serious developments in my concept of the thesis like yesterday after it already made my thesis presentation so fortunately nothing that's going to work but but I think that for me the thing that I am really most deeply interested in that maybe I didn't fully express through this is it's a concern for the calcification of like which particular groups of fans that we are going to study so right there's this whole thing where we study people who write fan fiction you know we study people who are in this tradition of media fans and who are not quote fair old fans which is a term that some people will use for those who did not sort of come up through the star track to whatever you know and also you know for studying male fans we study certain behaviors of theirs and for studying female fans we study other behaviors that are theirs so when you bring up humor with football fans yeah there's a lot of stuff about men doing parody and most of that is not actually a conversation with people who would call themselves fan study scholars and there's I feel like there's all these calcifications that are existing and I would really like to or that are beginning to come to be and I would really like to sort of smash those down and I think that maybe the idea of audience study is where I want to go with this the idea that there are audiences that are here not in the way that Jonathan Gray is talking about them as inhabiting very set points but rather as as a more cited thing right as a more individual thing for each person a conversation away from the academic discussion because I know that your interest just knowing you are in both spheres and I'm wondering what the institutions of this work are for the people from using content as well as people in marketing yeah so I've been thinking about this a lot actually I know that you also know and one of the things is I think that people's perceptions of what a fan is who are in the sort of grid and entertainment world are very un-mixed right they're very much focused on the idea that fans are giving an adulation and completely love everything they do and I think that in recent years that's been challenged to some degree and people don't necessarily understand that even though they maybe are not purely loving everything we do that's not necessarily the end of the world right that you can look at reactions and be like okay here these reactions to my work some of them are good some of them are bad how can I slave to these to keep everybody interested I haven't gotten too far into that because I've been mostly focused on actually writing thesis but I'm looking forward to exploring that a little more and thinking harder about very controversial things like Twilight right where man all the people on Twilight went to see the Twilight movies and make fun of them in the theaters and man they were putting some more money in the pockets of the people who were putting on the Twilight movies so I think that it's an interesting way to go for marketing and for commercial applications but I'm sort of drawing my animal one and using humor I draw back to Mary Douglas to suggest that humor emerges when we have intensely contradictory ideas in our midst at the same moment and humor is the way we negotiate through those contradictions absolutely so it's not to think about the male fans for a moment historically there has been a discourse where the fandom has not written in academia about male fans using humor to negotiate knowledge based on the text and to signal their emotional distance from it as a way of negotiating what it means to be a fan and a male at the same time so the question traditionally that's opposed to the more immediately engaged female fans through romance or melodrama have been the dominant modes so I'm wondering how that gets complicated by this reading are the female fans simply adopting the male posture is it traditionally described or is there the intensity or ambivalence about closeness and distance or critical engagement and emotional investment that's very different from what's been characterized as male fans so I think that it depends on which specific group you're talking about I think that for the twilight group I would say yes it is the same impulse because because of the fact specific the text is so highly gendered and twilight fans are represented as so female and so incredibly irrational just every possible term that you can use for that I think that there really is something happening with the twilight fan group where they are both launched the text and absolutely have to somehow negotiate that I'm not a girl like that however the fans in any community which I'm also looking at I think is different in some ways the human standards are easily overlooked but many of them do speak to a closeness to the text that doesn't come up as much in twilight that is more mixed so I think that it's a really great insight and I think that both are true for different communities and I think that this just points back to why you can't say like and then here are wall fans right like why I can't just propose the category of wall fans who like to make fun of the text and like leave it there which would be very neat and let me tell you how much I would love to do that but I can't do that because different communities of fans are using humor as interacting with the text generally speaking I would say that the media has gotten nicer to fans in the time that I've been in fandom and I think that that is true so I guess I'm optimistic but then their coverage of twilight fans has been a throwback which is part of what interests me in it because it seems like fan communities were getting treated more and more reasonably even just from the time that I started becoming involved in Harry Potter fandoms now they're treated much more sympathetically but twilight fans are this real case where they're like back to all of the things that are you know back to describing all the scary things about fans back to the beetle maniacs back to you know all the stereotypes so I don't know what to say on that topic I think it probably is a little bit a little panic but I think it existed around the beetle maniac so that's good at least so I have a lot of evidence I have a question about corporeality corporeality so a lot of like you said beetle maniacs for example has a reference and a lot of this talk about how women relate to these media that they have an effect in relationship with is about yeah like this so like this is different and a lot of one of the ways this is different twilight is that these people are in a physical space screaming at an actual person I assume so what I'm curious about is if you have thoughts about the sort of interface between on the one hand this sort of intellectualized humor like you talked about all of the references that have to go to the macros in contrast to this kind of fan behavior which is not online and can it be done in a lull yes it can in fact twilight has done many things where they actually showed up to things that they knew it's a lot like right when anonymous comes and like you know live trolls somebody they'll do things like they'll organize like a twilight prom which is going to happen this is something that has actually legitimately happened Stephanie Meyer did throw a twilight prom that was for serious business so they'll show up to like a bookstore or whatever and have like their twilight prom in cosplay but in really ridiculous over the top ways and sometimes they'll do the thing where they somehow are embodying a macro or whatever so they'll show up in person and they actually do have a lot of physical meaning I was surprised when I started looking at the community I just didn't have time to talk about all this but a lot of them talk on the phone text message I actually interviewed some people in person who live in Boston and they were totally fooled with that it was a really interesting thing that people assumed that a community like this is going to be totally disembodied but in reality the twilighters were meeting up and were engaging face to face so I think that there is an important question about embodiment and like the way that people are talking about being embodied one other thing though is that I use this because it's nice to illustrate and it's hard to like just show a picture of a website and be like hey guys but these fans are probably also involved in online communities right so it shouldn't be you shouldn't even though the language of embodiment is used to talk about twilight and you shouldn't assume that that means that like the laughing fans are online and the serious fans are offline I guess I'm not thinking of them being like whether they're two different groups or not but thinking about like how and the expression even one of them would work differently because the online one seems very intellectual and referential and there's sort of you know the two kinds of humor this like belly left kind of humor and I expect that might map out whether they're in physical space or not it doesn't really seem to, I mean it seems like mostly they're translating the intellectual humor into some kind of a physical analog out of curiosity I mean I'm going to make a set of heuristic distinctions and I know they're all bound together but I'm curious about where your emphasis is within this so there's the community aspect it's embodied, it's corporal you're looking at it that's what you're doing research there's an identity issue where it's a highly effective mode you've got to really understand how people think and see themselves and there's maybe the issue of engagement, the activities the manifestations, the things that people do and they're all bound together but if you had to say like where your interest really is because this might a bit solve the problem of the reification of a social group as fans so this has really changed over the course of the thesis and I think that that's why there's some amount of confusion as to what my focus is because until very recently I was confused as to what my focus was but it really is about so in the thesis itself my focus is definitely on the productions of the community and doing close readings of a number of things like those macros and then I'm using the rest as as a scene setting as sort of showing like there's a lot more that we can do with this but here are the macros and the reason that I'm doing that is because that has been a traditional thing that people in fan sites have been doing right like they look at a fanfic and they're going to do some kind of a focus on this fanfic they're looking at a vid and they're doing a close reading of a vid I don't know if that actually answered your question but my brain's a little poor I guess this is kind of related to that question and maybe we can talk about this but the self-regulation of the group who seem to have focused mostly on and of course it's really interesting to sort of move the scale of the person and talk about the relationship between the person and the fact but thinking about are there any outliers or because you have to be in sort of whether an outlier data point but then also like maybe not because it's a self-regulation group but then of course there's a lot of deviance so how does it regulate everything it's like you stepped into girl world it really is so this is something that I had I really do not have time to talk about this in the thesis otherwise I would go way into this stuff right so there's all this really cool stuff that's actually happening with the relationships between people and so on but instead because I have only like 100 pages to write this in I've been focusing sort of on the things that they leave behind as they go through it but in my study man they will drum people out of the group and in fact there's like this whole language around what happens when somebody is starting to get too serious business or when somebody has gone too far and founded everybody right like there's these two ways that you can get drummed out of the spotlight group and they'll talk about how you can like you post that when is the term not flail flounce post so like when you've been drummed out of the group because everybody loathes you either because you're too serious business or because you're too making fun of things traditionally people will post a flounce post about like oh I really hate twatlight right and from their perspective they're like dude twatlight is full of horrible people who have just kicked me out by making my life miserable but everybody on twatlight finds this really funny and they'll make fun of the flounce posts how do you drive someone out basically being really mean to them and sending like by posting macros I mean you know by posting mean macros in context where they're going to be insulting and by posting animated gifs which I also didn't get a chance to talk about but there's like lots of animated gifs that they use to express emotions and hosting those like ones of people eye rolling on all your posts and so on so it really it's like stepping into middle school a little bit but it's very strongly regulated community internally would be an entire thesis talk about that so in the world are there any men on the community and what are their roles and how do they have to sort of negotiate that yeah so in my time on twatlight I encountered four men and two of them are boyfriends of people who are there and two of them are gay and the gay guys generally behaves like I hate making like general comments like this but when I interviewed them they were like yeah I totally have girls and the guys who were on there were just like I really like, I think they're funny they're hilarious, like these women are really funny and I like being here and my girlfriend's on here and she's really into it and so like it's fun for me to watch what's going on and it gives me an insight into the minds of women which I thought was sort of scary but so there were a very few but everybody in twatlight was very excited to have them there and was like you should go talk to the guy, he can give you his perspective you know but yeah internal polling was like you know 99% women and I have no reason to doubt that I mean I'm sure it's not a scientific example but I have no reason to doubt that the polls were not reflective of like the people who are boasting the most and so on because we should probably wrap up and she will be one


Oh, that hits where it hurts Hey guys, this is my review for a Manchester by the sea I know this review is like two weeks late, but I went to the theaters today and watched a few films and This was one that I really did want to see I had heard so much buzz about it And I totally understand why the first word that comes to mind when I watched this film was raw the amount of emotion the lingering shots the authentic sort of Atmosphere and dialogue between the characters was raw. It was so good It was life-like the funny thing is I've always kind of complained about certain films that are so lifelike so realistic It's like what's the point of watching it when you can see that in normal day There are a lot of realistic dynamics with this the film has a bit of a simplistic sort of story in the sense that it is What guy who finds out his brother dies and he has to deal with what to do with his nephew But there's so many more layers to that because of the past and the present When the future sort of aspects of their characters Casey Affleck is absolutely fantastic in this movie I couldn't believe that he could do any better of a role than he did in gone baby gone And he did in this film his role was so multi-layered so emotional and so Absolutely captivating the events that happen to his character both in the present and in the past are so layered and so Absolutely traumatic in certain senses that it's amazing how his character is still going and His interactions with people are reflects of what happened to him And he's just this he's kind of an asshole Because he can't really connect with people anymore because he does he can't he physically can't because of what's happened to him And when he tries to work with his nephew some of the interactions are comedic But they're also quite depraved and they're quite soulless at times And we see that it stops getting funny after a while and it's sad and it's it's emotionally turning This film was great all the way through despite the fact that this film was over two hours long I was in it the whole way through. I did not want it to end I just wanted to keep on sticking with these characters and everyone did a phenomenal job Not just Casey Affleck, but the kid Michelle Williams his brother the dad everyone in this film was so good I was amazed how well this film turned out the cinematography and how the shots were done is great The script is phenomenal. There are some very funny moments, but also the raw Emotionality really digs into you and you really feel for these characters in all honesty If had I watched this movie last year this movie would have been on my top five for sure Because I'm gonna give Manchester by the sea a seven out of seven now I'm letting you know don't walk into this movie and expect to come out feeling good because you don't This film hits you hard, but it hits you hard in all the right places anyway guys That's all for me. See you guys next time


Mentoring skills for managers is about how you, the person with more knowledge and skills, pass these on to team members who know less than you. Mentoring is an effective way to leverage your time and skills into the team you manage. i.e. rather than being limited to one pair of hands, you can create 5, 6, 7 pairs of hands or more. You and the team can add a lot more value to the company this way. Mentoring is also rewarding, satisfying, enjoyable and fun as you are building a close professional relationship with team members. Mentoring is not training, although there are many similarities. Mentoring is more like being a guide for the other person's learning and the relationship is a lot more two-way than training. Today we're covering, I personally think that investing in mentoring and coaching team members is one of the best investments you can make as a manager of that team. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in corporates and household names through to SMEs. As a line manager I spent around 40% of my time mentoring my direct reports, who in turn successfully delivered a huge number of projects and initiatives. This investment led to winning the best team award and coming runner up in the following year. If you are new to this channel, enhance.training shares, business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Before diving into mentoring skills for managers I'm going to quickly cover how mentoring helps team members and you. If you're going to invest your time in mentoring at work then you want to know it will be worth it for you personally and for your team. You can use mentoring skills to teach a team member on any subject that you know more about than them or help them build skills that you are better at than them. Great uses of mentoring include firstly to give team members direction or help them avoid wrong turns, secondly helping team members learn a specific skill or set of skills, third to pass on specific knowledge and life or professional experiences to them, fourth help tackle problems and work on problems together or to guide them through solving the problem. Both mentoring the team member to build their reputation and personal brand within the business, sixth help them navigate the personal relationships and politics of an organization and seventh provide career advice and guidance so they can move their career forward faster. There are so many ways you can help others learn what you know and what you do well. A mentoring relationship can be very much a two-way street. You can also learn a lot from those you mentor to. The benefits that you'll personally get from investing in building mentoring skills and spending their time to mentor team members include firstly improved individual performance, feeding into improved team performance, secondly a happier more motivated and valued employee, third stronger more positive relationships with your team members, fourth more ownership and accountability within the team, fifth less employees leaving the team and more wanting to join from other teams in the business, sixth passing on knowledge and skills to your successor so you can move your own career forward. As mentioned earlier using mentoring skills and investing your time mentoring is an effective way to leverage your time and skills into the team you managed. Upskilling the team keeps everyone's careers moving forward and creates more valuable staff members for the company, a win all around. Time and time again I have personally experienced the benefits of this investment with my team or my career and in terms of my satisfaction, happiness and motivation. If you want personal career progression make the time to mentor as many of your team members as possible. When starting to use mentoring skills for managers you are likely to realize successful mentoring needs time. If you want your investment in mentoring your team members to move the dial you need to invest a lot of time into it. This can be really tough when you have so much on your plate in the first place. Let me tell you about Dave. He took over a team of 35 staff and six direct reports. There was a lot that needed to be done by the team and it was impossible for Dave to personally get involved in more than a fraction of the work. The team members lacked the skills to deliver important results on their own. Rather than Dave rolling his sleeves up drinking a lot of coffee and working late every night he spent about half his week mentoring and supporting his six direct reports and insisted they spend some of their time mentoring their direct reports as well. And you might be thinking that 50% of Dave's time taken up in one-on-one meetings how on earth would Dave and the team get what was needed done? Dave realized that he needed to multiply some of his skills into his direct reports so that they could do more of the work that was needed. This meant more hands tackling the problems. His direct reports worked in the same way with their reports. The team delivered on 54 separate projects in that year many significant projects and that was over and above each person's day job. This is what you can achieve with a happy motivated team while constantly building the right skills within that team. So plan on investing a significant chunk of your week supporting your team members if you really want to see the benefits of mentoring in the workplace. Mentor each person face to face and in person as much as possible. A video called is a minimum where this is not practical. Set aside at least an hour a week per person to meet in private. Keep the mentoring time and place consistent each week. I would expect that you spend another hour or two in ad hoc meetings or helping with specific problems that come up. Successful mentoring takes a significant time investment on your part. Every minute is worth it. The third area when using mentoring skills managers is to set goals and build a plan. As a manager, aim to set expectations in your first mentoring meeting. You know how often you will have diarised meetings. When will the team member get your ad hoc advice? What is expected from each party, etc. This is really up to you and the team member to agree on. Next, set goals together. What is the purpose of giving mentoring from your side as a manager? Equally important, what does the team member want from it? Find out what their ambitions and longer term goals are? What skills and knowledge should you be transferring? When you have both agreed what the goals are, then I suggest you as the mentor start planning out how you're going to help your team member achieve those goals. If you don't create a plan, you'll have a lot of unstructured chats which don't move your team member towards the goals agreed. For your plan, think about first, you know what subjects you're going to cover and in which order. Secondly, what experience do they need to build these specific skills? Third, what projects are they involved in and what problems do they need to solve now? Fourth, what projects do I need to get them involved with? Fifth, which people should I help them build relationships with? Plan out how you're going to help get the best out of your team member through your use of mentoring skills. The fourth area of mentoring skills for managers is to be a cheerleader.  You build a positive mindset towards them, use positive language with them, encourage their efforts wherever you can and praise them for good decisions and actions. You want your team member to learn as quickly as possible, to improve as quickly as possible. There is no way this is going to happen if you're constantly pulling them up about all the mistakes they make, regardless of how well intentioned your comments are. Off a lot of encouragement. Learning is hard work. Changing is hard work. As a mentor, your job is to help them overcome any personal resistance they have. Tell them what they have done well and explain why they have done that well. Praise their good choices and good behaviors in preference to praising natural talent or things they can already do well. Positive reinforcement really works. And the more you praise choices and behaviors that you want to see, the more they will do them. Make your feedback praise and compliments specific. Don't say, well done. That was great. Say, I was really impressed you chose to really push into the detail and kept looking at different angles. Doing so gave you several really valuable insights that I don't think you would have got to otherwise. Those insights have helped us add £40,000 in sales to the account in the first month of using your insights. Really well done. Remember to keep a team member happy, you need to encourage and praise them at least three times more than you criticize. With mentoring at work, be their personal cheerleader and encourage them to learn and change. The fifth area of mentoring skills for managers is how to give useful feedback to steer and teach. A lot of managers and team members are afraid to get really honest feedback. They're worried about offending the other person, damaging relationships and making their own lives more difficult. So instead, they water down their feedback or shy away from making it specific. If you want to successfully mentor team members to help them improve, you can't afford to give feedback that is not useful. Useful feedback in my view is, firstly, intended to steer direction, action and behavior. Secondly, to explain why a particular choice was not as good as others that could have been made, i.e. giving instruction and teaching. Third, feedback needs to teach to give the other person better tools, approaches and skills. Fourth, feedback should be specific with examples and facts where possible. Fifth, feedback should be focused on choices, action and behavior, not on the person themselves. For example, you don't say how you dealt with the James situation was a bit of a disaster, which conveys almost nothing useful and is far from encouraging. How is the other person going to learn from this? You should say something like, the way you dealt with James, you're bluntly telling him that his work was not up to standard and then explaining in detail how he needed to change what he was doing was better than not saying anything. You're well done for having the courage to have that difficult conversation. From your description of James's subsequent behavior and body language, I suspect he is unhappy with the conversation. Would you mind if I walked you through a different way of approaching the situation? And note, that's asking for permission to provide an alternative.  You could finish with try this approach at the next opportunity and let's discuss how you feel this went in our next session. Comparing the approach taken to alternative approaches gives you a lot more scope to praise the parts done well and also teach or encourage an approach that should work better based on your experience. When giving feedback, you can't afford to beat around the bush or water down the feedback. What you do need to do is to make sure your feedback is kind, considerate and useful. You can still be pretty direct while doing this. Make your feedback honest, specific and useful to the other person as much as possible. And sixth, I wanted to share 10 skills to focus on when developing mentoring skills for managers. This list is not exhaustive. I think these skills are a great place to start building the essential mentoring skills for managers and to teach and support your team members as effectively as possible. In my view, 10 essential mentoring skills are firstly empathy, you're putting yourself in their shoes and thinking through what they might be thinking and feeling. Secondly, self management, your ability to control your reactions, body language and manage your emotions. Third, building trust and essential skill to build any relationship. Fourth, observation skills. So you have a better idea of what the other person is thinking and feeling. You can then adjust your mentoring approach for this specific situation. Fifth, planning, which increases the chances of achieving goals and doing it faster and with less effort. Sixth, active listening skills, pretty essential for coaching and mentoring. Seventh, communication skills, being able to effectively explain and teach knowledge and skills to a range of different people. Eighth, encouraging and praising. Surprisingly, few managers are good at this. So do practice praising and encouraging others until it's second nature. It is a great skill to have. Nine, giving honest, useful feedback. There is an art to giving honest, direct feedback without offending the other person. Practice, practice, practice. And ten, analytical and problem solving skills are very useful when working on problems together or when you are guiding them through issues that they are facing. Work on improving these skills so you can use mentoring skills for managers very effectively with your team members and help the team deliver more, which of course helps you too. So in summary, we've gone through different aspects of mentoring skills for managers. Why mentoring skills are very useful. Four key areas to deliver effective mentoring at work and touched on 10 skills that I think are pretty essential for delivering effective mentoring in the workplace. Enjoy developing and using mentoring skills with team members. Please leave any questions you have in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.