Tuesday, February 06, 2007

nadio machiavelli

here's an email i received a while ago..it was in regards to an MBA assignment that my group had to submit.
NB: Would anybody pls inform me, Is Nadia a prime Minister of any country where we live as illiterate people or she is the CEO of any organization where we are serving as 3rd / 4th graded employer? She should realize that, If we are not so, then she failed to show minimum courtesy in her last mail.
what i wrote in my last email was that if he didn't submit his portion, in all fairness, we would take his name off the group list. wasn't that courtesy enough, considering he hadn't done a single thing? he submitted his work 2 days later, 1 weeks after it was due, and he wrote about BMW. He obviously didn't read the case study, since it was actually about Mercedes!! When the assignment was over, he wrote an email to us, saying that he'd like to pull out of the team. Nobody bothered to reply his email.

Lesson learned: act like an illiterate, you get treated like an illiterate.

I know what i did sounded cruel, but here's something i read in Machiavelli's The Prince:
''A Prince should therefore disregard the reproach of being thought cruel where it enables him to keep his subjects united and loyal. For he who quells disorder by a very few signal examples will in the end be more merciful than he who from too great leniency permits things to take their course and so result in chaos and bloodshed, for these hurt the whole state, whereas the severity of the Prince injure individuals only.''
sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind. :-)