Hyper­par­ent­ing is also known as “heli­copter par­ent­ing” in some cir­cles. It is the term for par­ents who pays extremely close atten­tion to his or her child’s or children’s expe­ri­ences and prob­lems, par­tic­u­larly at edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions. They are so named because, like heli­copters, they hover closely over­head, rarely out of reach, whether their chil­dren need them or not. In Scan­di­navia, this phe­nom­e­non is known as curl­ing par­ent­hood and describes par­ents who attempt to sweep all obsta­cles out of the paths of their chil­dren. It is also called “over­par­ent­ing”. Par­ents try to resolve their child’s prob­lems, and try to stop them com­ing to harm by keep­ing them out of dan­ger­ous situations.

We’ve been talk­ing about the prin­ci­ples of the book good to great in our com­pany the past few months. There cer­tainly are rea­sons why some com­pa­nies are great (or world class), and why some com­pa­nies stay in the dol­drums. It will cer­tainly have some­thing to do with the company’s tri­pod: peo­ple, work envi­ron­ment and processes. It will have some­thing to do with the com­pany cul­ture and the pur­suit of excel­lence of its lead­ers and its people.

WeFol­low is a user pow­ered Twit­ter direc­tory. The site was launched by Digg founder Kevin Rose. The site is easy to use and under­stand. Each cat­e­gory on the web­site is a tag such as gar­den­ing, sports and knit­ting. Twit­ter users in each of the cat­e­gories are ranked by the num­ber of fol­low­ers they have.

Remov­ing scratches from sun­glasses can be a tricky task.You have to real­ize that dif­fer­ent brands of sun­glasses use dif­fer­ent types of pro­tec­tive coat­ing. There is no one rem­edy and you should be aware that some might do more harm than good.

I wrote this sev­eral years ago, in the Jesuit Retreat House called Mirador, in Baguio City.

I remem­ber it was a gloomy after­noon, and was about to rain.

I remem­ber being awed by the dogged­ness of the spi­der. How could he con­tinue build­ing his web, know­ing that it will prob­a­bly just be washed out by the rains? Per­haps, he didn’t know? Or per­haps he was just stub­born? Or maybe that’s what spi­ders do.