Why pure devotees are seen to "suffer" ???

(1) First is because the Lord wants their glories to be known widely because when there is suffering in the lives of pure devotees, they become more attached to the Lord and their glory shines even more. Also, by their example during suffering, the conditioned souls can learn and understand from the example of the pure devotees, how to react to suffering in their lives by surrendering to the Lord even more during those times.

(2) Secondly, the Lord wants to stop unqualified, materialistic and egotistic people from approaching and disturbing the pure devotee. Thus He deliberately puts that pure devotee in some distress so that materialistic people think that this pure devotee is an ordinary person and they don't go and disturb his or her bhajana. And thus the pure devotee can relish the Holy Names peacefully in the association of other sincere devotees and disciples.

(3) The third reason is an internal reason. Feeling separation (which may look like suffering externally but actually is extremely blissful within) from the Lord increases and heightens the intensity of the pure devotee's love for the Lord and that makes the pure devotee even more quailified to directly participate in the Lord's pastimes. It also shows to the world the ultimate nature of pure love which is that a pure devotee cannot even live for a moment without the Lord.
For all these three reasons, pure devotees are sometimes seen to externally "suffer". But internally they are experiencing the highest bliss of pure love for Lord Gaura Krishna during these times.

What is Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a framework that can be used by businesses to assist in finding a proper balance between financial and strategic controls. The scorecard consists of four perspectives, each of which is essential to a firm's success. These four perspectives include: the financial, customer-focused, internal business processes, and learning and growth perspectives.
In each of these, the firm establishes a limited number of specific criteria relevant to its industry and business model that will allow it to measure performance in a given area. Then, the firm regularly reviews its progress against the benchmarks it has established.

First, the financial perspective helps firms to look at what shareholders seek, ie, firm profitability. In this area, firms measure their progress against earnings-per-share, return on invested capital, cash flow and other finance-orientated targets.

From the customer-focused perspective, the organisation assesses its relationships with its customers to help ensure that it keeps in focus the needs of those who will bring it future profitability. Criteria for measurement might include the customer retention rate, percentage of on-time deliveries or the number of co-operative marketing agreements with customers.
The internal business processes perspective helps the organisation focus on what it must do internally to achieve customer and shareholder satisfaction. Measures should centre on the firm's core competencies and business processes that most impact customer satisfaction. Examples include manufacturing cycle time, employee turnover rates and technological capabilities versus those of competitors.

Finally, the learning and growth perspective focuses on improving the firm's ability to innovate, to learn and to improve its products. Criteria in this area might include the number of new products versus those of competitors, the percentage of sales from new products and improvements in employees' skill levels.

Reference - Universitas 21 Global Pte Ltd.

Supreme Personality of Godhead – Personal & Impersonal

Supreme Personality of Godhead – Personal & Impersonal

Every soul is the part of Supreme Personality of Godhead. Due to influence of Maya, at time souls bring impersonal attitude towards Supreme Personality of Godhead. So the soul, covered with Maya (in material forms) descends to earthly planet but still as a part & parcel of Supreme Personality of Godhead.

Influence of Maya is so strong that at times soul forgets it’s origin and starts enjoying the materialistic life. It starts believing impersonalism and stops associating with the creator & goes through repeated birth & death.

Impersonalism is not about a groups or religions who don’t believe in personal form of God but it’s about any philosophy, attitude, mindset where everything is not related to God. Anything that brings concept/relation/existence other than Supreme Personality of Godhead is an Impersonal. There are many varieties of impersonalism such as:

• There is no GOD (Buddhism) – we are the product of natural processes and chemicals
• There is a God but he has no forms, no personalities – He is complete immanent, but what about transcendence?
• There is a God and he has a personality but no forms – He is unable to incarnate
• There is a God but I take care of mine - I have my family, I work hard and feed them, God doesn’t feed them, I worked hard t build my house etc..

Because of the above listed Impersonalism there are many problems gets created and some of these are:

In relation with God:

• Create Peace without joy
• Knowledge without love
• Justice without mercy
• Control without adaptability

In relation with human beings:

• Impersonal Dealings
• Mechanistic Society
• Isolation & loneliness
• Violence & Misuses

In relation to nature:

• Violence
• Exploitation

Any Impersonalism attitude is limiting the potency of God. It’s the God who is personal as well as impersonal and that’s the reason he is the God. God has a personal form but he capable of taking any from and there is difference between God and his energy (light, earth, water etc..). So, we have to acknowledge both principles - unity in diversity & that’s the definition of GOD.
So, the objective of human form is to associate with Supreme Personality of Godhead so that He gives an opportunity to a soul to comeback to Him. We have to believe that we are the parts & parcel of God and we should accept God in personal form as mentioned Bhagwad-Gita, Chaprter -12, sloka – 5 otherwise it would be very difficult to go back to Godhead.

Reference – Mantra -5 , SRI ISOPANISAD by Prabhupad

Sales vs. Marketing

Marketing is everything that you do to reach and persuade prospects।

The sales process is everything that you do to close the sale and get a signed agreement or contract.

Developing a Marketing Mix

Everything in marketing revolves around four areas of principal concern, namely, product, price, place and promotion. These "four Ps" are known as the marketing mix. The marketing mix is a framework that marketers use to conceive, organise and execute a marketing strategy. Every P must be aligned to satisfy the needs of the target market. If not, products - even companies - can fail.

• Product: What should a firm produce or provide to satisfy consumer needs?
• Place: Where should the offering be available to consumers?
• Price: How much will customers be willing to pay to satisfy those needs?
• Promotion: How should a firm communicate with consumers?
  

ISO 8583 - Electronic Data Interchange Protocol for financial service

What is Electronic Transactions?
In modern world we are heavily dependent on electronic transaction, we frequently swap
the credit cards at merchant location, we do ATM transaction and Internet transaction, we
use Petrol Cards at petrol bunks etc. Every time you do an electronic transaction, the data
traverse from one system to another. But are we aware of, in which format data goes from
one system (Ex. Card Terminal at shopping mall) to other (Ex. Bank as card issuer)? Is
there any standard followed while sending these data?

In electronic world any data interchange which takes place across the systems does
require some standard to be followed. These standards do provide standard data
interchange formats to allow integration, exchange and interoperability of various
systems. There are many such standard existing and the various organizations are
working towards making these standard more generic and adaptable. In Healthcare
industry HL7, DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) are the
protocols implemented by the system, similarly in financial world there are the standards
(protocols) ISO8583, ISO7816 etc, for the various kind of data interchange.

Understanding ISO 8583
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of
national standards bodies. ISO 8583 International Standard is designed as an interface
specification enabling message to be exchanged between systems adopting a variety of
application (Financial transaction cards, related media and operations) specifications. It is a protocol for conducting highly structured inter-organization exchanges, such as for
money transaction, making purchases, initiating loan request etc. ISO 8583 standard
specifies a common interface by financial transactions card originated messages may be
interchanged between Acquirers and Issuers. Standard can be further extended to support
the transaction taking place between POS (Point of Sale Terminals) and Merchant
Acquirer. ISO 8583 specifies message structure, format and content, data element and
values of data elements. Application specification may remain at private level
(implementer) and the method (message) by which settlement takes place is not within
the scope of ISO. The designer of such applications have complete freedom of design
within the overall constraint that message shall be convertible to this interface format in
order that international interchange may take place.

ISO 8583 Message Structure
The structure of a terminal/host ISO message consists of three major parts; the header,
application data, and the trailer. The header and trailer envelop the application data and
are used for routing and message integrity. The application data consist of ISO message
including MTI, BIT MAP and ISO Data Element.

ISO 8583 Implementation:
To implement ISO 8583 message at the host or terminal there are various commercial as
well as freeware software available. jPOS Framework is free-ware
software (www.sourceforge.net & http://www.jpos.org/). Uses of Message Mapper software is are very simple and Message transformations are configured via a point-and-click windows interface and it enables many complex transformations to be set up without the need for any programming.

The standard can be purchased from ISO directly or in some cases from your country's standardization organization.

Hope this does help the readers.

regards
Shyam