With recession looming, it must be time to talk about how to hire people. Sure, things are uncertain, but they're always uncertain in the modern economy. That's the theme of Peter Cappelli's "Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty." Cappelli, a professor...
Slacker Manager has a weak post on telecommuting, 8 Tips on How to Work From Home: 28 Years of Experience, by David Zinger . It's really more like eight thoughts. Only two seem like tips to me -- the rest are observations or benefits based...
In a fun and mind-turning essay, Michael T. Kanazawa argues People Don't Hate Change, They Hate How You're Trying To Change Them It starts out with a cold slap in the face: "According to a summary of over 40 research studies on change, the success rate of...
The future of business will be dominated by freelancers who affiliate with each other on a temporary basis and rarely go into an office. Why should they? The network technology will be so advanced that the real world will be largely forgotten, thanks to virtual worlds built on top...
Perhaps because everyone knows there's no place like home, I was skeptical of Who's Your City? see The Future According to Richard Florida. Having now read it, I am impressed by author Richard Florida's ability to take massive amounts of...
Looking for the best place to build your high-tech business? Here's what The Milken Institute says in its 2008 State Technology and Science Index. The states in the best position to succeed in the technology-led information age are (2004 rankings in parentheses): Massachusetts...
With 60 percent of Americans now attending college, Richard Posner asks whether the number might go to 100 percent (don't snort; it wasn't even a century ago that most people didn't go to high school). At first, in his post on the boom in college education, he seems to think...
Slacker Manager has linked to a survey on whether people are given 'strength-training' at work; that is, are trained to improve their strengths and use them more often. The answer appears to be a resounding no. I say "appears" because the data seems based...
Should work make us happy? Hmm. I should say yes -- I write frequently about ideas suggesting workplace culture should be more encouraging and supportive than it often is. Most people spend the majority of their waking hours working, and work shouldn't be a depressing...
Business thinkers may want to skip the second part of "The Big Switch." It's learned and interesting, but not very much about business -- at least, in the short term. In the long term, his speculative logic changes everything about society. The Universal Computer that will emerge from...
My post on whether women make better managers than men brought out the hornets check out the comments. Now Business Pundit is arguing that women do better in business than men, based on a Washington Post article, Women Rise in Rwanda's Economic Revival. The Post article notes...
Feel like you're running on an economic hamster wheel, powering an economy that benefits only a relative few? Jared Bernstein's "Crunch" is for you. So says reviewer Harry Hurt III in A Rock, A Hard Place and an Exit Strategy. Hurt walks through Bernstein's discussion...
I think markets have blind spots, along with a certain caustic wit. But the Templeton Foundation has been funding research into what you might call the two sides of Adam Smith, melding the free-market capitalism of "The Wealth of Nations" with the moral philosophy of its predecessor, "The Theory...
Having fun outside of the office boosts productivity. Or so argues the blog Chief Happiness Officer, which suggests that companies would improve productivity by giving employees a fun day -- an extra day off and a little bit of money to go do something fun. To ensure that it's...
I've stirred the pot with my post Sink or Swim Business, which looks at some of the management ideas of Ralph Sink. While I note several of his comments, the incendiary part of the post seems to be my opening line, which includes the words "fire all the managers." ...
Ben McConnell of the Church of the Customer blog features 10 Questions with David Vinjamuri author of the new book "Accidental Branding," which he looks at inexperienced entrepreneurs who nonetheless built well-known brands (Clif Bars, Columbia Sportswear). A couple of Vinjamuri's better comments from...
I'm interested in how people come up with ideas. That's one reason why I reviewed Bernd Schmidt's book "Big Think" (see How To Build Bernd Schmitt's Trojan Horse). So I was eager to read The Road To Eureka! subscription required, a piece in Science News on...
Drugs are bad for productivity, right? Well, maybe not. While you can probably correlate productivity increases with declines in per capita drinking, what about coffee or Diet Coke? These can act as mild stimulants. Then there's full-fledged brain steroids, say, a drug like Provigil, which...
The third section of Creating a World Without Poverty details Muhammad Yunus' vision for creating social businesses and how they will eliminate poverty. Yunus recaps some of the hoops that had to be jumped through before Grameen Danone could start making high-nutrition, low-cost yogurt in Bangladesh. Capital...
Grameen Bank is an improbable business worth study. In the second section of Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus details the ongoing evolution of what he calls "The Grameen Experiment." Yunus was an economist, not a banker, and he needed to invent his bank for the poor,...
