Many people working in large companies speak business-buzzwords as a second language. Business language is full of pretty meaningless words. I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore article tells that the language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. There are several strains of this epidemic: We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things, acronymitis, and Meaningless Expressions (like “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation”). This would all be funny if it weren’t true. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.
Check out this brilliant Web Economy Bullshit Generator page. It generates random bullshit text based on the often used words in business language. And most of the material it generates look something you would expect from IT executives and their speechwriters (those are randomly generated with Web Economy Bullshit Generator):
“scale viral web services”
“integrate holistic mindshare”
“transform back-end solutions”
“incentivize revolutionary portals”
“synergize out-of-the-box platforms”
“enhance world-class schemas”
“aggregate revolutionary paradigms”
“enable cross-media relationships”
How to talk like a CIO article tries to tell how do CIOs talk, and what do they talk about, and why they do it like they do it. It sometimes makes sense to analyze the speaking and comportment styles of the people who’ve already climbed the corporate ladder if you want to do the same.
The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article tells that the stupid business talk is longer solely the province of consultants, investors and business-school types, this annoying gobbledygook has mesmerized the rank and file around the globe. The next time you feel the need to reach out, touch base, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it. If you have to ask why, chances are you’ve fallen under the poisonous spell of business jargon. Jargon masks real meaning. The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article has a cache of expressions to assiduously avoid (if you look out you will see those used way too many times in business documents and press releases).
Is Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business? article tells that most of what is called innovation today is mere distraction, according to a paper by economist Robert Gordon. Innovation is the most abused word in tech. The iPad is about as innovative as the toaster. You can still read books without an iPad, and you can still toast bread without a toaster. True innovation radically alters the way we interact with the world. But in tech, every little thing is called “innovative.” If you were to believe business grads then “innovation” includes their “ideas” along the lines of “a website like *only better*” or “that thing which everyone is already doing but which I think is my neat new idea” Whether or not the word “innovation” has become the most abused word in the business context, that remains to be seen. “Innovation” itself has already been abused by the patent trolls.
Using stories to catch ‘smart-talk’ article tells that smart-talk is information without understanding, theory without practice – ‘all mouth and no trousers’, as the old aphorism puts it. It’s all too common amongst would-be ‘experts’ – and likewise amongst ‘rising stars’ in management and elsewhere. He looks the part; he knows all the right buzzwords; he can quote chapter-and-verse from all the best-known pundits and practitioners. But is it all just empty ‘smart-talk’? Even if unintentional on their part, people who indulge in smart-talk can be genuinely dangerous. They’ll seem plausible enough at first, but in reality they’ll often know just enough to get everyone into real trouble, but not enough to get out of it again. Smart-talk is the bane of most business – and probably of most communities too. So what can we do to catch it?
2,765 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Good Employees Leave (And How You Can Keep Them)
http://www.cio.com/article/742315/Why_Good_Employees_Leave_And_How_You_Can_Keep_Them_?page=1&taxonomyId=3123
If you’re losing good workers and you’re not sure why, the problem may lie with your firm’s management style. The good news is that you can make small changes that will make a huge difference when it comes to employee retention.
It’s tough when good employees leave: Productivity sinks, morale suffers and colleagues struggle with an increased workload until you find a replacement. On top of that, recruitment and search costs, training and on-boarding new hires can make for a difficult and expensive transition.
The best solution, of course, is keep your workers happy so they don’t want to leave. But before you can implement a plan to increase employee retention, you need to determine why valuable employees are leaving.
“Most people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers,” says Wendy Duarte, vice president of recruiting at recruiting, hiring, and consulting firm Mondo.
While that insight might be hard to swallow, understanding that your organization’s management philosophy could be part of the problem is the first step to improving retention, she says.
“When you lose your top talent, the first place to look is at management,” Duarte says. “Managing teams as a whole is hard. You have to manage to each individual, and invest time into discovering what each member of a team needs both at work and outside of work to do their job to the best of their ability,” she says.
One of the key things — if you’re really listening to employees — is to find out if they are getting the resources to add to and change their roles, to take on more and different responsibilities, to spearhead new projects, to experiment.
– Wendy Duarte, Mondo.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s The Evidence That The Tech Sector Is In A Massive Bubble
http://www.businessinsider.com/evidence-that-tech-sector-is-in-a-bubble-2013-11
The stock market is at an all-time high. Tech startups with no revenue have billion-dollar valuations. And engineers are demanding Tesla sports cars just to show up at work.
Here’s the evidence that we’re in a new tech bubble, heading for a crash, just like the dot com bust of 1999.
Interest rates are effectively at 0%.
The stock market is at a peak, which is exactly what you’d expect in a zero-interest environment.
In the tech sector specifically, there has been a recent run-up in deal prices.
It’s not just tech asset prices that are high. Salaries are high, too.
Twitter svp/technology Chris Fry got a $10 million pay packet. He only joined the company last year.
It’s not just wages that are expensive. Company valuations are rising too.
Companies with broken business models are highly valued.
Companies without meaningful revenue are highly valued.
Companies with no revenue at all are highly valued.
Yahoo is again paying top dollar for companies with no meaningful revenue, just like it did in 1999.
Companies are making dumb decisions: This startup chose beef jerky over a 401 (k) plan.
Companies are making dumb decisions (part 2): There are more Facebook ad agencies than regular ad agencies.
Serious investors are beginning to suspect a tech bubble has formed, and that a crash is coming.
Andreessen Horowitz is pulling up the ladder.
One of the most legendary tech investors, Tim Draper, thinks we’re at the end of the curve.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 7 Types Of People Who Never Succeed At Work
http://www.forbes.com/sites/glassheel/2013/09/18/the-7-people-who-never-succeed-at-work/
There are an endless amount of characters in the workplace.
The Gullible One.
If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that you should never believe everything a company says. Don’t believe them when they say they don’t expect layoffs (the mere mention of that word suggests they’re on the way). Don’t believe that they’ve offered you the highest salary they can. Don’t believe them when they say they can’t negotiate your raise.
The Groupthinker.
Groupthink is a psychological problem that runs rampant in workplaces. Even more if you’ve got a large population of “longtermers” in a corporation. Groupthink is why technology isn’t updated, why policies are outdated, why there’s no new blood (or ideas) on a team, why you hear the sentence “you can’t do that, that’s not how we’ve always done it!”
The Fearful One.
People do ridiculous things when they’re scared.
Apathetic Guy.
Don’t be the apathetic coworker. The grass isn’t always greener, even though it may appear so.
The Sore Loser.
A sore loser will think you got that deal because you’ve got an important last name. Or that you were hired because your Mom sits in the corner office. Or that you simply got lucky (literally and figuratively).
Malicious Gossiper.
There’s harmless gossip and then there’s malicious gossip.
The Apologizer.
She looked sharp and ready. But then she opened with, “Don’t worry, this isn’t a crappy website that does blah…”
Well shoot. For the remainder of her presentation, I assumed her website was crappy.
Repeat the following statement as many times as you need to before you have an important conversation or make a presentation: Be confident, not cocky.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Box CEO talks European plans, warns about meeting BlackBerry’s fate
http://www.citeworld.com/business/22655/box-ceo-aaron-levie-talks-disruption-in-london
Starting by talking about the differences between European and US markets, Levie noted, “Europe sees the exact same business challenges as anywhere else in the world, the exact same trends transforming businesses.” They’re familiar trends: the move from on-premises to the cloud, the move from the traditional PC to tablets and mobile, and the changing nature of work itself. He’s been talking to CIOs around Europe, and says, “They’re trying to implement new technologies from a new set of vendors for a new set of experiences to solve a new set of problems.”
Levie remains well aware that the biggest threat facing Box is the same one that makes it a threat to incumbent enterprise software vendors. As he points out, the shift to cloud and mobile changes the way software is bought and deployed. “This shift means the onus more than ever is on the vendor. If we don’t stay competitive, if we don’t build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out.”
By making it simple for users to deploy solutions, companies like Box need to be aware that they’re also making it easy for customers to replace them with something new. “You will either get swapped out because IT will swap you out or just because people will stop using you because they’re using a consumer solution, And because it’s SaaS, they’re only paying for what they use — and you stop getting paid”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel on Europe: The Internet of Things could SAVE US ALL
Apply clever tech to lift economic gloom, says chip giant labs chief
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/10/25/intel_smart_cities_and_internet_of_things/
How will Europe lift itself out of current and future economic woes – and help save the planet while it’s about it? According to chip giant Intel, with hi-tech carrots rather than government sticks.
So said the head of Intel’s European R&D operation, Martin Curley, this week at the chip company’s European Research and Innovation Conference – Eric to its friends.
It’s easy to be cynical about such a message, especially given the number of business book buzzwords that were tossed around alongside it – “new innovation paradigm”, “quadruple helix innovation”, “full spectrum innovation” – Intel is very keen on the “i” word, it seems – and the involvement of so many talking-shop Eurocrats.
Tomi says:
Integrated Thinking: The Answer To Enterprise IT’s Perpetual
Struggle
http://www.effectiveui.com/downloads/publications/EffectiveUI_Study_Integrated_Thinking.pdf
Enterprise Application Development Teams Struggle To Keep Up
Despite adopting agile methods and digesting a constant flow of new software development tools, technologies, and
cloud services, a mere 39% of surveyed business decision-makers say that IT has the ability to regularly deliver on
time and on budget
That’s a real problem when you consider how crucial technology is to the success of the contemporary enterprise.
Software applications, in particular, are of strategic importance to virtually every function of the business, including product research, design, and development; advertising and marketing management; sales; and customer experience. That’s why the top critical software priority for IT organizations is to support business requirements
and corporate growth
The business implications are huge because both customer- and employee-facing applications directly and indirectly affect a firm’s customer experience, employee productivity, business agility, and competitiveness
Complexity, Silos Are The Culprit
Enterprise application development teams are faced with a hydra of obstacles that make it difficult to keep up with the business demand for new applications and enhancements to existing web and mobile applications
Ultimately, application development teams are judged not by how well they gather business requirements, choose development technologies, manage the project, or march through the development process — they are judged by:
1) how well their software serves the business goals, and
2) by how people — customers or employees — feel before, during, and after they use their software.
Teams know they need to improve. Only 20% of IT decision-makers surveyed reported that they are very satisfied with the user experience of their customer-facing web applications, and only 14% were very satisfied with their customer-facing mobile applications
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIO = Chief Motivating Officer
At the end of a complaining that the rush is: projects popping, budgeting press on, tired bunch of people, and the world should be completed before the end of the year.
Specter in the background in early known to the evaluation of the discussions, which compare the achievements of the year, then carefully according to the formula set out in the personal bonus targets. They should motivate you to keep you going.
At the same time, on the other hand Slush organizers receive hundreds of volunteers to make all round most days in the history of Finnish growth company event a success.
I wonder if we have something to learn from higher organizations of human motivation?
Instead of hurry and hierarchy emphasizing even large organizations would have to learn how to truly motivating presence, diversity and feedback.
Management is based is that the organization has common objectives and indicators to monitor their implementation. In other words: what is relevant to our goals, and how to continuously improve customer and employee satisfaction.
When the direction and gauges are clear, each of us must be aware of how our work takes toward a common goal. Then head for the inspiring feedback and appreciation from colleagues – profit and loss sharing.
Supercell company management philosophy is admired: the teams are kept small, the failures are celebrated, not personal goals, but solves a bunch of success. They are also told to be very careful about whom will be recruited in the first place.
This is how top teams are known to work. When the group of people is a strong sense of community and inspiring a common goal, it is being done to the fullest without having the personal bonuses or controversy about what was just my role.
IT services and support functions require a builder or gardener’s attitude. Let’s make the process of patiently, knowing that the results may not appear until years later. The party is subject, the end-users do not choose too much, and firefighters are required.
CIO’s most important task is to find the right kind and the strengths of people with right kind of attitude, work tasks and teams.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/blogit/CIO_100_blogi/cio++chief+motivating+officer/a948126
Tomi Engdahl says:
When buying has become a self-service, to win the hearts of your customers by making them a useful enchantment and assisting with content. Content Marketing purring trade all year round regardless of the weather.
If you are unable to serve the potential of your clients fully fact-finding stage, since you can not even participate in discussions and your competitors will make trades. Potential customers do not have time to visit the many vendor with a half-hour question marathons and the mere product information, please visit our few get answers to all open-ended questions. Customer orientation, therefore, the search engine iPad and still own to figure out how to solve his problem. He is looking for providers, but also suitable for articles, magazine articles, product reviews and comparisons, as well as to fulfill Blog Posts for knowledge. Company in terms of customers has become a ninja, and a buyer is able to tackle the sale of only the invisible man – a helpful and useful content.
Content marketer has a significant competitive advantage compared to relying solely on product and service pages on reliable supplier.
To impress the buyer, content marketer have to understand the customer so well and he is able to guide the conversations quickly to the right track – whether it’s online or face to face. Good marketing dismantle barriers to buying one at a time in answering all the questions in mind, make up for the customer to want to buy.
Content Marketing for your business to create an invisible army of salesmen. For example, when buying a service often feel a higher risk than the purchase of products, you have good content to convince the buyer in advance of your ability to serve.
Source: http://www.taloussanomat.fi/kumppaniblogit/2013/11/18/rakenna-nakymattomien-myyntimiesten-armeija/201315998/322?ref=ts_promo
Tomi Engdahl says:
Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst
by Sarah Green | 1:00 PM November 13, 2013
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-worst/
What probably gets under my colleagues’ skin much more is how noisy I am: the muttered curses when my computer gives me the blue screen of death or the impromptu phone calls with authors that end up lasting an hour (sorry guys!). A full 30% of workers in cubicles, and roughly 25% in partitionless offices, were dissatisfied with the noise level of their workspaces.
The worst part, according to the data, is that these office workers can’t control what they hear — or who hears them. Lack of sound privacy was far and away the most despised issue in the survey, with 60% of cubicle workers and half of all partitionless people indicating it as a frustration.
Given that other studies have shown we only spend 35% of our time at our work stations, though, I it seems reasonable for a cost-minded manager to assume that we should just abolish the office, despite its popularity with workers. Make everything modular. Let the collaboration flow.
Not so fast. Previous research, cited by Kim and de Dear, has already shown that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction… was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices, and the tasks requiring complex verbal process” — the most important tasks, you might argue — “were more likely to be disturbed than relatively simple or routine tasks.” In this paper, Kim and de Dear show that this loss of productivity is not offset by increased collaboration. “Ease of interaction” was barely an issue — less than 10% of all office workers cited it as a problem, no matter what kind of workspace they had. In fact, people in enclosed offices found it even less of an issue than workers in cubicles and workers in open layouts. (Perhaps because enclosed offices obviate the all-too-common challenge of finding a private place to talk.)
The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable, reporting the lowest rates of satisfaction in 13 out of those 15 factors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform
by Edward M. Hallowell
http://hbr.org/product/baynote/an/R0501E-PDF-ENG?referral=00505
Frenzied executives who fidget through meetings, lose track of their appointments, and jab at the “door close” button on the elevator aren’t crazy–just crazed. They suffer from a newly recognized neurological phenomenon that the author, a psychiatrist, calls attention deficit trait, or ADT. It isn’t an illness; it’s purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live. But it has become epidemic in today’s organizations. When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain’s frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine. The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with ADT have difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These 4 tech CEOs rarely code, but they’re glad they know how
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/09/these-4-tech-ceos-rarely-code-but-theyre-glad-they-know-how/
Many of the great technology companies out there today — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — have a code-savvy CEO, but these leaders don’t spend much, if any, of their time coding.
Which brings up a couple interesting questions.
VentureBeat spoke with a group of Silicon Valley CEOs to find out how much time they spend coding, and what it means for their business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/11/20/1843208/elon-musk-talks-about-the-importance-of-physics-criticizes-the-mba
“In a two-part interview with the American Physical Society, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, talks about how important it is to be able to think in terms of first principles, a tool learned as a physics student.”
‘They don’t teach people to think in MBA schools.’
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineering Is Much More Than ‘Engineering Decisions’
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1320190&
Engineering has never been “just about engineering” decisions. It’s always been about:
The customer “stuff”
The product “stuff”
The manufacturing “stuff”
The marketing and sales “stuff”
The business “stuff”
…and finally, the engineering “stuff.”
Engineering is a discipline that has rules, or we think it has objective rules, and it does, to a point. Taken in isolation, engineering decisions can be made according to engineering rules, but isolation can be deceiving.
I was once training the teams that worked for me in an engineering-dominated company. My point was that people make emotional decisions and then look for reasons why their decision was right.
One of the most vocal engineering managers, Jim, stood up and said, “Bull**it, I don’t make emotional decisions even in my everyday life!”
I eventually asked, “Jim, why did you choose that specific car when some of the alternatives were cheaper?” He answered, “Because my wife liked it.”
Aha! An emotional decision! There was no objectively measurable thing that entered into the decision matrix. And, in fact, the car that they chose was not the best fit in the decision matrix. But, it passed the most important test of all: Did his wife like the car?
Business for engineers has a lot in common with this story. There are a great many aspects of the other business disciplines that we’ll consider in future columns that won’t make logical sense to you. Sometimes, as you gain more understanding, they will start to make sense — but sometimes not.
Gaining a better understanding of business will make you a better engineer.
Hold on tight for the ride — it’s going to be a wild one!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get Smart About Your R&D Spend
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=269929&
Few would argue that innovation can fuel business success. Companies that make the investment tend to generate bigger profits than those that don’t. But it’s also true that spending more on R&D doesn’t necessarily make your company more successful. Pouring more money into R&D, however small or large the company may be, doesn’t guarantee more profits.
There are a number of cases where a company has invested heavily in R&D but has gained only limited profitability. Other companies in the same industry spend much less and produce profits that are several times bigger.
So what’s going on at these companies to enable them to generate superior results with less investment? The first observation is that some 70% of R&D projects never make it into product development, and of those that do, only 50% ever make profits. The remainder enter the market as weak offerings that don’t press the customer buying buttons, or as quite often happens, the investment is used to bolster aging products by giving them a fresh coat of paint in the hopes that it’ll extend sales while saving costs.
The result is that about 85% of the R&D spend doesn’t generate a profit. In most business circles, a similar return on investment case with such poor returns would be shot down before it even started.
Consider Apple and Microsoft in 2010. Both companies were of a similar size and the industries they served substantially overlapped. The one difference that stood out was that Apple invested about 2% of its revenues in R&D compared to Microsoft’s 12-13%.
Apple grew 55% between 2010 and 2012, whilst over the same period, Microsoft displayed a modest growth of 7% per annum and received a flood of complaints from angry shareholders who were concerned about the extent of R&D investment with little new to show.
Microsoft had been investing a high percentage of its R&D into simply defending the PC business while the technology marketplace at that time was rapidly shifting to new platforms and opened up new lucrative opportunities, such as mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), cloud-based applications, and data access, and even gaming consoles.
There are several ways of measuring R&D effectiveness. A favored approach is to use a measure referred to as RORC (return on research capital), which can be calculated by dividing the current year gross profit by the previous year R&D spend.
it can provide a reasonable indication of a company’s year-on-year trend if measured in successive years to drive improvement
Tomi Engdahl says:
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/138233/healthcaregov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality
“The idea that ‘failure is not an option’ is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers.”
“Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure.”
” As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov’s ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/
When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to simplify, delay, or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.
Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.
Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.
Comment:
The problem you’ve described is one that’s fundamental to technology, though. The reality is that the vast majority of helpful new uses for technology don’t involve doing anything novel or interesting. They involve applying an existing solution or technique to a new area. Sure, sometimes people get to work at Facebook and design high-availability low-latency distributed database systems… but most of the time, even on the prestige jobs, they’re munging together some existing APIs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Real Problem In Working From Home (It’s Not What You Think)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/06/24/working-from-home/
If you give employees the right to telework, be careful!
The very technology that enables telecommuting and working from home could be destroying its value. Although productivity may increase in the short term, working from home may prevent your teams from working effectively.
Command And Control
The intuitive answer would be that many companies worry about losing control of their employees. Teleworkers frequently back this perception by citing difficulties in performance reviews, when compared to their office-based peers.
There may be some truth to these, but neither is the full story.
Yes, remote workers may indeed be more carefree, happier and productive, but that doesn’t mean they’re good for their companies. A company is more than just the work that needs to be done, plus the workers who are there to do it.
A healthy organization has a culture that allows the sharing of values and ideas, the formation of a corporate identity, and the sense of competitive urgency that allows a company to be agile and innovative.
However, working from home can fail to fire up remote workers in the same way as a shared company environment.
Google workers, for instance, are brought into Mountain View on a free wi-fi enabled bus, and they’re encouraged to spend up to 20% of their time on projects other than their own work. Yet when it comes to working from home, the company line is to keep it to the barest minimum, unless it involves putting in extra hours after leaving the office.
Creativity And Institutional Memory
Ultimately a company is only as good as its people. The value of each worker centers on the knowledge they have and the knowledge they can gain.
The Bottom Line
As technological change accelerates and marketplace pressures intensify, companies need to become ever more agile and innovative, just to keep up.
Paradoxically, the very technology that made teleworking a real option is now conspiring to keep workers in the office.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A recent doctoral dissertation: Leaders of the time it takes almost half of the dispute settlement
Helsinki-based researcher Kalle Siira recent dissertation by as much as 40 per cent of managers’ time is spent in conflict and related issues.
Dissertation by both men and women are guilty, but to control the management of conflict situations. Conflicts are resolved with facts when it would be the feeling of things.
Syrup says this is an error, although at first may seem effective to deal with the conflict out of the way and then continue as if nothing had happened.
The situation will, however, one way or another over against, and so as much as 40 per cent of managers of their time to settle disputes.
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/2013120217782796_uu.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech boom! The war for top developer talent
With eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings, today’s talented developers have their pick of perks, career paths, and more
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/tech-boom-the-war-top-developer-talent-231709
The Oval Office concept started as a joke, explains Tim Clem, who like nearly every other GitHub employee has no official title, but oversees product and corporate strategy for the six-year-old startup. If you could build the coolest room in the world, what would it be? The idea stuck.
“We want everyone who’s new to GitHub — whether they’re interviewing for a job, a potential client, or just one of our superfans coming by for a visit — to feel like a first-class citizen,” Clem shouts above the hammering.
GitHub sits at the white-hot center of a tech boom unseen since the early days of dot-coms. It is both emblematic of an industry where success is often accompanied by excess, as well as a showcase where software engineers can highlight their coding chops to prospective employers. Each month nearly 5 million developers pay up to $200 apiece to share code and swap techniques on GitHub’s online project hosting platform. If you want a job with an open source company, your list of GitHub commits is far more important than a résumé on LinkedIn.
In a world that increasingly runs on code, developers are king — and companies will pay a king’s ransom to lure top talent. What follows is an inside look at some of the startups and development firms fueling the hottest market for coding talent the tech industry has ever seen.
Oval Office aside, GitHub is not unusual in the kinds of perks it offers employees, roughly 70 percent of whom are developers or designers. Across Silicon Valley and beyond, companies compete to see who can offer the most generous salaries, the best benefits, the most over-the-top extras.
That’s because for every 10 coding jobs in the marketplace, there are maybe eight people who can fill them, estimates Avik Patel, senior staffing manager for WinterWyman in New York.
“Demand has grown like crazy, but the talent pool hasn’t kept pace,” he says.
Perks vs. work/life balance: The central trade-off of the hiring market
But only the naïve believe such perks are truly free. The trade-off for being served breakfast and dinner at work is that you’re expected to arrive early and stay late. The toys, trips, and games with coworkers substitute for a social life, as it is not uncommon for developers to grind through 80-hour workweeks. It’s a culture designed for the young and unattached.
The gaming industry is especially notorious for its disregard of life/work balance, notes Scott Keller, director of strategic solutions for Yoh, a high-tech recruiting and staffing firm. With billions of dollars riding on the success of a game, coders are expected to do whatever it takes to hit their release dates.
“People end up missing the birth of their children and postponing their weddings,” says Keller. “When you get into your 30s and 40s and have a family, you don’t want to work 18 hours a day anymore. But if you only put in 12 hours, well, then you’re a slacker.”
It’s a trade-off many developers are unwilling to make.
“These companies value an environment where you screw around and stay there all the time,”
“It’s a buyer’s market out there, so you need to have a compelling story,” he says. “We actually have two.”
Culture, community, code
In many ways, the most visible perks of coding culture are no longer a differentiating feature in attracting talent. Even salaries and stock options aren’t always the deciding factor. The most appealing thing is often the nature of the work itself, as well as the community of coders they’ll be part of.
“Number one on their list was the opportunity to learn and grow on the job,”
“If you go with one of the big dogs, they’ll promise you a lot up front, including probably a six-figure salary,” says Harlan. “But once you get inside one of these companies, you can get pinned to a specific part or feature of a project for months or years at a time. Here you’re working on a new project every three or four months. Within the first year, you’ll have helped create two or three websites or apps that you can tell your friends, ‘I made that.’”
“We are delivery junkies,” jokes Associate Director Davis W. Frank. “It turns out I get much more of a dopamine rush knowing I can ship code at any time than some testosterone-driven ‘I just solved this big hard problem I’ve been working on for months.’ Solving tens of problems a week is way more gratifying.”
“It’s cool that people can relate to what we’re doing, while at the same time going after real challenges in enterprise computing,”
“Every candidate we look at these days has an offer from at least one of the following companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Square, Pinterest, or Palantir,” says Schillace. “If you want to play at a high level and recruit the best engineers, every single piece matters.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 15 worst ways to kill programming productivity
Meetings, know-nothing managers, productivity metrics — here’s what’s threatening to slay the next generation of great software
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/129821/the-15-worst-ways-kill-programming-productivity-231450
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: How Do I Convince Management To Hire More IT Staff?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/12/04/0140220/ask-slashdot-how-do-i-convince-management-to-hire-more-it-staff
Comment:
Standard way of doing it:
- Outline what’s wrong with the current undersized staff, where are the bottlenecks, what’s being held up because there aren’t enough people.
- Explain how this hurts the company’s bottom line.
- Explain how hiring another person will solve the current problems, increase efficiency, and in the medium to long term, increase revenues more than the cost of hiring this new person.
If your case is well built, it’ll be self-explanatory. If your boss/manager is reasonable, they will see the benefit of hiring a new person. If they don’t seem to see the benefit and refuse to see the logic of your case, either
1/ you haven’t built a good enough case (your fault)
2/ your boss is a jerk and you should quit
3/ something fishy is going on at your company (such as the company having run out of cash and being unable to hire, even if it’d make sense) and you probably should quit as well
The point you have to make is not you need to hire more people, it goes beyond that.
Point 1) document the time you are “wasting” with tasks bellow your competence.
Point 2) do the math, show them how much they could save, both with productivity lost in important projects, and most importantly, how much they could save shifting more mundane tasks with cheaper people. Point 3) Document the expenses with outside contractors (if any).
Point 4) Make the case for outlining responsibilities and areas of competences. People dont ask airline pilots to pick up trash, or give food to travellers, well again, because their work is expensive. Also, people dont expect taxi drivers to be able to fly a jet.
Point 5) Learn to say no. Either when you dont have competences or time.
Point 6) Learn when how to say I dont know.
Point 7) Know when it is time to outsource some services, either in complex or lengthy tasks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK.gov declares digital success as PR, food shops redefined as ‘tech’ businesses
Artisanal tripe to follow?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/uk_gov_defines_pr_food_shops_as_digital_businesses/
Are you in PR? Do you sell holidays or food? Congratulations, you’re now an internet business!
Global financial index provider the FTSE Group has just announced a “widen[ing of] the definition of what constitutes an internet service business” – which gov.uk has been quick to trumpet as a success growing out of its “Tech City UK” marketing initiative.
Banks, loan companies and advertising agencies and PR companies are now considered to be “technology or digital” businesses. So too are broadcasters like the BBC. And opinion pollsters. And too, weirdly, the Bank of England. Or at least they are for the purposes of a report prepared for Tech City UK’s Third Birthday.
With this sleight of hand, the the number of tech/digital companies in London is reckoned to have increased by 76 per cent between 2009 and 2012, with employment growing 16.6 per cent (compared to 0.3 per cent across Britain).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Success is a guarantee of failure
“There does not fail so badly as a success,” said (among other things), English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton more than a hundred years ago.
This is done by the economist Kenneth Boulding, the fact that people do not get to success, only failure.
Perhaps you could add: if it is not.
After a long career in Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks has made Ilkka Wijkberg said recently that ate the effectiveness of the mobile phone company’s capacity for innovation alive.
Several hundred developable squeshed ideas over the years, the logistics machine tracks. Highly armed delivery engine was not agile idea of filtering mechanism.
“What is new is usually once and for all to see. The most important thing would be adaptive, adaptable. ”
Furiously growing and still more fiercely wavy, extremely hot and sensitive to change mobiilipeliala is an example of what Wijkberg talking about. There should learn from the success, both their own and the neighbors.
Maybe some of that is already visible. The young author knee to share their experiences over the company borders in a way that would not have been possible in more traditional sectors in networks.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/blogit/uutiskommentti/menestys+on+epaonnistumisen+tae/a952685
Tomi Engdahl says:
15 ärsyttävintä konsulttikielen sanaa – miksi ihmeessä näitä käytetään?
Perinteinen yritysjargon – siis suomeksi hölynpöly – elää ja voi hyvin.
http://www.iltalehti.fi/fiidifi/2013121117821575_fd.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
As Software Eats The World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/14/as-software-eats-the-world-non-tech-corporations-are-eating-startups/
Netscape founder and VC titan Marc Andreessen famously wrote back in 2011 that software is steadily eating the world, disrupting industries like music, retail and more. Now large corporations in these industries are starting to eat startups.
Over the past year or two, non-tech corporations have begun to actually open their wallets to arm themselves with talent and technology that can help them enter the digital and data-focused world we now live and work in. It’s no longer Google, Facebook and Yahoo that are competing to acquire the best and the brightest startups in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of corporations in retail, health, agriculture, financial services and other industries that are sending their corp-dev talent to scout out possible acquisitions in the Bay Area and beyond.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital GIANTS in BLOODY battle to put your EYEBALLS in a JAR
Who will capture the screen?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/04/capturing_the_digital_edge/
As consumers become ever-more attached to their gadgets – variously glued to PCs and tablets, and, after-hours, laptops, game consoles and mobiles – the gigantic digital businesses are competing with each other to capture and monopolise users’ screen time on internet-connected devices. And all of the contenders are using many monumentally large data centres and data vaults.
For the first time in human history, businesses can hope to have access to consumer eyeballs for several hours a day and become electronic comfort blankets for digital entertainment, mail, mapping, photo albums, e-tailing, search and social media – either through endpoint device capture or internet activity dominance, or both.
The influence of the “FAGAMe” group of businesses is becoming pervasive, global in scope, and capturing a hitherto unattainable amount of individual consumer spending through the colossally concentrative effects of internet access to favoured destinations.
Just six businesses are becoming the dominant internet destinations for consumer eyeballs. Here they are with their dominant consumer-facing activities:
Facebook for social media;
Apple for phones, tablets, digital entertainment and mapping;
Google for search, phones, mapping and mail;
Amazon for e-tailing and book readers and digital books;
Microsoft for desktops/notebooks, search and mail; and
eBay for e-tailing and payment
These businesses are sticky; they have such scale and such a deep interaction with their users that their potential for growth is simply awesome.
If the device a consumer uses to connect to the internet is “owned” by one of the big six, then they have an initial and enduring advantage. So far, four of the six have this aspect covered:
Apple – desktops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones
Google – Chrome and Android-running notebook, tablets and smartphones and smartphone hardware
Amazon – Kindle Fire and tablet and Kindle ebook reader range
Microsoft – desktop, notebook, and nascent tablet and smartphones, search and mail
Facebook and eBay don’t have their own devices and rely on being the dominant internet destination for social media (Facebook) and alternate e-tail site (Amazon). Both are vulnerable in the medium and long term because of this.
The market capitalisations of the big consumer internet six reflect this thinking:
Facebook – $114bn
Apple – $505.1bn
Google – $354.4bn
Amazon – $176.5bn
Microsoft – $319.9bn
eBay – $67.3bn
These six consumer internet giants have a reach into consumers’ lives that’s simply unprecedented and their collective effect on analogue-based businesses is deeply destructive
Apple and pals are helping to kill physical entertainment media supply (bye bye Blockbuster, farewell music CD and film DVD). Whole swathes of digital media retail jobs have been swallowed since iTunes and electronic music media became popular. The same is the case with the brocks-and-mortar sector since Amazon and its cohorts arrived with their digital product etailing and its online retail with physical fulfilment from enormous and cleverly automated warehouses. Thousands of people work in these centres but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, lose retail jobs out in bricks-and-mortar-shop land.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DEATH of the CHANNEL? Resellers, distributors – your countdown to oblivion starts NOW
A little economics, a little evolutionary biology, and you’re toast
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/12/17/tim_calls_time_on_the_channel/
Whither the channel when it’s all in the cloud? Whence the box-shifter when no one actually buys PCs any more? The answer is, of course, that once a particular business model has no more business then that business model ends.
It is, however, possible to look at this in rather more sophisticated terms.
The most obvious, since we’re talking about business, is through the lens of economics. And to the economist the ability to make a profit means that whoever is making that profit must, by definition, be adding value. The reverse isn’t quite true, it’s not always the case that adding value will lead to profit but it’s still a good indication.
So for those in the channel at present the question is, well, is it possible to identify the value that is being added? The answer will be different from different parts of the channel.
For a simple box-shifting distie it’s difficult to see what the value added is beyond the basic logistics of the process.
For the distributor with a wide range of equipment and spares and repairs, well, if people will indeed pay for the just in time delivery then there’s a margin to be made there. But for both the competition is only a click or two away on Amazon, and so margins are going to be squeezed yet again.
For those providing an actual solution to a problem it will be rather different: as it will also be depending upon which solution is being offered. Basic networking is now simple enough that no one’s going to be making a living at it but those who really are adding value in the eyes of the consumer will be able to carry on.
Value-add… sometimes it’s all about knowledge
If in the world where people get their tablets from the phone shop, their PCs off Amazon and the software out of the cloud, if in that world you can still add value then there’s a good chance of survival. But no value added and there’s no place in that ecosystem for a business.
Which brings us to the second way we can view this, from the evolution point of view.
It’s often described as the survival of the fittest but that’s not really quite right. For it is the environment itself that does the selecting.
We can see the channel environment changing around us and the question is, well, where’s my niche?
But the general idea should be obvious: as the business environment changes then so too will the things that small businesses have to do to survive.
Peak support services?
There is one further pressure and that’s best explained by an analogy with the car industry. The point is that all computing is simply getting so much more reliable. An early car needed almost as many people to run it as a coach and horses did.
But we can see quite clearly that while car ownership per head has continued to grow in these recent decades the size of that support ecosystem has not. We very definitely have fewer filling stations than we did, for example.
And I would maintain that something akin to that is happening in computing. Yes, the population of computers is still expanding rapidly (not least that computer that is a smartphone) but that doesn’t mean that the population of people to service those computers is going to expand. Indeed, I think we’re at, or have passed, the peak level of the support industry.
Which leaves us with three points: the first being that the industry as a whole is going to be shrinking, the support and channel industry that is, despite the overall expansion of the computing market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Company management does not even trust his own decisions
Four out of ten business leaders do not trust companies to decisions because they lack the background knowledge or information can not be accessed easily enough .
Harvard Business Review, analysis services , QlikTech ‘s survey , only 13 percent of respondents believe strongly that they can not even trust yourself to decision making.
Central problems , including increased access to information and decision-making in situations of internal and external quality of the information .
The respondents also felt that the organization’s internal barriers negatively affect the decision-making process .
As many as 45 per cent were of the opinion that the greatest cause harm to the decision-making behind closed doors without the presence of real people, as well as senior management experience in an exuberant confidence .
Four out of ten respondents also mentioned the lack of cooperation hindered their decision-making into one thing.
” The knowledge can now be accessed so much more easily than , say, ten years ago. Still, the survey shows that it does not know how to properly support decision making “, QlikTech Finland and the Baltic Country Manager Jarmo Rajala says the release .
He points out that today’s leader must be able to make decisions there and then.
” Self-confidence and confidence will certainly increase by the fact that relevant information is easily accessible and quickly distributed to others,” Rajala believes.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/yritysjohto+ei+luota+edes+omiin+paatoksiinsa/a954958
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enough is enough
The case for a six-hour workday
http://qz.com/157092/the-case-for-a-six-hour-workday/
Today, workers are putting in increasingly more hours—so much so that the 40-hour week has become a relic of the past. But pushing employees to clock up those extra hours is bad for their well-being and detrimental to your company.
When you sleep is more important than the number of hours you sleep, a recent study found. What’s more, getting too little sleep might not be ideal, but waking up while it’s still dark is worse.
In a recent article for the New Yorker, neuroscientist Kenneth Wright said that “cognition is best several hours prior to habitual sleep time, and worst near habitual wake time”—which suggests that you do your best work later in the day, not first thing in the morning. Your consciousness kicks in almost immediately after waking up, but it can take up to four hours for your mind to crank itself up to full awareness and alertness—and in that time, you won’t make good decisions.
So how do employers accommodate this?
A shorter workday works particularly well for knowledge workers—people in creative or professional jobs—who can work productively for about six hours a day, compared to the eight hours manual laborers can churn out, according to Salon. Unlike machines, humans operate on a cyclical basis, which means our energy and motivation fluctuate in peaks and troughs. Cognitive workers tend to be more focused in the late morning, getting another energy boost in the late afternoon when lung efficiency peaks.
It’s been about a century since the economist John Maynard Keynes first touted the six-hour workday, predicting that by 2030 only extreme workaholics would work more than 15 hours a week.
employees were happy to work less when they were paid 12.5% more per hour
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to offer your expertise to solve your client’s problem
Use these four steps to ensure a successful expert-client relationship.
http://www.plantengineering.com/single-article/how-to-offer-your-expertise-to-solve-your-client-s-problem/4bcf092ba4fcb3e548d5702dc4539dd8.html
It is not complicated. You simply need to know what you are talking about, thoroughly. I mean that there should be no doubt in the minds of your listeners that you are the guru in your subject area. If you are, you do not need to read this column. You do not need to do anything special. Just let your ideas and knowledge flow and amaze your audience. Right? Wrong.
I have met many people who are indisputably experts in their field but, for some reason, they fail to project this image to their clients. The client is left thinking, “His resume is impressive, but he does not seem to grasp our problem. Maybe we should look for another expert.”
It is this very thinking that the consultant should prevent from materializing in the client’s mind.
As in everything else, there is a certain technique to building a successful expert-client relationship. Here are some tips.
Preparation: Like painting, the more preparation you do before meeting your client, the better the outcome will be. Try to have a detailed conversation with the person who makes the first contact. Most clients love to talk, particularly when they have a problem. There is no need to tell the client about your expertise or experience. Just send your latest resume. He or she has either heard about you or already knows you; otherwise he would not be calling you.
Encourage the client to talk. Ask the question most doctors ask: “When were you first aware of the problem?” Research the client on Google. Carry with you brochures and descriptive literature of the equipment which is reported to be the source of the problem.
Arrive approximately 15 minutes before the meeting. Decline the coffee if offered. Suit and tie is probably not necessary, but a jacket and tie would create the right impression.
Communication: To use an old cliché, communication is the key. In this case, it is the communication with the people around the table in your first meeting. Although it would be a plus-point, you do not need to speak in refined King’s English. Speak in a matter-of-fact tone. Make a brief reference to your past experience, if any, with the firm.
Just listening is what you must do most of the time during your first meeting. Do not offer your opinion before hearing from everyone around the table. Do not offer a solution before finding out what they have already done about the problem. Every company has smart engineers.
Whom to focus on? Around the table in the client’s office you will find people of different ages.
Then there typically is a much younger person who really understands the problem and has the ability to understand the solution you may later offer. This person is probably fresh out of engineering school. It is easy to spot this person.
It is this person you need to focus on because it is very likely that everyone in the room will later turn to him or her and ask, “What do you think?”
Follow-up: After the first meeting, be sure to send a letter to the vice president or decision-maker, thanking him or her for the opportunity to assist the company. State that you are reviewing the problem and that you will respond very soon. Include a list of material that you would like copies of.
Work diligently on your final report and be aware that your report will be copied and circulated widely within the client’s company. It may even be sent to another consultant for review.
Focus on visuals: Make full use of colored graphs, pie-charts, and photographs in the report. Include one or two alternative solutions together with your recommended solution, complete with costs, benefits, and risks.
Be sure to include the tests that the client must perform before energizing the equipment. Offer to review the test results.
Often, problems in industry arise due to human errors or omissions. If this is the case, do not lay blame on any particular individual or group. Instead, propose automation to preclude human errors. Downplay the consequences of human errors and state that human errors are inevitable and not uncommon in industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Sci-Fi Movies Teach Us About Project Management Skills
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/13/12/19/2350247/what-sci-fi-movies-teach-us-about-project-management-skills
“It’s certainly fun to pretend to find work inspiration from our favorite SF films. That’s what Carol Pinchefsky does in two posts”
5 Insightful Project Management Lessons from Sci-Fi – See more at: http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/12/06/5-insightful-project-management-lessons-from-sci-fi/#sthash.6FFmF5Sw.dpuf
5 Project Management Horror Stories Found in Sci-Fi Movies – See more at: http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/12/19/5-project-management-horror-stories-found-in-sci-fi-movies/#sthash.iLMY8Gl1.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marketing 105: Making Scents of Your Brand
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/scent-branding/
Dawn Goldworm recently sniffed glue for work. She’s a trained “nose” who has created fragrances for everyone from Lady Gaga and David Beckham to Adidas and Lamborghini. She runs 12.29, a firm that designs stealth-branding signature scents for high-end retailers, corporate clients, and even a few private homes. The glue-huffing was done for Italian luxury furniture maker Poltrona Frau during a visit to its factory in Turin, where Goldworm breathed in the aroma of … chairs.
Goldworm catalogs those scents, then combines them with corporate buzzwords like “luxury” and concepts like the texture of leather to determine the best smell for Poltrona Frau’s showroom. She asks questions like, “If your brand could be a color, what would it be?” Poltrona Frau favors orange, which brings instant, and intense, scent associations for Goldworm. That’s because she has synesthesia, a neurological disorder in which the sensory stimulation of one pathway – say, sight – brings an involuntary stimulation of a second pathway, such as smell. In Goldworm, this rare disorder means every number and letter is instantly paired with a color or scent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 Takeaways That I Learned About Services
http://rapidresponsemarketingpr.com/5-takeaways-that-i-learned-about-services/
A lot of small business owners these days are not really aware yet of how important it is to make use of IT support companies to back up the operation of their business. Even though there are many of the business today that still don’t operate with the help of an IT support service, there do have their own set of problems and consequences to handle as a result.
Without automatic resolve of said problems, dealing with it takes a really long time and it would affect the business in a very huge loss. If you have the right team of IT support and with the right kind of IT system working with your business, the common problems that your business would encounter will immediately be fixed in just a few minutes at least and a few hours at most.
With that being said, it really is very useful to any type of business, big or small, to have an aid form the IT support services that they could rely on.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Check Out the CEO’s Paycheck
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320439&
As images of holiday bonuses dance through our heads, we thought it was a good time to look at the compensation of a handful of the semiconductor industry’s CEOs. We found packages that ranged from less than $3 million to nearly $20 million.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sales for Engineers
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1320493&
There are a lot of pearls of wisdom in business about customers, but the main reasons why businesses appreciate the lifetime sales value of a customer are as follows:
It’s easier to sell to a customer you already have.
The cost is lower to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new customer.
Each customer engagement is an investment by the business in the customer.
Every sale increases the relationship between the customer and the business.
Experienced customers can be a key strategic resource in new product planning.
And the list goes on, limited only by business needs.
Let’s look at the objective of selling. At first glance it would seem that the primary goal is to get money for something. However, in the larger picture of maximizing the lifetime value of customers, there must always be multiple simultaneous goals — to derive a steady stream of cash from customers in the short term to keep the business solvent, and to strengthen the relationship with the customers so that they continue to prefer buying from you and your business.
The sales process is where miscues can easily happen. There are a number of models of the selling process. Sometimes it’s referred to as a “sales funnel,” but the essence is how you find prospects and move them through the sales process. From the seller’s viewpoint, the process has often been characterized as having eight steps, as follows:
Prospecting/initial contact
Pre-approach — planning the sale
Approach
Needs assessment
Presentation
Meeting objections
Gaining commitment
Follow-up
In larger companies, this step-wise approach to getting sales can identify areas that are an impediment to sales, and ultimately lead to the ability to predict sales number based solely on initial interest. But this process doesn’t explicitly try to maximize the seller’s return on investment through repeated sales.
Increased profitability due to customer retention happens because once a relationship has been established with a customer, benefits can accrue, as follows:
Acquisition cost occurs only at the beginning of a relationship — longer relationships lower the amortized cost.
Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs.
Long-term customers tend not to switch to another supplier or solution. They also tend to be less price sensitive, thereby making stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume.
Long-term customers promote by word-of-mouth referrals, are more likely to purchase related products, and tend to be satisfied with the relationship and are less likely to switch to competitors, making it difficult for competitors to enter the market or gain market share.
Long-term customers are less expensive to service and require less education.
Many of these benefits accrue directly to the sales force and sales support staff, but all of this does require an investment in all aspects of the marketing-sales process and — controversially — in the customer themselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eraser or Sledge Hammer? You Decide
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=270476&
I’m not a big gambler, but I think I understand the basic strategy of certain games. Take blackjack. The strategy is to keep track of the cards that have gone out. As the game progresses, you can better calculate your level of risk with each hand played. Once you have that understanding, you start betting more often and in higher amounts, based on your card observations.
It’s the same in product development. Conducting design research up front reduces your risk of problems occurring downstream. As you move through the R&D process, you can invest more money more confidently. The betting here is your monetary investment in development, engineering, and prototyping. As your risk goes down, you can spend more money.
People sometimes have an inverse approach. They believe they have a great idea, and they throw a lot of time, money, and resources at it. Some even leap right into a concept, a prototype, and a working model. They’ve already spent a ton of money, but then feedback starts coming in, and changes need to be made — some of them drastic. It takes time to make changes. At this point, the risk is really high, because of money already invested, and now there is a lot to lose.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How does a non-technical manager add value to a team of self-motivated software developers?
Can someone with no relevant experience contribute to a team?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/how-does-a-non-technical-manager-add-value-to-a-team-of-self-motivated-software-developers/
I am seeing a lot of programmers turning away from management and administration roles. They want to build stuff. And as a result, a lot of these positions are filled by non-technical people. I fail to see how they add value. Is scheduling meetings, booking offsites, and other administrative work enough to justify their role?
Don’t underestimate the amount of interaction your manager does with other departments. They handle budgets, training plans, HR paperwork. They protect the developers from getting sucked into meetings with other departments and provide a unified front for your group.
In short, their job is to protect self-motivated developers from all of the other demotivating things that exist in business.
The best managers are magicians. They make the rest of the company disappear for their developers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Next Big Thing You Missed: Companies That Work Better Without Bosses
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/holacracy-at-zappos/
Alexis Gonzales-Black doesn’t have a job title. If she did, she’d have to get rid of it. At online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos, her job is to help eliminate all of the company’s job titles.
Zappos is reorganizing itself according to a new system called “holacracy.” The idea is to structure the company around the work that needs to be done rather than the people who do it. That’s why Gonzales-Black is scrapping the company’s job titles, including her own. By the end of the year, she says, the organization will operate without anyone calling themselves a manager.
Holacracy was developed inside an obscure Pennsylvania software startup founded by a man named Brian Robertson, but it’s slowly spreading elsewhere.
Can these companies really overcome the “master and servant” paradigm — an arrangement so entrenched that it’s practically synonymous with the workplace itself?
To overcome the inefficiencies created by office politics, Zappos is redefining itself in terms of responsibilities and tasks. “We begin by taking out names and building a system of work,” Gonzales-Black says. Traditional managers, for instance, might be in charge of both managing subordinates on a personal level and overseeing the technical aspects of their work. In a “holacracy,” that job gets divided in two, such that a person who is good at tech but not so good at people doesn’t have to do both. “Those two things don’t have to live under the same title,” she says.
As the company flattens out, different jobs and areas of responsibility such as human resources or engineering organize themselves in “circles.” These core units of the holacratic system are meant to be the key to its flexibility. They’re ostensibly self-organizing: They can define and redefine their purposes as needed. Because jobs are defined by work rather than title, the hope is that the best person to do a particular task will step up to do it. Gonzales-Black calls this a “role marketplace”
“This allows us to rapidly evolve the structure of the organization to react to real world conditions,” she says. “It is definitely going to put us in a place where we’re much more agile.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data Brings Big Changes to Recruiting
http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/01/big-data-brings-big-changes-recruiting/
It’s no secret that companies — particularly small businesses and startups — face challenges when it comes to finding and hiring the best possible talent. While it’s true that the age of the internet has made a wealth of information available on potential candidates, wading through all that data can be a considerable time (and money) suck. It’s enough to make you miss the good old days when referrals were the only way to find employees. (In fact, referrals are still an important factor, but more on that later.)
What’s certain is that big data is the future of job recruiting and development, and understanding how to make sense of it will be critical to a company’s success. These days, big data is helping fast growing companies find their perfect engineers, developers and executives. And everyone can say they have access to big data with LinkedIn, G+ and other profiles on the web. However, you can’t just “data mine” your way to the right candidate; you need the right tools to analyze it, and the right people who can provide meaningful insight.
There’s no shortage of workforce analytics and applicant tracking systems designed for recruiting purposes, and many are great at gathering and aggregating “transactional information.” But the trick isn’t merely in collecting the data–it’s in interpreting it, and understanding the importance (or lack thereof of) each data point. Systems like Hadoop are great at gathering large amounts of data, but there’s still a fundamental problem, because people don’t know what they don’t know.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/
“Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fab CEO Jason Goldberg’s 3,500-Word Mea Culpa: “We Had Started to Dream in Billions”
http://recode.net/2014/01/07/fab-ceo-jason-goldbergs-3500-word-mea-culpa-we-had-started-to-dream-in-billions/
Among his regrets:
Letting Fab sell things its staff wasn’t proud of.
Hiring too many people, too quickly in Europe, ultimately resulting in layoffs
“We had started to dream in billions when we should have been focused on making one day simply better than the one before it.”
Talking publicly about revenue forecasts.
Talking publicly too often. Period.
Betashop Quarterly. Volume 1. January 2014.
http://betashop.com/post/72547337624/betashop-quarterly-volume-1-january-2014
Tomi Engdahl says:
“While we see new technologies pop up frequently, it takes a considerable amount of time for them to work their way into the every day company’s stack on a mass scale to notice major trend changes,” Cole said.
Source:
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/08/in-demand-tech-skills-of-2013-java#awesm=~osrFBdbovz80kl
Tomi Engdahl says:
The system language is after all, not in Hebrew, but the first impression of the user interface is not particularly inspiring
Still, I would hope that the IT system usability and user interface design in general, pay more attention to than it is now. It would be a pleasure to use application that has really invested in a clear layout and ease of use. Maybe a new system really make it easier and faster to work in the very first accessed, using a onwards.
Yes their usability and user interface design focus a lot. You’re just wrong user group.
The fair will the HR department asking whether a reporting unit availability better than the previous system. Yes it is.
These systems are designed and made for those to whom it is sold. That is, the management, not the workers. It’s a system is not there for you, so what’s all the same you feel.
Management is of course wrong in this, but it is not a system supplier failure. Supplier rubs those properties, of which the customer is interested. Employees’ job is to educate the management in this regard for example, so that you refuse to use it until it is better. Then it is of interest.
Source:
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/blogit/uutiskommentti/kun+kayttaja+tuntee+itsensa+tyhmaksi/a958661
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unemployed in Europe Stymied by Lack of Technology Skills
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/business/international/unemployed-in-europe-hobbled-by-lack-of-technology-skills.html?ref=business&_r=1
Week after week, newspapers issue a stream of hopeful headlines: Microsoft, PayPal, Fujitsu and scores of other companies are expanding their investments in Ireland, creating thousands of jobs as unemployment hovers near record highs.
There is just one hitch: Not enough people are qualified to fill all the jobs. In some cases, the companies have had to look outside Ireland to recruit candidates with the right skills.
After a five-year economic crisis, the mismatch represents one of the thorniest problems facing Ireland and many other European countries. Hundreds of thousands of people who lost work, and many young people entering the work force, are finding that their skills are ill suited to a huge crop of innovation-based jobs springing up across the Continent.
“In all countries, there is an expectation that many of the new jobs created will be in the knowledge-intensive economy,” said Glenda Quintini, a senior labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “But we are seeing a worrisome skills mismatch that means a large number of unemployed people are not well prepared for the pool of jobs opening up.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox and Uber: Worth Billions, But Still Inches From Disaster
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/dropbox-uber/
Dropbox went dark over the weekend.
According to the company, the widespread outage was the result of a bug it introduced while updating the hundreds of computer servers that drive its massively popular file-sharing service. But the problem was bigger than that. The San Francisco-based startup not only faced countless complaints from users across the net, it was forced to deflect rumors that the service was hacked, something that turned out to be a hoax.
On one level, a dust-up like this is just part of life as a startup. Things go wrong, people get upset, problems are solved, lessons are learned. But the stakes are higher when you’re Dropbox — or any other tech startup that has ascended to the misty heights of the billion-dollar club.
The most successful tech giants — think Google and Facebook — have been able to insulate themselves from the big SNAFU by performing well for long enough that we become inescapably dependent on them.
For many of us, Gmail would have to delete our entire accounts before switching became even plausible anymore. But even for billion-dollar companies still in a period of massive growth, such cushions aren’t always there to catch them. If they fall, the landing could still be hard.
Do One Thing, Do It Best
In an interview with WIRED this past fall, Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston acknowledged that his company has almost no margin for error. If Dropbox accidentally destroyed just one person’s file, he said, it could erode the trust of all its users. “This is like the same sort of genre of problem as the code that you use to fly an airplane. Even if it’s a little bug, it’s a big problem.”
The risk for Dropbox is that at its core, it essentially does only one thing: It syncs your files across all your devices. On the one hand, this single-mindedness has brought Dropbox its tremendous success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
16 Stupid Tech Job Interview Questions: Show Your Snark
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-business/16-stupid-tech-job-interview-questions-show-your-snark/d/d-id/1113474
Glassdoor characterizes these actual job interview questions as “oddball.” We give these questions the answers they deserve.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Officeland: Open Concept Offices
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/01/23/officeland-open-concept-offices/
Open concept offices have been lauded in the tech industry, especially when they come with bright slides, games and stocked kitchens all in the name of collaboration and creativity. And yet studies show attention span, productivity and creativity can create an unintended slide.
In the 1960′s – the revolutionary change sweeping the workplace was the introduction of what we now call cubicles. Half-walls that separate employees and give them some slight privacy.
Today, even those walls are tumbling… many employees work in tighter quarters with no walls at all.
By 2015 it’s estimated that three quarters of all companies will have an open plan office design.
In 1994, workers had about eight square metres to call their own. Today, that’s shrunk to less than seven.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Proper Etiquette Can Help You Land Your Dream Tech Job
http://www.cio.com/article/746953/How_Proper_Etiquette_Can_Help_You_Land_Your_Dream_Tech_Job?page=1&taxonomyId=3123
Job interviews can be nerve-wracking, but preparing for them and handling follow-up doesn’t have to be. Here are some ‘beyond the obvious’ tips for acing the lead-up and the aftermath of job interviews.
Tomi Engdahl says:
51 Startup Failure Post-Mortems
No survivorship bias here. A compilation of startup failure post-mortems by founders and investors. January 20, 2014
http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/startup-failure-post-mortem
On his many failed experiments, Thomas Edison once said
I have learned fifty thousand ways it cannot be done and therefore I am fifty thousand times nearer the final successful experiment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Jobs That Are Being Replaced By Machines
http://mashable.com/2014/01/26/10-jobs-replaced-by-machines/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link
Automation may claim as many as 47% of current jobs by 2033, according to a recent Oxford University study. If you’re planning a career that spans beyond the next decade, you may want to strike the following off the list. Why?
“In the future, it’s very likely that many of today’s jobs, from cashier to teller, will be automated and the need for real people to take on these roles won’t be needed as technology will catch up and take on these responsibilities,” says Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor community expert.
“Themes people should be aware of include low-skilled jobs being likely replaced by automation first, such as telemarketer or typist, whereas jobs requiring creativity or a social aspect to them are not as at risk.