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?
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Biggest Competitor… is Amazon
https://medium.com/@gideonro/the-google-amazon-slugfest-8a3a07a1d6dd
Two competitors, seemingly in different businesses, now determine the future of retail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is your boss making you sick?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/is-your-boss-making-you-sick/2014/10/20/60cd5d44-2953-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html
Having a bad boss can make your work life a misery, but it can also make you sick, both physically and mentally, researchers say.
“The evidence is clear that the leadership qualities of ‘bad’ bosses over time exert a heavy toll on employees’ health,” says Jonathan D. Quick, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the book “Preventive Stress Management in Organizations.” “The evidence is also clear that despite the rationalizations some leaders may use to defend their stress-inducing, unsupportive style, such behavior by leaders does not contribute to improved individual performance or organizational productivity.”
Research has linked having a lousy boss to an increased risk of heart attack, Quick said. Chronic stress that can result when someone must deal daily with a bad boss has been linked to high blood pressure, sleep problems and anxiety and is also associated with several unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, excessive use of alcohol and overeating.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT management of the Ten Commandments
1. Lead the IT as you would lead business
2. Service first
3. Lead through the people
4. Simplify
5. Develop wisely
6. Make it together
7. Make sure the organization’s ability
8. Lead affiliates
9. Know your strengths
10. Safely home
Prepare yourself, make sure to monitor and educate, so there is no point in anyone’s quiver.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/cio/blogit/CIO_100_blogi/itjohtamisen+kymmenen+kaskya/a1024511
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux systemd dev says open source is ‘SICK’, kernel community ‘awful’
Reckons newbies should beware of hostile straight white males
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/06/poettering_says_linux_kernel_community_is_hostil/
Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is “quite a sick place to be in.”
He also said the Linux development community is “awful” – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.
“A fish rots from the head down,” Poettering said in a post to his Google+ feed on Sunday.
Poettering said Torvalds’ confrontational and often foul-mouthed management style is “not an efficient way to run a community”
“The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days,” Poettering wrote.
The Linux main man has no great love for the core systemd developers, either. In April he called top systemd coder Kay Sievers a “fucking prima donna” and said he didn’t want to ever work with him.
From https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13rdjryqyn1xlt3522sxpugoz3gujbhh04
Much of the Open Source community tries to advertise the community as one happy place to the outside. Where contributions are valued only by their technical quality, and everybody meets at conferences for beers.
Well, it is not like that. It’s quite a sick place to be in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cyber security implementation for ICT and security staff
1. Instruct, train and educate, and to justify bans
2. Determine which remotely and at home may be made, and by what means
3. Define and guidelines for handling of classified information
4. Define and guidelines, train and educate the user and password policy and require the employees to use it
5. Make sure that the terminal’s security features are enabled
6. Make sure that the software automatically updated and are up to date
7. Instruct using the social media as well as the Apps
8. Be prepared for problems – who helps?
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/blogit/turvasatama/kyberturvallisuuden+toteuttamisen+huoneentaulu+ict+ja+tietoturvahenkilostolle/a1024492
More material: http://ict-tuki.fi/tietoturva/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Great IT Hiring He-Said / She-Said
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/11/04/0113217/the-great-it-hiring-he-said–she-said
Is there an IT talent shortage?
Or is there a clue shortage on the hiring side? Hiring managers put on their perfection goggles and write elaborate job descriptions laying out mandatory experience and know-how that the “purple squirrel” candidate must have. They define job openings to be entry-level, automatically excluding those in mid-career. Candidates suspect that the only real shortage is one of willingness to pay what they are worth. Job seekers bend over backwards to make it through HR’s keyword filters, only to be frustrated by phone screens seemingly administered by those who know only buzzwords.
The IT Talent Shortage Debate
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/team-building-and-staffing/the-it-talent-shortage-debate/d/d-id/1317128
Tech employers say good people are hard to find. Job hunters see a broken hiring process. Both sides need to shake their frustration and find new ways to connect.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Project Management Best Practices
http://www.techonline.com/electrical-engineers/education-training/tech-papers/4436282/Project-Management-Best-Practices
solid survival tips in the following categories:
Lay the foundation
Plan the project
Estimate the work
Track your progress
Learn for the future
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/11/13/1613258/your-incompetent-boss-is-making-you-unhappy
A new working paper shows strong support for what many have always suspected: your boss’s technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers’ well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector.
Boss Competence and Worker Well-being
http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/NovArtzGoodallOswald2014.pdf
Nearly all workers have a supervisor or ‘boss’. Yet there is almost no published research by economists into how bosses affect the quality of employees’ lives. This study offers some of the first formal evidence. First, it is shown that a boss’s technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a worker’s well-being. Second, we provide equivalent instrumental – variable results. Third, we demonstrate longitudinally that even if a worker stays in the same job and workplace then a newly competent supervisor greatly improves the worker’s well-being.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 tips to accelerate your engineering career
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/embedded-basics/4437578/10-tips-to-accelerate-your-engineering-career?elq=8d79b896806445e4a47affd6fbe35e87&elqCampaignId=20257
Tip #1 – Take time to plan your career
A critical step to any engineering career is to set time aside at least twice a year if not once per quarter to reflect and pander where you want your career to go. What is the end target that results in a successful career?
Tip #2 – Build a resume that shines
With a career plan in hand the odds today that an engineer will stay at a single company for their entire career is relatively slim. Periodically changing jobs is a quick way to move up the ladder (and pay scale) to reach career goals sooner.
Tip #3 – Master the tools of the trade
Mastery comes from continual reading of industry literature such as books, articles and specifications. The most important point to mastering the tools though is through use and experimentation.
Tip #4 – Step up to the plate
One of the simplest ways to start accelerating a career is to step up to the plate and do the things that others refuse to do. When the boss asks for someone to volunteer to do something step up and agree to do the work.
Tip #5 – Never feel satisfied
No matter how much you learn or become the subject matter expert, there is always more to learn! The mastery of every new skill always reveals another which is lacking.
Tip #6 – Experiment outside the office
There are few employers who don’t get excited when they see a candidate who not only goes to work and gets the job done but someone who then goes home and continues to experiment and learn. When walking into a job interview an individual can’t bring material from their current employer to show what they have done and are capable of doing; however, a project done at home on their time can be brought in and shown off!
Designing a circuit board, developing software, or creating a widget that can be brought into an interview is a sure way to stand apart.
Tip #7 – Learn to control the conversation
An easy way to help accelerate a career is to learn to control and direct conversation.
Tip #8 – Pursue a certification or higher education
Pursuing a certification or higher education degree is another way to show expertise and help elevate an engineer above their peers.
Tip #9 – Find a Mentor
Finding a mentor or a coach is a great way to manage a career. A mentor can help answer questions based on their own experiences and help guide and direct a career path.
Tip #10 – Use social media to share your expertise
The last tip to help accelerate an engineering career is to have a good online social media presence. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the engineer needs to be a thought leader in their field although that does help.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Must Market IT’s Value
http://www.cio.com/article/2835675/it-strategy/cios-must-market-its-value.html
Why don’t more CIOs make it a serious priority to market IT internally? Done well, it shows the business value of IT and gives visibility to top performers, says CIO Publisher Adam Dennison.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Fish for (and Land) IT Talent
http://www.cio.com/article/2835765/careers-staffing/how-to-fish-for-and-land-it-talent.html
CIOs need to be deeply involved in writing IT job postings — not just leave it to the HR admin — to lure great hires.
Tomi Engdahl says:
White Papers: Key to B2B Enterprise SEO Power
http://downloads.digitalmarketingdepot.com/DMD_1407_Key2B2BSEO_display.html?utm_source=selml&utm_medium=display&utm_content=cui&utm_campaign=auddev
Enterprise marketers, particularly in the B2B space, often find content development for SEO a difficult proposition. The company’s thought leaders are often afraid of committing to a writing schedule. And the marketer is trying to get others to “squeeze in” content, essentially “off the books.” With no reward, why should anyone help with the difficult, thankless work of writing white papers? The trick is for the marketer to take advantage of three key tactics:
• Appealing to the ego
• Re-purposing
• Transcription
Tomi Engdahl says:
How CSOs Can Help CIOs Talk Security to the Board
http://www.cio.com/article/2850855/security0/how-csos-can-help-cios-talk-security-to-the-board.html
CIOs aren’t necessarily security experts, but that doesn’t mean they can’t speak intelligently to the company’s board of directors. The key is getting a little coaching from the CSO about how and what to communicate.
Most CIOs are not security experts, but in the board room they need to be. Thanks to the CSO, they don’t have to go it alone. Behind the scenes, they can help prepare the CIO, offering advice on how to interpret the company’s threat levels, boiling down the most relevant information and communicating it, early and often, so the C-suite will pay attention.
“The challenges when you take on the CIO role or an executive role are that you don’t think all about security,” said Michael Hart, vice president and CIO of Petwell Partners, during a panel discussion at CIO Perspectives Houston last week. “You rely on the CISO.”
The panelists, which included IT and security executives, discussed common assumptions about security risks, ways to get your business colleagues to take those risks seriously and best practices to use at your companies.
“Address past, present and future — and make a case for the CEO. Get on his radar with a weekly report and education,” said Michael Oberlaender, global security expert, author and former security executive. He also said it’s important to create a program that C-suite executives can follow and include clear policies for employees to abide by. “Your company will have a breach sooner or later,” he said. “So educate your executives that you can do something about it.”
Lastly, it’s critical to involve the legal department, which, Sutton says, can never happen too early. “Please get legal folks involved early on before your data is on fire,” he said. “Help us, help you.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New job in 2015? The Reg guide to getting out and moving on
The planning starts now
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/24/new_job_in_2015_the_planning_starts_now/
While the temptation, particularly for technical roles, may be to wow prospective bosses with jargon, lists of technical certifications, and geek-speak, it’s also important to make it easy for your audience to pull out the information relevant to them. Tailor your CV to the job you’re applying for, making sure that the most relevant courses and previous roles are listed.
The importance of “other” interests
Remember, too, that non-work achievements can really help boost career prospects by illustrating sought-after attributes such as creative flair or an ability to thrive in high pressure environments, says Michael Snow, business development manager at Capita IT Resourcing. Sure, a company wants to know that you have the relevant training, qualifications or work experience, but they also want to understand what type of individual they are dealing with.
The chances are, any prospective employer will have done their homework on you. As competition for good people heats up, being scouted for a top role increasingly relies on your “job-seeker searchability”.
Social network: handle carefully
Needless to say, any inconsistencies between data on candidates’ CVs and what is publicly available about them online will raise serious questions. LinkedIn is the site most companies will search to find you, but don’t overlook the impact that other social media channels could have: now’s the time to tidy up your Facebook profile, remove “that” picture or revisit your privacy settings.
Don’t be a geek
With IT departments increasingly central to businesses, it’s more important than ever that candidates can show themselves – whether through their CVs, social media presence or during the interview process – as possessing the skills to interact with the multiple business departments in an engaging and approachable way.
Combining a current tech skill with business savvy, such as project management, will make you very employable.
Although re-skilling can make a candidate more marketable, if they don’t have any commercial or on-the-job experience with that specific skill, they may lose out to a stronger candidate. So it is important to try and get that experience, even if it has to go unpaid – it will play in their favour in the long run,” warns Joanne Clifford, head of recruitment at Daisy Group.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Star Witness in Apple Lawsuit Is Steve Jobs
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/technology/star-witness-in-apple-suit-is-steve-jobs.html?_r=0
Three years after his death, Steve Jobs is very much a presence in courtrooms across the country.
And that’s not necessarily good news for Apple.
In December, the company is set to go to trial in the third major antitrust lawsuit it has faced since Mr. Jobs died. His emails will play an important role in the case, as they did in the last two. But lawyers will probably have to work hard to give his statements a positive spin. The potential damages — around $350 million — are a pittance for a company that in its last quarter had an $8.5 billion profit.
Executives are often told by their lawyers to be careful what they put in writing for fear it will end up as evidence in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Jobs did not get the memo. His emails in past lawsuits — a mix of blunt litigation threats against his opponents and cheery financial promises for potential business partners — have made him an exceptional witness against his own company, even beyond the grave.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Spec Dilemma
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324803&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want To Work For a Cool Tech Company? Hone Your Social Skills
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/01/2040209/want-to-work-for-a-cool-tech-company-hone-your-social-skills
Want to work at a fun tech company? Practice your social skills.
http://www.itworld.com/article/2851715/want-to-work-at-a-fun-tech-company-practice-your-social-skills.html
Programmers and Engineers entering the job market usually have high hopes of working at a hip, fun, start-up style company like they’ve seen on TV or in the movies. They want the colorful and modern offices with wacky chairs, in house chefs, game rooms, and high pay. While these jobs are out there, not all of them are equal. The truly great places to work are the ones that value their culture above pretty much all else. And for every one that does, there are many more that don’t, even if they have a similar outward appearance. When you find one of the good ones, you need to focus on more than just your technical skills and experience, you need to show that you can be one of them.
Depending on where you’re job hunting, your skill set may be common or it may be very rare.
Once you’re comfortable that this is the place you want to work, what are some things you can do during an interview to show you’re the type of person the company wants in their next ping pong tournament or beer tasting event?
Be positive and friendly
Be lighthearted and easy going
Be genuine
Be eager to learn
Be ambitious and hard working
Talk about your personal interests
Have examples of comparable challenges you’ve faced
Speak broadly about your skill set
Show willingness to adapt and become what’s needed (skill-wise, not personality)
In the end if you’ve been honest and genuine and they don’t bring you on board, it probably wasn’t the right place for you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Workers On Autism Spectrum Finding Careers In Software TestingWorkers On Autism Spectrum Finding Careers In Software Testing
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/01/1958230/workers-on-autism-spectrum-finding-careers-in-software-testing
According to Autism Speaks, about 85% of people who have autism in the United States are currently unemployed or underemployed, but a social enterprise organization called Meticulon is training autistic individuals for highly skilled jobs in software testing. According to Meticulon, autistic people often possess sharp memory and pattern matching skills as well as attention to detail, making them ideal candidates for software testing jobs.
Finding a fit for autism in testing
http://sdtimes.com/autistic-advantage-software-testing/
Intense focus, sharp memory and pattern recognition are some of the traits that a great software tester has to have. It so happens that those traits are prominent in individuals on the autism spectrum.
Autism is a term used to describe complex disorders of brain development, and a person with autism often experiences difficulties with social interaction, communications and imagination. But they also often shine in areas of visual skills, music, math and art, according to the advocacy organization Autism Speaks.
There are many talents a person with autism can bring to the workforce, but they often have difficulty landing jobs. According to Autism Speaks, about 85% of people who have autism in the United States are currently unemployed or underemployed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now we need to lead in it that you do not understand anything
In recent years, I have begun to look at a slightly different angle. In summary, we could say that we live in a time where no longer be able to understand different points of view.
If you already have a home high-speed Internet, high-definition television (or even UHD), cellular phone, Netflix, Spotify, etc., You still would like to see more?
For many people it is very difficult to conceive that, after this will be much, much more.
This guess has always been throughout history. The writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “enough advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The pace of change is accelerating all the time. We are reaching the point where the pace of change is no longer attached to the engineers to produce technological innovation but only to the imagination of the people to use technology.
Each project can therefore be a pioneer.
How does a project manager will ensure that you no longer an obstacle, if someone proposes something that you will not even be able to understand?
How someone came up with Uber – billion-dollar business, which is based on only one application, which you can download on your phone? In Europe it is clearly not invented, because here the resistance to change service point is hard.
The project manager is an obstacle to change, if he does not understand the potential of the digital revolution. The same otherwise applies to everyone, whether you are the CEO or a member of the project.
The pace is accelerating, cycles faster. Imagination and business models are key. R & D department engineers no longer have a monopoly on innovation-making.
If, therefore, invented a good story, and it has business value, its implementation is nothing more than an obstacle to the digital era version of the change in resistance. Technology is no longer an obstacle. The only obstacle is the lack of understanding of what the technology can do.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/viisaat/accenture/nyt+pitaa+johtaa+sellaista+mista+ei+ymmarra+mitaan/a1032932
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social media data is RIDDLED with human behaviour errors, boffins warn
Trick-cyclists peddling BS about our online lives. Who knew?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/30/social_media_data_is_riddled_with_human_behaviour_errors_boffins_warn/
Researchers who heavily rely on social media data when studying human behaviour have been warned that such information can be very easily skewed.
Computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said in a paper published yesterday in the Science magazine that trick-cyclists were failing to spot the flaws in the data.
And yet, in recent years, there has been an explosion of studies on human behaviour using social media as a barometer for all kinds of predictions about the world we live in now.
“Many of these papers are used to inform and justify decisions and investments among the public and in industry and government,”
Despite the blindingly obvious weaknesses found in such data, Ruths remained optimistic about researchers using social media in their studies, if they tackle the problems outlined by the prof and his colleagues.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stop Wasting Everyone’s Time
Meetings and Emails Kill Hours, but You Can Identify the Worst Offenders
http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-to-stop-wasting-colleagues-time-1417562658?mod=trending_now_5
At the end of the day, many people wonder where all their time went.
New data-mining tools are helping employers answer that question. The causes of overload have long been suspected—email and meetings—but new techniques that analyze employees’ email headers and online calendars are helping employers pinpoint exactly which work groups impose the most on employees’ time.
The result: some surprises for managers, says Joan Motsinger, vice president, global operations strategy, for Seagate Technology , a Cupertino, Calif., company that studied how its employee teams use time and work together. At Seagate, some work groups discovered they were devoting more than 20 hours a week to meetings, according to an analysis of 7,600 Seagate employees’ interaction and activities in 2013 by VoloMetrix in Seattle. Also, one consulting firm was generating nearly 3,700 emails and draining 8,000 work hours annually from 228 Seagate employees.
Seagate has since reduced meetings and cut back on its dealings with the time-draining consulting firm. “You improve what you measure,” Ms. Motsinger says.
VoloMetrix’s software draws data from employees’ email headers and calendars to show whether, how, and how often groups are interacting
“A small handful of people are really off the charts,” says Chantrelle Nielsen, head of customer solutions at VoloMetrix. In studying more than 25 companies, VoloMetrix has found executives who consume more than 400 hours a week of colleagues’ time, “the equivalent of 10 people working full-time every week just to read one manager’s email and attend his or her meetings,” she says.
Common time-wasting habits include copying too many people into emails and overuse of “reply all.” Inviting too many people to meetings is another common mistake
On email, many employees spend a lot of time writing responses because they fear failing to answer will offend colleagues or hamper their work. However, many emails don’t require a response, Mr. Mankins says.
Trying to collaborate via email poses challenges, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 Ways to Know a Company’s Work Culture (Without Asking)
http://www.zoho.com/general/blog/5-ways-to-know-a-companys-work-culture-without-asking.html
I’m surprised when my friends tell me they know nothing about the culture of a company they are about to join. ‘It pays well, and I like my job title. That’s all that matters.’ Does it, really? These are important factors, for sure, but if you can’t be happy where you work, you won’t stick around for long.
1. Take a look around: You know how you would survey your potential new home? That’s what you should be doing when entering your prospective office for an interview. The only drawback here is, you can’t really ask the ‘broker’ any direct questions. Don’t fret, though, it’s amazing how much you can learn from just casually glancing around. Just keep your eyes and ears open.
2. Attentiveness goes both ways: ‘So what do you do in your free time?’ As I answer, I can tell my interviewer isn’t really listening because she has already moved on to the next question. If she’s your future manager, and she’s not interested in what you have to say … well, I don’t think you are expected to contribute much in this company.
3. Are you human?: I have attended a few interviews where I wanted to jump up and display a Captcha code and ask the interviewer: Are you a human or robot?
There are so many blogs and books out there that talk about the importance of body
language at an interview. Unfortunately, they are all directed at the interviewee
4. Resume vs person: Let me just say it, I am more than my resume. Some recruiters insist on going over each point of your resume, and while that is important, isn’t an interview so much more than that? I love to see interviewers take a cue from my resume to ask me more insightful questions.
5. Does your manager love her company?
‘Before we give you the test, I just want to tell you this job requires a lot of hard work and long hours. It’s not all fun and games.’ I should have known then, that this was not a happy workplace (or my manager wasn’t a happy camper – either way, I should have stayed away).
I’ve met people who love their jobs and the companies they work for. It is rare, but when it has been a long-lasting affair, you know it is true love.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-can-we-get-business-care-about-freedom-openness-and-interoperability
They use our stuff. Why not our values too?
At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.
For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems.
We are seeing the same thing start to happen already with the Internet of Things (IoT), about which Bruce Sterling has written a brilliant essay titled The Epic Struggle of The Internet of Things. “The first thing to understand about the ‘Internet of Things’”, he says, “is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that powerful stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes. They like the slogan ‘Internet of Things’ because it sounds peaceable and progressive. It disguises the epic struggle over power, money and influence that is about to ensue. There is genuine Internet technology involved in the ‘Internet of Things’. However, the legacy Internet of yesterday is a shrinking part of what is at stake now.”
One dividing line is between standards and platforms built on them. This is also the line between infrastructure and commerce in the “layers of time”
FOSS building materials are all at the Infrastructure layer. So are the standards that create the Net and the Web: TCP/IP, HTTP and the rest. These and countless thousands (millions?) of standards and code bases support boundless freedom and generativity for everything that’s built on them and with them, up at the Commerce and Fashion-Art levels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Sniper Mentality: 4 Ways To Think Better Under Pressure
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/05/14/sniper-mentality-leader/
In an ideal world, we want our business leaders to be a little bit superhuman.
We want our leaders to exhibit the icy calmness of a sniper when under pressure: Decisive, with a clear sense of purpose, a complete understanding of what needs to be done, and the willingness to do it.
Here are four ways to be that sniper-like, superhuman leader…
1. It’s Personal
2. It Requires Empathy
3. Calculate Everything
4. Carry Out A Situation Assessment
But Leaders Are Not Snipers
There are studies that show that some leaders lack empathy and other personality traits that allow them to humanize their decisions. In a social-media environment, where everything enterprise does is open to interpretation, the wrong type of leadership can be catastrophic.
The DARPA study showed that snipers who were taught to recreate the optimum mental frame of mind dramatically improved their own performance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Develop Mental Toughness
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-develop-mental-toughness.html
Mental toughness is what separates the superstar from the merely good. It separates the musicians that play small party gigs from the rock stars. Someone without mental toughness can have all the natural talents or ability and not make it as far as someone with mental toughness with average ability.
The key to mental toughness is applying consistently the traits of self motivation, positive attitude, emotional self control, calmness under fire, and being energetic and ready for action. Consistency is important.
10 Mental Toughness Fundamentals for Entrepreneurs
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-mental-toughness-fundamentals-for-entrepreneurs-2012-4
In sports, mental toughness is defined as the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity. If anyone in business ever needed mental toughness, it’s an entrepreneur. Investors tell me that startup success is all about execution, all while facing determined competitors and overcoming customers’ resistance to change.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Interesting articles:
http://www.businessinsider.com/author/jeff-haden
Tomi Engdahl says:
40 Words That People Almost Always Get Wrong
Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141203134446-20017018-40-incorrectly-used-words-that-can-make-you-look-dumb#ixzz3LJWxf5v3
Tomi Engdahl says:
9 Things Very Successful People Never Do
http://www.businessinsider.com/things-successful-people-never-do-2014-12
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sisu: How to Develop Mental Toughness in the Face of Adversity
http://jamesclear.com/sisu-mental-toughness
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Habits Of People With Remarkable Mental Toughness
Read more: http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/7-habits-of-people-with-remarkable-mental-toughness.html#ixzz3LJXpGDEl
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to get ahead in IT: Swap the geek speak for the spreadsheet
A techie’s guide to understanding the bosses’ biz
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/28/techies_talking_business/
Increasingly, we’re told, IT types who “understand” their organisation’s business can help their business and get ahead. But what does “understanding” the business actually mean? Why does it matter and how does an ambitious IT professional get the mix of skills needed to attain that understanding and also hit the fast track?
The IT recruitment market is flying, having picked up to a post-recession high. As IT recruiters battle to fill vacancies, competition for the best people has led to a frenzied market, with the right candidates being offered jobs at interview stage and the most sought-after skills commanding salaries up 10 per cent on this time last year.
Despite the buoyancy of the market, companies still complain of skills shortages as the quest for a new breed of business-focused IT pros steps up a pace. And while the temptation may be for technical roles to wow prospective bosses with jargon and lists of technical certifications, many roles today encourage you to park the geek-speak.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Strategic planning
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2014-12-17/
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Common Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make
Not a grammar geek? Doesn’t matter. Using words incorrectly can make you look bad. Here’s some help.
http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/10-common-grammar-mistakes-even-smart-people-make.html
How well you use words can make a lasting impression on people. Wield those words skillfully and people may perceive you in any number of positive lights–as intelligent, poised, persuasive, funny, to name a few. But even one little grammatical slip can have the opposite effect.
It’s a topic that worries lots of people. Inc. columnist Jeff Haden recently pointed out 30 Incorrectly Used Words That Can Make You Look Bad, which readers shared more than 75,000 times on social networks. Here are 10 more to add to the list.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Handle a Co-Worker Who’s a Chronic Complainer
http://time.com/money/3620933/complaining-gossipy-coworker/
A: Everybody needs to let off steam once in a while. But be careful about getting sucked into a gripe session about your boss. What you say could come back to bite you.
You are probably not the only one to whom your colleague is complaining.
“Make sure whatever you say you would also be comfortable with if someone repeated it to your boss,” says Brownlee.
If there’s a serious issue that should be addressed, encourage your colleague to raise the problem with the boss directly—and suggest a tactful way to do it. “It’s not going to solve your colleague’s problem just talking to you about it,” says Brownlee.
On the other hand, if your colleague is a chronic complainer who is more interested in moaning about things than fixing problems, it’s time to short circuit that aspect of your relationship.
Constant complaining wears you down and distracts you from your work. Plus, turning a sympathetic ear will only encourage your colleague to come back to with a subsequent rant. “Complaining is like a fire, it needs oxygen,” says Brownlee. “And complainers seek out people who will feed that fire.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU VAT law could kill THOUSANDS of online businesses
Selling knick-knacks? Register or face taxman’s WRATH
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/17/eu_vat_law_could_kill_off_thousands_of_online_businesses/
New EU tax rules that come into force on 1 January could kill thousands of mini and micro online businesses.
The new VAT rules have been on the cards for six years and are ostensibly aimed at preventing big companies (yes, we mean you, Amazon, Apple and Starbucks) from claiming that all their European profit is made in Luxembourg (or similar tax havens) where they benefit from paying hardly any tax.
To this end, online businesses will have to pay tax in the country of the consumer buying the goods, not the business. The side effect of this seems to be that many small businesses will find themselves having to unravel miles of red tape associated with complying with 28 different VAT regimes.
However, that still leaves a lot of small businesses with a lot of extra work to do and would undermine new EU digi-veep Andrus Ansip’s plans for a true digital single market. He was, therefore, keen to point the finger of blame elsewhere: “Given that this change was adopted six years ago, member states should have helped businesses to prepare. But even if the concerns come late, they should be listened to. Companies should not be left alone. One practical aid should be the one-stop-shops that have been put in place.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get Gifted in Sales & Ops Planning
http://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=3219&doc_id=276044&
Managing sales and operations planning (S&OP) in a formalized way can put an electronics OEM at the head of the pack, and lead to a good year-end sales report. That’s the gift that keeps on giving during the holiday season.
Although accurate forecasting leads to myriad benefits, getting there can make even the most sophisticated organization feel less than merry. In fact, one in five organizations tags S&OP processes as the single most significant opportunity for improvement, according to research by E2Open.
variety of potential benefits for organizations focusing on S&OP, including:
Gross margin improvements of 25% to 35%
Significant savings from product and customer rationalization
Customer retention improvements of 10% or more
Order fulfillment rate improvements of 20% to 40%
Product introduction success rates growing in direct proportion to S&OP maturity
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aggravations on the job are a fact of life. From the colleague who steals your chair to the colleague who steals your clients, there is enough potential for conflict to take up most of the work week.
The majority of the employees in enterprises face sometimes, for example, personal chemistry problems caused by the workplace.
Business newspaper The Wall Street Journal writes that it is essential to understand when you should raise the cat on the table and in what way.
The Wall Street Journal, the following issues should be submitted in the workplace aside,
Do not start wars salary if you do not have to propose a settlement
Do not begin to argue about things that are not important to the employer, or your work in terms of
Do not interfere in matters which do not belong to their own responsibility
Do not challenge a dispute with a colleague just because you do not like his character
Do not quarrel with a colleague, if he is to you more influential
Journal notes, however, that important, affecting the work of the problems you should try to resolve.
Sources:
http://www.tivi.fi/tividuunit/naista+asioista+ei+kannata+tyopaikalla+aloittaa+sotaa/a1038705
http://www.wsj.com/articles/picking-your-workplace-battles-1418772621
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jump-Start Your Tech Job Search in 2015
http://news.dice.com/2014/12/31/jumpstart-tech-job-search-2015/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
It’s a brand new year, and by all indications the economy’s doing pretty well, which means that a lot of people will begin looking for a new, possibly better job. If you’re one of those job seekers, here are some tips for jump-starting your search
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Resume Makeover: How (and When) to Break the Rules
http://www.cio.com/article/2684941/careers-staffing/it-resume-makeover-how-and-when-to-break-the-rules.html#tk.cio_nsdr_intrcpt
The ironclad rule of resume writing is to highlight your career in reverse chronological order – all the time, every time, right? Wrong. Resume expert Donald Burns explains why.
“As a resume writer I must condense a typical two-hour career story into a document that can be read and understood in about six seconds,” says Burns.
What does resume makeover candidate Michael Wallace have in common with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? Each created something very big at the beginning of their careers and spent the rest of their professional lives building on that initial success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 things control engineers should know about management
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/7-things-control-engineers-should-know-about-management/3f325ecc576b65bdcd9d4b0cceb2e1d3.html
How to communicate effectively with management and accelerate your career: Engineers should know these 7 things about management today. Don’t wait for others to delegate the needed resources or complain that they haven’t. Leadership can be innate, earned, learned, or situational, but knowing these strategies and tactics and reviewing these examples can help you succeed. (See also: 7 things noncontrol people should know about control engineers.) Send a link to others, so they understand.
Management vs. leadership
Management is the act of achieving a targeted result with limited resources. Those resources are money, material, and people. If you had unlimited resources, no management skill would be required. Anyone can be assigned to a management position. In business the manager must perform. The farther you move away from a “Mom and Pop” shop toward a Fortune 500 company, the greater the demand for performance.
Leading to results
The manager is not necessarily the leader, and the leader may not be a manager. A teacher manages the classroom and may appear to be the leader. However, sometimes the leader may be a student (which is often disruptive). We have all encountered that manager with zero people skills. “Why do they keep him?” The answer is simple: He performs. Give him credit, he has found a way to be effective. A manager’s job security is directly related to his ability to achieve results. Leadership is optional.
1. We are a profit company.
Only the government can offer job security while losing money year after year. If a company does not turn a profit, all its employees end up unemployed.
2. Know your competition.
Those who are most successful know with whom they are competing. At the corporate level, companies compete for market share and public image with a goal of improved profit. The company’s plants support those goals. Those plants, however, are in competition with each other.
3. Expect and prepare for skepticism.
Every plant manager knows one absolutely true fact: If all the projects completed to date saved the money claimed, we would be making our product for free. How is this possible? While a few projects just don’t pan out, others often transfer the cost to another department.
4. Never be negative, never.
Always think, act, and speak in the positive. A positive attitude is contagious and creates an atmosphere of approval. Any negativity will cause people to back away, not wanting to be part of anything you propose.
5. Play nice in the sandbox.
Learn to put teamwork and group harmony first. Task oriented vs. people oriented: there is no reason for these to be mutually exclusive.
6. Think outside the box.
Yes, thinking out of the box is often recommended, but you do need to be creative and not accept sacred cow taboos as absolute.
7. Think like a manager, and develop as a leader.
You should stop growing the day after you die, not a minute before. Here are 10 ways to think like a manager and develop as a leader:
a. Well-managed companies try to maximize profit over the entire business cycle, not just the short term. Short term may appear wrong at lower levels.
b. If you can’t measure it, it’s not provable.
c. Profit and capitalism are very, very good-not bad.
d. Very few buy stock for the sake of producing a product. Stock is bought for return, like your individual retirement account (IRA).
e. Bankrupt companies pay no wages and no taxes.
f. If you can’t sell it, you are ineffective.
g. Only you will fight for your jobs, so be your own advocate.
h. There is only so much money to go around, so when you don’t get everything, do not take it personally. Try again next year and remember Number 3.
i. Never buy serial number 1. (Corollary: Only load odd-numbered releases.)
j. Override your first tendency if you’re now thinking: “I should hide this article from the rest of my department.” That would be a natural corollary to Number 2: Know your competition. I encourage you to put that aside and more strongly consider Number 5: Play nice in the sandbox. Why 5 over 2? Because when you start caring about the development of those around you, when you become a resource and help others in your plant, you are thinking like a manger and developing as a leader (number 7).
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 things noncontrol people should know about control engineers
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/7-things-noncontrol-people-should-know-about-control-engineers/468a965ceb6770928a1a7984c1ac3218.html
A few basic differences between control engineers and others in the plant can hinder progress toward optimization. Start a conversation to improve communications and controls. See examples and career advice. Send a link to these seven things other people should know about control engineers, so they understand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook worth more than Portugal? Hell, it’s worth a LOT more than THAT
Zuck should have hired ME
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/worstall_weds_facebook/
Facebook has commissioned a report showing what vast amounts of wonderful, beneficial economic activity it is responsible for indicates that the company in fact contributes nothing.
Not that the Wall Street Journal uses quite that language but the message is clear:
“The results are meaningless,” Stanford economist Roger Noll said in an email. “Facebook is an effect, not a cause, of the growth of Internet access and use.” … “The value of smartphones is that they help you read Facebook – in addition to other benefits – not vice versa,” Cowen said, calling the study’s calculations “bad reasoning.”
However, having dismissed this calculation of the economic impact of Facebitch as nothing but a hot, soapy hand job to the corporate ego we do rather face the problem of working out what the hell the contribution of Facebitch to the economy is. And that’s problematic, as a conversation I’ve been having around and about recently reveals. Because in conventional economic statistics that contribution by Facebook is only $12bn globally. And that’s just insane.
So, in the GDP statistics Facebook’s value is the advertising that it sells. That’s the production. T
This led to Marc Andreessen musing on where the heck all the economic growth is. We can see technology roaring ahead but can’t seem to see the results in GDP. Nor in productivity for that matter. So where is the effect of all that roaring technology? Larry Summers then said yup, it’s all a bit of a puzzle but it’s not because this new tech is deflationary, as Andreessen had mused.
A reasonable value to start with is the US average (mean) wage of $24 an hour. We obviously prefer to be on Facebook to working. At the margin that is. Another more reasonable answer is at the minimum wage.
es, yes, I know there’re holes in this reasoning. No, we don’t think that anyone would willingly pay $7.25 an hour to play on social media. But it’s also true that people do this a lot, this social media, and thus they must assign a value to the doing of it.
And thus we can reach an “economic value in consumption” for Facebook, for the US, of $232bn to $769bn. Which is, I agree, a bit mad.
Another way of putting this is that something that Americans spend 32 billion hours a year on, voluntarily, can’t really have an economic value of only $12bn. It’s just nonsense to value people’s time at under 40 cents an hour.
We’ve thus got a vast range of economic values that we can ascribe to the adslinging network. It could be nothing [or indeed less than nothing -Ed] as that editor proposes. It could be $12bn as conventional accounts would have it. It could be $100bn to the US economy and globally,
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Tech Industry’s Legacy: Creating Disposable Employees
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/01/21/164225/the-tech-industrys-legacy-creating-disposable-employees
VentureBeat is running an indictment of the tech industry’s penchant for laying off huge numbers of people, which they say is responsible for creating a culture of “disposable employees.” According to recent reports, layoffs in the tech sector reached over 100,000 last year, the highest total since 2009. Of course, there are always reasons for layoffs
But the article argues that this is often just a smokescreen. “The notion here is that somehow these companies are backed into a corner, with no other option than to fire people. And that’s just not true. These companies are making a choice. They’re deciding that it’s faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them.”
Disposable employees may be tech industry’s greatest achievement
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/20/disposable-employees-may-be-tech-industrys-greatest-achievement/
A Bloomberg story about layoffs rising at tech companies has been making the rounds. It seems so counter-intuitive: How can job cuts be soaring when tech is booming?
Everyone seems surprised, but they shouldn’t be. Tech, more than any other industry, has succeeded in convincing us over the past two decades that workers are entirely disposable.
We throw out smartphones after two years. Replace our PCs every few years when they get slow. Why can’t we do the same with people?
Turns out, we can. Or, at least, we can try.
“Despite the overall strength of the tech sector, employers in the computer industry saw the heaviest downsizing of the year, announcing a total of 59,528 planned layoffs. That is 69 percent more than a year ago.”
That was seriously bucking a trend during a year in which layoff announcements across all industries in the U.S. fell from 509,051 to 483,171. As a result, in 2014, tech accounted for one out of 5 layoff announcements.
The good news, I suppose, is that these numbers are well below the post dot-com bubble era.
But if you look before the dot-com bust (1997-1999) and the post-bust, pre-recession years (2004-2008), tech still represented an unusually large percentage of overall job cuts.
Benner sums up many of the explanations that are commonly handed out for the tech industry’s exuberant human weed-whacking. Companies buy other companies and need to rationalize headcount. And there’s all that disruption. Big companies, in particular, are seeing their business models challenged by startups, so they need to shed employees with skills they no longer need, and hire people with the right skills.
“But I agree with them: It’s absolutely necessary for all of these companies to clean house,” Benner says. “They have to do it to change and, perhaps, survive.”
She adds: “But a big part of the industry is trying to revamp, catch up, and keep the market healthy — and they’re cutting jobs to get there.”
These companies are making a choice. They’re deciding that it’s faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it’s a more complex calculation than most people believe.
But severance is not the only cost. There are intangibles, like morale. And there are other fiscal costs, like the price of recruiting and orienting new employees. There is a cost in time and money when you have to train new employees in your internal procedures and culture, get their computer hooked up, help them find the toilets, etc.
More often, layoffs make things worse, rather than better.
“Some managers compare layoffs to amputation: that sometimes you have to cut off a body part to save the whole,” he wrote. “As metaphors go, this one is particularly misplaced. Layoffs are more like bloodletting, weakening the entire organism.”
Which all begs the real question: If layoffs don’t really work, why does everyone keep doing them, even in good times?
“Part of the answer lies in the immense pressure corporate leaders feel — from the media, from analysts, from peers — to follow the crowd no matter what,” Pfeffer said.
In other words, corporate leaders in tech lay people off because it’s what everyone else does. This is perhaps the saddest commentary on the tech industry. Rather than being full of mavericks, tech’s overuse of layoffs reveals it to be an industry led by people who are unable to think for themselves
Tomi Engdahl says:
Talent management
21st-Century Talent Spotting
https://hbr.org/2014/06/21st-century-talent-spotting
Why did the CEO of the electronics business, who seemed so right for the position, fail so miserably? And why did Algorta, so clearly unqualified, succeed so spectacularly? The answer is potential: the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. Algorta had it; the first CEO did not.
Having spent 30 years evaluating and tracking executives and studying the factors in their performance, I now consider potential to be the most important predictor of success at all levels, from junior management to the C-suite and the board.
With this article, I share those lessons. As business becomes more volatile and complex, and the global market for top professionals gets tighter, I am convinced that organizations and their leaders must transition to what I think of as a new era of talent spotting—one in which our evaluations of one another are based not on brawn, brains, experience, or competencies, but on potential.
A New Era
The first era of talent spotting lasted millennia. For thousands of years, humans made choices about one another on the basis of physical attributes.
I was born and raised during the second era, which emphasized intelligence, experience, and past performance. Throughout much of the 20th century, IQ—verbal, analytical, mathematical, and logical cleverness—was justifiably seen as an important factor in hiring processes (particularly for white-collar roles), with educational pedigrees and tests used as proxies. Much work also became standardized and professionalized. Many kinds of workers could be certified with reliability and transparency, and since most roles were relatively similar across companies and industries, and from year to year, past performance was considered a fine indicator. If you were looking for an engineer, accountant, lawyer, designer, or CEO, you would scout out, interview, and hire the smartest, most experienced engineer, accountant, lawyer, designer, or CEO.
I joined the executive search profession in the 1980s, at the beginning of the third era of talent spotting, which was driven by the competency movement still prevalent today.
Now we’re at the dawn of a fourth era, in which the focus must shift to potential. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment (VUCA is the military-acronym-turned-corporate-buzzword), competency-based appraisals and appointments are increasingly insufficient. What makes someone successful in a particular role today might not tomorrow if the competitive environment shifts, the company’s strategy changes, or he or she must collaborate with or manage a different group of colleagues. So the question is not whether your company’s employees and leaders have the right skills; it’s whether they have the potential to learn new ones.
Unfortunately, potential is much harder to discern than competence (though not impossible, as I’ll describe later).
The recent noise about high unemployment rates in the United States and Europe hides important signals: Three forces—globalization, demographics, and pipelines—will make senior talent ever scarcer in the years to come.
The impact of demographics on hiring pools is also undeniable. The sweet spot for rising senior executives is the 35-to-44-year-old age bracket, but the percentage of people in that range is shrinking dramatically.
The third phenomenon is related and equally powerful, but much less well known: Companies are not properly developing their pipelines of future leaders.
In many companies, particularly those based in developed markets, I’ve found that half of senior leaders will be eligible for retirement within the next two years, and half of them don’t have a successor ready or able to take over. As Groysberg puts it, “Companies may not be feeling pain today, but in five or 10 years, as people retire or move on, where will the next generation of leaders come from?”
How can you tell if a candidate you’ve just met—or a current employee—has potential? By mining his or her personal and professional history, as I’ve just done with Algorta’s. Conduct in-depth interviews or career discussions, and do thorough reference checks to uncover stories that demonstrate whether the person has (or lacks) these qualities. For instance, to assess curiosity, don’t just ask, “Are you curious?” Instead, look for signs that the person believes in self-improvement, truly enjoys learning, and is able to recalibrate after missteps. Questions like the following can help:
How do you react when someone challenges you?
How do you invite input from others on your team?
What do you do to broaden your thinking, experience, or personal development?
How do you foster learning in your organization?
What steps do you take to seek out the unknown?
Always ask for concrete examples, and go just as deep in your exploration of motivation, insight, engagement, and determination. Your conversations with managers, colleagues, and direct reports who know the person well should be just as detailed.
Researchers have found that while the best interviewers’ assessments have a very high positive correlation with the candidates’ ultimate performance, some interviewers’ opinions are worse than flipping a coin.
By contrast, companies that emphasize the right kind of hiring vastly improve their odds.
“Pushing your high potentials up a straight ladder won’t accelerate their growth—uncomfortable assignments will.”
Your final job is to make sure your stars live up to the high potential you’ve spotted in them by offering development opportunities that push them out of their comfort zones.
Pushing your high potentials up a straight ladder toward bigger jobs, budgets, and staffs will continue their growth, but it won’t accelerate it. Diverse, complex, challenging, uncomfortable roles will. When we recently asked 823 international executives to look back at their careers and tell us what had helped them unleash their potential, the most popular answer, cited by 71%, was stretch assignments. Job rotations and personal mentors, each mentioned by 49% of respondents, tied for second.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Business Plan: The Document Nobody Read
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325506&
Business plans are still one of the most important documents any company develops.
It used to be that one of the first things the founding team of a start-up did was write the business plan. The thinking was that the company’s business plan was written expressly for venture capitalists and was essential to raise money. However, it has become clear that venture capitalists do not expect — and will not read — a traditional business plan. Does that mean that the business plan is a useless, obsolete document?
I have a different, more pragmatic view of a business plan’s value and believe it still is one of the most important documents any company develops. The reasons are varied and considerable, but the most important motivation to invest the time in writing the plan is the absolute need to clarify the corporate goals, objectives and plans of the fledgling startup.
Driven by this goal, the process of writing the business plan becomes more important than the final document itself. During the creation of the plan, the founding team will need to develop in-depth answers to questions about its mission, product direction, market availability and strengths and weaknesses.
Let me briefly cover two examples of key questions that will need to be resolved. The first is the capitalization table (cap table for short): What ownership of the company is awarded to each employee and how the company will be valued when seeking investments are key parameters here. Another critical element is how the company will allocate its scarce resources. For instance, which markets and customers will be chosen for the initial “beachhead” target? How will the budget be allocated between product development and the sales/marketing efforts?
Coming up with clear answers to those questions will force healthy discussions between the team members and hopefully create an alignment in purpose that will be beneficial.
The plan will become a living document used throughout a company’s existence.
Of course, writing a business plan is a great exercise because it will service as a vehicle to get funding,
Going through the exercise of developing a 30-page or longer business plan will help the founders get a keen understanding of their business.
Through the process, the founding team may find that the company needs to move to a different market segment. It may point out weak areas within the team, which will spawn conversations about resources.
Getting started may seem daunting, but shouldn’t be. After all, the plan begins with open communication within the founding team.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The boss decides to Excel
Companies spend 90 percent of IT investment systems, and hope that the system would help to change the buying decision effective immediately
“This is the same phenomenon, which is why people are buying cookbooks and dream that the kitchen looks the same as book illustrations. But few will always use the cookbook when doing cooking “, say the Swedes decision-making experts and Ari Mona Riabacke.
The most common management tool still Excel, which can be found in Windows computers and the use of which is easy to start a basic level. It may be some uses good enough, as well as pen and paper.
Many customers would like a simple answer to the question, what is the best solution.
The answer will always depend on the company itself, its culture and people. Fits-all solution does not exist.
If a company really wants to develop decision-making, first need to understand how people act. Otherwise, an expensive system may be unnecessary shopping. Tools to support decision-making and the first you should find out what kind of decision-making are supported, before it can be recommended to support the solution.
Companies are individuals
“We are programmed to avoid risk. If we have information for making decisions, it becomes a safe feeling. But if there is too much information, we do not know what to focus on. ”
Big data and business intelligence are trendy and accumulates data analysis systems at an incredible pace. 80 percent of the existing data types are said to be those which did not exist five years ago.
Usability is an investment in people: those who make the decisions in the end.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-02-04/Pomo-p%C3%A4%C3%A4tt%C3%A4%C3%A4-Excelill%C3%A4-3215215.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Female-Run Companies Often do Better Than Male-Run Ones (Video)
http://features.slashdot.org/story/15/02/04/1719254/female-run-companies-often-do-better-than-male-run-ones-video
Today’s interviewee, Viktoria Tsukanov, is one of the executives at predictive marketing company Mintigo who did a study in January, 2015 that seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs “achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs.”
The “18% higher revenue” figure specifically applies to companies with more than 1000 workers, while companies with fewer workers may average more revenue per employee if they have male CEOs. Besides discussing the study itself, in our interview Viktoria talks about how male employees might want to alter (or not alter) their behavior if they find themselves working for a female boss for the first time. She also discusses challenges a woman might face if she is suddenly put in charge of a heavily male IT or programming staff. Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people, both of which apply to people of all genders. Interesting food for thought all around.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 things control engineers should know about management
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/7-things-control-engineers-should-know-about-management/3f325ecc576b65bdcd9d4b0cceb2e1d3.html
How to communicate effectively with management and accelerate your career: Engineers should know these 7 things about management today. Don’t wait for others to delegate the needed resources or complain that they haven’t. Leadership can be innate, earned, learned, or situational, but knowing these strategies and tactics and reviewing these examples can help you succeed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Does Employee Turnover Cost You?
http://www.insightlink.com/blog/calculating-the-cost-of-employee-turnover.cfm?utm_source=OUTBRAIN&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=OBBlog
Many organizations either do not try to calculate the cost of employee turnover or, if they do, they find that it is not a simple calculation, especially since these costs don’t appear as a line item in their financial statements. However, this doesn’t change the fact that turnover in an organization’s workforce has true costs, whether you try to estimate those costs or not.
Within this category, you should also account for the cost of “lost productivity,” since new employees can rarely perform at the same level of more experience employees. One way of estimating this cost is to assume that a new employee will reach a productivity level of only about 10% in their first week, then 25% for their next 3 weeks, 50% for the following 8 weeks and then 75% for the 8 weeks after that. With these estimates at hand, all you need to do is to apply the difference in that employee’s payroll expenses over the same period to calculate their lost productivity. You should also try to put a value on the lost productivity of the new employee’s coworkers and supervisor because of the time they will need to spend on bringing the new employee “up to speed.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Programmers Who Want To Get Rid of Software Estimates
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/02/26/2025205/the-programmers-who-want-to-get-rid-of-software-estimates
This article has a look inside the #NoEstimates movement, which wants to rid the software world of time estimates for projects. Programmers argue that estimates are wrong too often and a waste of time. Other stakeholders believe they need those estimates to plan and to keep programmers accountable. Is there a middle ground?
Estimates? We Don’t Need No Stinking Estimates!
How a hashtag lit the nerdy world of project management aflame — or at least got it mildly worked up
https://medium.com/backchannel/estimates-we-don-t-need-no-stinking-estimates-dcbddccbd3d4
As long as we’ve been making software, we’ve been screwing up its deadlines. Beginning in the 1960s, as industry began to demand ambitious software projects, programmers began to find that the harder they tried to deliver polished work on time, the more miserably they failed. In the 1960s Frederick Brooks, tasked with leading a massive IBM programming project, famously discovered that adding more programmers to a late software project only makes it later.
Well, that sucked.
The annals of software-project history are packed with epic train-wrecks.
Late software projects run up costs, incur collateral damage and sometimes take down entire companies. And so the software industry has devoted decades to waging a war on lateness — trying frontal assault, enfilade, sabotage, diplomacy and bribes, and using tactics with names such as object oriented programming, the Rational Unified Process, open-source, agile and extreme programming.
Estimates play a part in nearly all of these approaches. Estimates are the siege-engines of the war on lateness. If we use them carefully and patiently and relentlessly, the hope is, maybe, eventually, we’ll win.
Why is software so late? One venerable intellectual tradition in the field says the answer lies in software’s very nature. Since code costs nothing to copy, programmers are, uniquely, always solving new problems. If the problem already had a solution, you’d just grab a copy from the shelf. On top of that, we have a very hard time saying when any piece of software is “done.”
There are lots of ways to try to do software estimates, but most of them look like this: First, you break your project down into pieces small enough to get your head around. Then you figure out how long each of those parts will take, breaking them down further into smaller pieces as needed. Then you add it up! There’s your estimate.
You can do this all at once up front — that makes you a “waterfall” type, who likes to finish one thing before you start another. Or you can do it in little chunks as you go along — that’s the style popular today, because it gives you more room to change course. Teams around the world now use the agile “Scrum” technique, in which programmers consult with “project owners” to divide work up into “stories,” then eyeball these stories to guess how long they will take and how many can fit into a (brief, usually two-week) “sprint.”
In this world, putting detailed days-and-hours estimates on stories is out of fashion; teams pick from a slew of different guesstimate styles. They assign “points” to each story, or they take a “shirt sizing” approach, assigning each story a label like S, M, L, XL.
Some developers swear by these techniques; others roll their eyes at what they see as fashion trends in the fickle programming marketplace. The trouble remains: However you arrive at them, software project estimates are too often wrong, and the more time we throw at making them, the more we steal from the real work of building software. Also: Managers have a habit of treating developers’ back-of-the-envelope estimates as contractual deadlines, then freaking out when they’re missed. And wait, there’s more: Developers, terrified by that prospect, put more and more energy into obsessive trips down estimation rabbit-holes. Estimation becomes a form of “yak-shaving” — a ritual enacted to put off actual work.
Zuill recommends quitting estimates cold turkey. Get some kind of first-stab working software into the customer’s hands as quickly as possible, and proceed from there. What does this actually look like? Zuill says that when a manager asks for an estimate up front, developers can ask right back, “Which feature is most important?”—then deliver a working prototype of that feature in two weeks. Deliver enough working code fast enough, with enough room for feedback and refinement, and the demand for estimates might well evaporate. That’s how Zuill says it has worked for him for more than a decade. “Let’s stop trying to predict the future,” he says. “Let’s get something done and build on that — we can steer towards better.”