Tag: business
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Quiting Google
As someone who works in IT (or on the fringes of it, at least), a job at Google is seen as the Holy Grail of positions: if it’s not going to be a job for life, it’ll at least set you up for it—after all, who wouldn’t want to hire Google alumni, right? And the…
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Free: Interview with Chris Anderson
Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubtedly aware that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has written a new book: Free. I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premise—and given that the unabridged audiobook can be downloaded online I’ll no doubt be giving it a…
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The Five Whys
Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows: My car…
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Emails Predicting Organisational Collapse
Regardless of content, the email patterns inside organisations may be able to predict approaching crises. This is the conclusion of a study looking at how the communication between Enron employees changed as the company approached its 2001 bankrupcy. [Researchers] expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest…
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The Advantage of Female Executives
Of the top 500 public US companies, firms with women in senior management performed 18 to 69 percent better in terms of profitability than the median companies in their industries. Not only this, but these firms, with around three women in top jobs, scored higher on top measures of organisational excellence by at least 40 percent.…
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The Ideal Creative Workspace
Jonah Lehrer suggests that the ideal creative workplace is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries”. Why would these three conditions be conducive to creativity? Colours can influence how we think (in one experiment, red backgrounds were found to make participants more accurate, while…
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Reporting Company Results
I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not (which in my case usually means it is), but Rowan Simpson gives a concise lesson detailing the three ways companies report their results, and how misleading each can be. Size “We made a net profit of $15 million.” Growth “Revenues increased by 9%.” Acceleration “We…
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How To Be Happy in Business
‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram. Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly…
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The Innovation Deficit
Disregarding software and much hyperbole (not necessarily mutually exclusive), one might think that recent times have been an innovation desert. This is the opinion of Newsweek’s Michael Mandel who believes that the lack of innovation over the past decade may be responsible for America’s economic situation. There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to…