Some Quick Sage Advice for Young Employees Early in Their Careers
My wife & I have a close friend who recently entered the workforce for his first-ever job. On his first day of work my wife was kind enough to write down words of wisdom from her years on the job. I don’t write about Tania very often – mostly at her request. Otherwise I’d shout […]
BYOD Is All About Enabling The Organization Of The Future
A while ago over on GigaOm, Matt McLarty of Layer 7 Technologies wrote an awesome post about the rise of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD. For those who haven’t spent much time thinking about the term, BYOD describes the new paradigm where individuals within an organization supply their own devices (mobile,
Don’t Hire CEOs, Architects, Gamers, or Dualies
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. from various domains including particle physics. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. Internet marketers […]
BMC Launches MyIT – Bridging the IT/Business Divide
Cross posted from the BMC blog. I spend most of my time talking to technology vendors, IT folks and business people all in an effort to drive organizational benefits through the use of technology. Over years of doing this, I’ve noticed a stark divide that exists within an organization between
The Darwinian Workplace: Kill the Weak and Drain the Strong
Recently Harvard ran an article published by Serguie Netessine and Valery Yakubovich (from Insead and ESSEC) called “Getting Your Employees to Compete Against Each Other” and “The Darwinian Workplace.” Naturally this caught my attention. According to the article: “By using technology to create a form of the leaderboard typical in sales organizations, innovative firms are […]
Facebook, Employers, and your username and password as a federated identity
This has been a very interesting week for employers and Facebook. I have been writing about this story over on Toolbox, here and here if you are interested in reading, but on this site I want to go a little deeper into the idea of asking prospective employees for a username and password to any […]
What Makes an Engaged Employee?
As I’ve stated before organizations today are focusing too much on “busy metrics” as their way to define engagement. Blog comments, ideas, number of groups, and amount of content shared are all variables that organizations are looking at trying to justify and explain engagement. Again, the problem with this is that it focuses on the […]
Resumes Are Worthless
Ok, so a question came up recently about hiring people for software development roles. In answering that, the group discussing this started talking about resumes. Resumes, which I’m told mine looks good and reads well, hold a certain value to someone entering the field of software development. There are also major problems with having a […]
Come On Silicon Valley, We Can Provide a Better Rx for Jobs!
Fortune magazine has an article running that Techmemed about some advice Barrack Obama is getting about jobs from Silicon Valley Heavyweights like Kleiner VC John Doerr and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. They’re all about Education and Immigration Visa Reform as the path to creating jobs, along with plugs along the way for their own ventures. Here […]
Three Wrongs When it Comes to Profiles in HCM Technology
We have to admit it – the modern world loves profiles. Every major service that “sticks” has a profile component that is meant to describe us. HR technology isn’t an exception. Every major vendor has made at least some attempts to position their profile components as truly central elements of their suite. So why is […]
How to handle being fired
The recession still blazes on, and people are still losing their jobs right and left. A friend of mine was recently fired and as we sat drinking coffee in our other office, the question was “how do I handle this?” Handling being fired is not easy, it is not meant to be easy; it is […]
Three Tiers of IT and where the money is going to be
One of the research projects I am working on is how schools, business and people align themselves to develop the skills needed for the workers we need today, and going into tomorrow. Like most forward projecting projects, the data gets fuzzier as you move deeper into the future, but there are some interesting aspects of […]
Over 50 and looking for a Job
There has been a lot of news lately on how being over 50 is a handicap when it comes to finding a new job. Realistically as the NY Times points out, along with a large body of research on being over 50 and looking that they will spend significantly mor…
Freemium model of employment
There are always risks to finding a job, one of the ways you can look for something to do while you are looking for the perfect gig is to do many forms of volunteerism. One other option though is the “Freemium Model” of employment where you give your time to a company for a percentage […]
E2.0, Productivity and Joblessness
In the months leading up to last year’s Defrag, I began to blog about what I called “the productivity boom .” By that I meant this broad phase that we’re in, whereby we’ll see productivity in the enterprise make better than normal gains. The boom has a couple of pieces: 1. the advent of cloud […]
