Quote of the day 9 Things Managers Do That Make Good Employees Quit Want your business to appear in Entrepreneur magazine? Tell us how you're empowering employees, and you could be selected for a full-page promotion provided by Colonial Life. It’s pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door. Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. The sad thing is that this can easily be avoided. All that’s required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager’s part. First, we need to understand the nine worst things that managers do that send good people packing. Related: The 9 Worst Mistakes You Can Ever Make at Work 1. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. 2. 3. 4. 5. Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals.
2014 Eco-Engineering Forum: Harnessing the Potential of Big Data The focus for the 2014 Eco-Engineering Forum is, The New Eco-System of Information: Harnessing the Potential of Big Data. This event is the sixth in a series of annual forums sponsored by Hitachi, and featuring panels organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and The Brookings Institution. Keynote Address The Honorable Terry McAuliffe, Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia Panel 1: Big Data and Transportation We are at a point in American history where the confluence of technology and the built environment has tremendous ability to fundamentally change the way we experience places, how metropolitan areas function, and how we engage in public dialogue. Panel 2: Meeting Environmental Challenges
Use Storytelling to Explain Your Company’s Purpose The idea of “purpose” has swept the corporate world. Encouraged by evangelists like Simon Sinek, myriad firms like Nike, Adidas, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola are devoting real time and attention to explaining why they do. The idea of purpose was central to a book I co-authored. But activating purpose is impossible without storytelling, at both the corporate and individual levels. This is hard for most business leaders. I learned this lesson, most acutely, from Marshall Ganz, who teaches what he calls “public narrative” at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. To create a public narrative for your own organization, start with “self.” An excellent example of this is Steve Jobs’s address to the Stanford graduating class in 2005. The next step, “us,” aims to connect these values with broader shared values of the audience — clients or employees, for example. While it’s miles away from the battlefield of Agincourt, Burt’s Bees is a good example of how a business has applied this technique.
Focus Area Forum On June 25, the Office of Naval Research will host the next Focus Area Forum. The forum is designed to assist ONR in developing the scientific foundation and advanced technologies in the area of data science. It will support tactical decision-making by bringing together researchers and Department of Defense stakeholders in panel discussions, Q&As, poster sessions and one-on-one conversations about research directions and challenges. (See registration details below.) Current Landscape: Assured information for naval forces relies heavily on extracting actionable knowledge for tactical decision-making from often heterogeneous data. Data science is the combination of how data is represented, organized, processed, shared and interpreted under relevant context and with necessary assurance. The challenge is: to automatically make use of this rich data -- with its varying degrees of quality, assurance, and uncertainty -- in the context of a mission to support tactical warfighting objectives.
Accelerate! Perhaps the greatest challenge business leaders face today is how to stay competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption. Any company that has made it past the start-up stage is optimized for efficiency rather than for strategic agility—the ability to capitalize on opportunities and dodge threats with speed and assurance. I could give you 100 examples of companies that, like Borders and RIM, recognized the need for a big strategic move but couldn’t pull themselves together to make it and ended up sitting by as nimbler competitors ate their lunch. The examples always play out the same way: An organization that’s facing a real threat or eyeing a new opportunity tries—and fails—to cram through some sort of major transformation using a change process that worked in the past. But the old ways of setting and implementing strategy are failing us. We can’t keep up with the pace of change, let alone get ahead of it. What to do, then? The Limits of Hierarchy and Conventional Change Management
Yámana Science and Technology - Events 'Mapping the Systems of Science and Technology: Assessing Tools for Teamwork' was the next stage in convening critical conversations for the future of science and technology. This hands-on working conference included 'Tools Tueday' with an intro to mindfulness training (used since 2006 at Genentech-Roche) and 'Dynamic Interactions' lead by top facilitators in the industry. We explored a) the importance of impacts of workplace culture on individual and team performance b) key challenges in our systems of science and technology and c) some attributes of effective collaboration. We looked at how and where needs, challenges and opportunities interlock in the systems of science and technology, utilizing visual processes for 'Mapping the Systems of Science and Technology.' This working conference included scientists, IT specialists, educators, policy strategists, students, and post-doctoral scholars - people interested in making an impact through their work in science and/or technology.
9 Things That Make Good Employees Quit | Dr. Travis Bradberry It’s pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door. Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. The sad thing is that this can easily be avoided. All that’s required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager’s part. First, we need to understand the nine worst things that managers do that send good people packing. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. If you must increase how much work your talented employees are doing, you’d better increase their status as well. 2. It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. 4. Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals.
Learn Mad Skills With Superhuman Speed The glove looks humdrum, like a garment you might pick up at a sporting-goods store. It’s made of soft black leather and fingerless, like a cyclist’s or weightlifter’s glove. The similarity is, however, deceiving. "I have a glove that can teach you how to play a piano melody,” Thad Starner declares when I call to chat about the future of wearable computing. Now a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the technical lead of Google Glass, he helped pioneer the field in the 1990s as a student at MIT. “During this conversation, you could have learned ‘Amazing Grace.’ ” Tech-Ed Out Clothing Is Fashion Forward: Photos “Really?” “Sure,” he says and invites me to Atlanta to see for myself. Caitlyn Seim, a Ph.D student, slips the glove onto my hand. But she doesn’t tell me which tune I’ll be learning. Once every minute for the next two hours, the motors in the glove vibrate across my fingers. Finger Computer Reads Books Aloud At last, Starner escorts me to a keyboard.
engineering culture (part 1) | Spotify Labs Here’s part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture (here’s part 2). This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, and there’s a lot of variation from squad to squad. So the stuff in the video isn’t all true for all squads all the time, but it appears to be mostly true for most squads most of the time :o) Here’s the whole drawing: (Tools used: Art Rage, Wacom Intuos 5 drawing tablet, and ScreenFlow) Here’s Part 2. Related Spotify engineering culture (part 2) Here's part 2 of the animated video describing our engineering culture. In "Labs" Squad Health Check model - visualizing what to improve (Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX) (Translations of this article: Chinese, French) What is a squad health check model? Spotify Technology Career Steps This is part two of a three part series on how we created a technical career path for individuals at Spotify and what we learned in the process.