September 2010

4 performance myths dispelled and no more performance reviews

September’s Talent Management magazine writer Mr.Harold D. Stolovitch provides a reality check within his Human Performance column titled Dispelling Performance Myths: High job satisfaction results in high performance When employees select their own work goals, their motivation to achieve them is greater Personality inventories used for selection purposes are strong predictors of job performance success [...]

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The key to innovation may be better employee hygiene

Today’s drive for continual innovation, as it is taught, as it is written about, as it is sought, and as it is crowd sourced has a lot to do with early pioneers in management theory.  For example why is hygiene important to innovation?  Innovation needs motivation and motivation needs hygiene to succeed. The humanistic  management school emphasizes, [...]

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Evaluating risk: financial models versus competency models, part 2

Models attempt to identify the assets that have value.  How to manage those assets.  And how to strategically turn these assets into money.  This is a 2nd, follow-up, post comparing financial models to competency models to evaluate risk. As I mentioned in that post, typical financial models and their build-outs inherently ignore important aspects of [...]

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Hiring the right person is more emotional than rational

You have to assume every person you interview has the technical skill to do the job.  Once past the traditional human resources gate-keeper by the time you meet a candidate they have the skills.  When assessing a hire it is not only technical skill that keys your decision, it is about integration or how they [...]

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When a small business should fear growth

A small company is a dynamic, creative place where it is necessary for people to take risks to build a new organization.  Leaders of small companies are visionaries and there are strong demands for innovation to do more with less and to bite off grand goals.  The people that work in small companies work around an assumed [...]

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What for-profits can learn from non-profits

For-profits commonly look down upon the management and staff of non-profits as woefully inefficient.  Non-profits are hounded relentlessly to operate more like for-profits. An Economist article, Profiting from non-profits, writes about the reverse flow of innovation for-profits can gain from non-profits.  When I mentioned non-profits, charities might come to mind first, but non-profits covers: hospitals, [...]

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The bureaucrat and bureaucracy revisited

Max Weber (1864 – 1920) was a German sociologist, political scientist, and economist and was an admirer of forms of organizations found in German government circles.  His views on bureaucracy, when revisited, provide an interesting set of implications, my comments, if any, are in brackets: Each office has fixed duties Impersonal rules and regulations apply [...]

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Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard?

The July 31st Economist wrote an article called The wages of failure and brought an interesting perspective to those CEOs dismissed because or PR disasters.  Do golden parachutes reward bad leadership or reward risk crucial for a firm to rebuild, re-imagine, and compete within capitalism? The article acknowledges the outrage many have to folks like [...]

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In review: A key to why so many companies blow it in social media?

August 2010 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: A key to why so many companies blow it in social media? — Do companies blow their social media efforts because they are afraid to fail, preferring to fall back on old marketing rules?  The comments section offers a chance for Jonathan Salem [...]

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