Can Your Customer Benefit from the Data You’re Capturing about Them?

Work 2.0

Last time “Work”, Ford Madox Brown’s vibrant, populous street scene of navvies laying water pipes in Hampstead, was shown at London’s Tate gallery, it was 1984. Margaret Thatcher, not known as a connoisseur of fine art, attended the opening. Then, as now, politicians were talking about the importance of “Victorian values”, and the consequences of unemployment and inequality. Now the canvas, which usually hangs in Manchester, is back in the city where it was painted. Brown’s radical aim – to ennoble and glorify hard work – has a renewed relevance at a time of economic downturn and high levels of joblessness.

Data Is Useless Without the Skills to Analyze It

The advent of the big data era means that analyzing large, messy, unstructured data is going to increasingly form part of everyone’s work. Managers and business analysts will often be called upon to conduct data-driven experiments, to interpret data, and to create innovative data-based products and services. To thrive in this world, many will require additional skills.

How Passive Face Time Affects Perceptions of Employees

About two years ago, Wayne Weita, a 33-year-old producer and director in the media department at Management Recruiters, began going to work at 8 a.m. instead of everyone’s usual 8:30 a.m. start time.

He takes a half-hour lunch, then leaves at 4:30. He started this schedule so he could get his 18-month-old son to and from the babysitter’s house on time. He admits that he still occasionally feels as though he needs to slither out so no one sees him leaving early: ‘Sometimes, if I’m at the elevator and someone’s going downstairs for a drink or candy bar, I do try to throw a reason [for leaving early] into the conversation subtly’ (Joyce, 2002: H06).

As this quote illustrates, employees’ display of ‘face time’ at work can affect how others perceive them.

But, how much do managers perceptions of “face time” affect their perception and evaluation of employees?

Don’t Trust a Single Number in This Jobs Report (or Any Jobs Report)

It is a sad statement about either American politics or American sanity that when today’s jobs report showed the unemployment falling below 8% for the first time in Obama’s presidency, the reaction from some administration critics was: The numbers are cooked!

The conspiracy claims are beyond silly, as my colleague David Graham explained today. But the employment-truthers are right about one thing. No number in this jobs report is to be trusted.

They’re all wrong, probably.

Want to Increase Your Productivity? Look at This Adorable Kitten.

When economists talk about boosting productivity, they usually talk about increasing the adoption of new technologies and optimizing workflows. Japanese researchers, however, have come up with a very offbeat approach: Showing workers lots of pictures of adorable, fuzzy, baby animals.

A team of researchers at Hiroshima University recently conducted a study where they showed university students pictures of baby animals before completing various tasks. What they found, in research published last week, was that those who saw the baby animal pictures did more productive work after seeing those photographs – even more than those who saw a picture of an adult animal or a pleasant food.

Setting Expections in SaaS - the Service Level Agreement

The emergence of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model has necessitated new relationships between the service provider and the consumer with respect to service availability, service performance and response times. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) has evolved to become a useful tool which governs both service expectations and the consequences of failure to meet
these agreed upon metrics.

Improving Strategy Execution through Effective Budgeting

Budgeting is nearly always portrayed as a management process that helps an organisation  to execute strategy.  Fine words indeed, but how many budgets and associated budget processes actually support that ideal?  Surveys reveal the reality that most budgets are totally disconnected from strategy and that the resources essential to success are often missing or unavailable.  In this short, practical article based on the best practices of high-performing companies, we show you how to design a budget process that will directly [...]

How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us

Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week. A surgeon with five simple ways to make health care safer.

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers.