News You Can Use: 6/20/2018

  • The Age of Tech Superheroes Must End

    Among these companies and their precursors, there are examples of smart founders who were able to use their power to help their companies grow sustainably. But they tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule. “Once a trend starts, then all founders want it, but I can count on three fingers the founders that should be in complete control of their companies with no governance or oversight,” says Sarah Cone, founder of venture capital firm Social Impact Capital.

    Fortunately, the trend isn’t really catching on outside of Silicon Valley. In 2017, just 14% of companies went public with permanently unequal voting structures, according to data from the Council of Institutional Investors.

    There are legitimate reasons—from the founder’s, if not necessarily the investor’s, perspective—why founders would want more control. Many serial entrepreneurs have had the experience of being pushed out of a previous company or forced to sell earlier than they would have liked. And for decades leading up to the previous tech-stock bubble, says Mr. Kedrosky, VCs had much more power than founders and were not afraid to use it. Even first-time founders have heard these stories, he adds.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-of-tech-superheroes-must-end-1528387420?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Young Workers No Longer Get the On-the-Job Training They Need — So They’re Finding It Elsewhere

    According to Peter Capelli, director of The Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources, companies want workers they don’t have to educate, and his research has found that employers don’t train young workers like they used to.

    In 1979, per Capelli, the average young worker received 2.5 weeks of training per year. By 1995, training time fell to just 11 hours.

    More recent comparable data has been hard to find, says Capelli, but the Wharton professor says that by 2011 “only a fifth of employees reported receiving on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years.”

    Also:

    Since 2011, when Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, began to gain public attention, their popularity has grown exponentially. Last year, by one estimate, 23 million people signed up to take their first MOOC. All told, since 2011, more than 800 universities have offered over 9,000 courses to 81 million registered users, according to the same report.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314468

  • Does your job match your personality?
  • Good News for Hustlers: Being Busy Could Actually Be Good for You

    The researchers conducted a series of eight experiments and had the participants establish the ways that they were busy, by doing things such as asking them to write down the reasons why they had such a packed schedule, or telling the undergraduates involved in the study that data found they were busier than the students at neighboring schools.

    The study looked at the ways that this feeling of busyness affected how the students made decisions about the foods they ate, whether they opted to exercise or relax and whether they chose to save money for retirement versus spending it. The researchers found that when people were influenced to see themselves as busy, it boosted their ability to have self-control.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314673

  • Skipping Your Lunch Breaks? Even Your Boss Wants You to Go out for a Bite, a New Study Says.

    But, according to our research, bosses want their employees to get out for a break. So, there’s a real disconnect happening, because the vast majority (88 percent) of North American bosses in the study said they thought their employees would say they were encouraged to take a regular lunch break, but only 62 percent of employees actually felt encouraged.

    Takeaway: Just as great coaches recognize the need for their players to recuperate in order to perform their best, your boss likely knows that your break helps, rather than hinders, your work. But it does seem that not every boss is communicating that idea in the most effective way.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314467

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 4/18/2018

News You Can Use, Productivity and Agile Thinking

  • Agile’s dark secret? IT has little need for the usual methodologies

    With the exception of the company’s website and mobile apps, one of IT’s core principles is “buy when you can, build when you have to.” IT licenses something like 90 percent of all new functionality in the form of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) and software as a service (SaaS), leaving 10 percent for software developed in-house.

    Scrum, Kanban, Lean Software Development and most other agile methodologies are designed for the 10 percent, not the 90 percent. On top of which, in a typical shop, about 70 percent of developer hours goes to maintaining and enhancing applications already in production, leaving 30 percent for implementing new ones.

    Do the math. Agile is mostly useful for 10 percent of the 30 percent — in other words, it handles a whopping 3 percent of what IT’s application teams are called on to do.

    https://www.cio.com/article/3263647/methodology-frameworks/agiles-dark-secret-it-has-little-need-for-the-usual-methodologies.html

  • What To Do When A Coworker Has It In For You

    What you should do really depends on whether you’re dealing with someone who dislikes or is threatened by you versus someone who is actively trying to undermine you or derail your career, Raina says. If the former, it may be a good idea to handle the situation on your own. If the latter—or if you’ve tried to confront the individual and it didn’t work or made the behavior worse—then you may need to engage your supervisor. However, if you can show that you tried to fix the issue on your own, that may show your boss that you made the effort to solve the problem first.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40554709/what-to-do-when-a-co-worker-has-it-in-for-you

  • Fake News in Mexico
  • 5 Ways To Reset An Unproductive Afternoon

    Multitasking gets a terrible rep, but sometimes it can be a great tool when monotasking is just not getting you anywhere. As Saunders previously wrote for Fast Company, “Some situations just aren’t meant for long stretches of unbroken focus.” The trick is to experiment what form of task switching helps you best. For Saunders, task switching motivates her to work through small and boring tasks. She gives herself permission to toggle between writing business emails and looking at her calendar tasks, or she’d alternate these administrative tasks with more “exciting” work (such as book marketing). Saunders wrote, “The promise of soon being able to do something fun helps me quit procrastinating on what’s not fun.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40550317/5-ways-to-reset-an-unproductive-afternoon

  • What Can You Really Accomplish in Just an Hour?

    But you’ll only make your hours matter to the extent that you displace your time wasters with planned, high-value activities you know you can accomplish in a day. That way, when you’re unconsciously reaching to check Instagram or texts, you can shift your attention back to your daily planner, open it up and then do something valuable for an hour. Do something that boosts your confidence — something that counts.

    Limit time-wasters by scheduling your email, text and social check-ins as independent goals on your daily planner. Most of my clients do fine with three to five scheduled visits per day. Also, consider going on a social media cleanse

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311449

Photo by Lê Tân on Unsplash

News You Can Use: 12/14/2016

  • The Best Music for Productivity? Silence

    When silence and music were put head to head in more cognitively complex tests, people did better in silence. In a study from the 1980s, researchers gave subjects the option to listen to either upbeat or soft music of their preferred genre, or nothing, while counting backward. The people who listened to their favorite, upbeat tunes did worst of all, and those who heard silence did best.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-best-music-for-productivity-silence/509948/?utm_source=feed

  • How FedEx is shaving millions from its IT costs

    Apptio’s software also uncovered a glaring inefficiency in FedEx’ aircraft maintenance operations. For years, engineers inspected aircraft by climbing up and down the planes and then driving a golf cart to a shack, where they would enter data into an inventory management system, which costed $10 million annually. To streamline the process, the IT team created Workbench, which enables engineers to inspect aircraft and input data via tablets and smartphones. The software costs $2 million a year.

    “We are several hundred million dollars cheaper because we keep finding unique ways to drive value,” Carter says. FedEx is applying some of the savings to emerging technologies such as TRON, a Bluetooth-enabled sensor that offers a lower cost way of tracking packages.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3144504/software/how-fedex-is-shaving-millions-from-its-it-costs.html

  • An island no more: Inside the business of the podcasting boom

    “The interesting thing is that, in this last six to nine months, I feel like we actually turned the corner,” observes Bryan Moffett, who heads ad sales for NPM, NPR’s sale arm. NPR — the leader in podcast audience — earns more than $10 million in podcast revenue and owns a double-digit share of the market. “We’re getting in business from Wells Fargo and Dell and Target — big Fortune 100 brands.”

    http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/09/an-island-no-more-inside-the-business-of-the-podcasting-boom/

  • Apple Grabs Wearables Lead with Holiday Sales
    A follow-up to SourceCast Episode 51

    For all the skepticism about the Apple Watch’s prospects, the new version appears to be selling better than the first one. Apple raked in nearly half of the revenue generated online in the U.S. wearables market in the monthlong lead-up to Cyber Monday, new data shows, a big increase on last year. Meanwhile, Fitbit lost ground—and the data shows that its expected purchase of competitor Pebble won’t help much.

    https://www.theinformation.com/apple-grabs-wearables-lead-with-holiday-sales

  • What this GE Exec is hiring for in 2017 (and why)

    Not everybody is a software engineer, but every single person at Global Operations understands their part in GE’s transformation into a digital industrial company. Whether you’re in HR, accounting, or operations, being able to analyze and understand data is critical. We produce massive amounts of data every day and need to use it as efficiently as we can.

    So even if you don’t have a degree in engineering or your job description doesn’t include data processing, we want to see how you use data every day. I look for candidates who can explain how they turn their work into actionable insights—or who can tell us how they think data might help them do their jobs better. Data is the most valuable language you can speak today.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3066215/pov/what-this-ge-exec-is-hiring-for-in-2017-and-why

Photo: wu yi