Tag: Career

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News You Can Use: 2/1/2017

  • Is 2017 The Year Of Flat Headcount?

    As budgets are settling down and getting approved for many of the companies I’m on the board of, I’m seeing a general trend of much less headcount growth in 2017 than in 2016. In some cases, companies got ahead of themselves. In others, they need to integrate all the people they’ve added. In some, they feel like they have a critical mass of people and want to march to get profitable on current headcount. And still others are profitable and have realized significant operating leverage in the past two quarters that they want to continue.

    http://www.feld.com/archives/2017/01/2017-year-flat-headcount.html

  • Google Co-Founder: Take Chances, Pursue Your Dreams and Silence the Voices

    Brin encourages experimentation and innovation, just as one of his professors did when he wanted to leave Stanford to launch Google. But his career has taught him that the future is impossible to predict. He is cautious in his forecasts.

    “The evolution of technology might be inherently chaotic,” he said. “We have a set of values and desires today that are probably pretty different than before the Industrial Revolution, and different still than before the Agrarian Revolution. And we might continue to evolve.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/288046

  • This is pretty much how it goes in procurement:
  • In a tech-saturated world, customer feedback is everything

    Executives and product teams shouldn’t wait until a product breaks to hear from their customers. My team, for example, recently executed a high-stakes redesign and overhaul of our central product. While we always strive to incorporate customer feedback and interaction into our day-to-day work, we worked with around 16,000 customers to receive feedback on different versions of our new product. Our entire process was oriented around continuous customer feedback — and it transformed the way we do business. We now collaborate with 11,000 customers who give us a constant look at how our product helps them solve the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/20/in-a-tech-saturated-world-customer-feedback-is-everything/?ncid=rss

  • Why your “career path” won’t lead to your dream job

    You may wonder, then, what’s the point of setting goals, working hard, and ending up somewhere you never intended to be? How can you make progress if you continually break course? How can you be successful if you can’t even follow a straight line?

    Here’s the thing: The more activities you participate in, the more people you meet, the more opportunities you grab hold of, the more likely you are to find something amazing along the way—regardless of (or maybe especially if), your path is quite windy. In the words of the inimitable Oprah Winfrey, “Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3067259/hit-the-ground-running/why-your-career-path-probably-wont-lead-you-to-your-dream-job

Photo: Ales Krivec

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News You Can Use: 1/25/2017

  • Why You Should Recognize Luck’s Role in Your Success or Failure

    Recognizing luck also helps with empathy. When you over-credit hard work and throw the role of luck out the window, it’s easy to assume everyone else should be able to accomplish the same things you can. When you recognize the role of luck, however, you keep your ego in check, which makes it easier to look at things more objectively and with less judgment.

    http://twocents.lifehacker.com/why-you-should-recognize-luck-s-role-in-your-success-or-1791093753

  • Would You Want the “Right to Disconnect” from Work?

    …“All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” MP Benoit Hamon told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

    http://lifehacker.com/would-you-want-the-right-to-disconnect-from-work-1790830015

  • How to Say ‘No’ at Work (Infographic)

    Too often, people burn themselves out by agreeing to take on more tasks than they can handle. However, overloading yourself with work can reduce the quality of what you produce. If you’re too busy, you may also miss deadlines. In those cases, the person you’re working for likely would have preferred that you had just said “no” from the start.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287746

    Photo: The Business Backer
    Coming out of college almost 20 years ago, I entered a work force that told me to “NEVER SAY NO”. Early in my career that was a major source of burnout. However, in the last 5 years, saying yes gave me opportunities and access to projects that were good for both experience and my career politically.

  • The Purpose of a Supply Chain Manager: The End Customer Experience

     The journey to understand that focus tells you what your business model really depends on. Too many companies don’t understand what customers really value and as a consequence spend a lot to develop low-value innovation, such as car manufacturers loading their cars with more features that customers don’t use – a phenomenon known as marketing myopia.

    http://www.scmr.com/article/the_purpose_of_a_supply_chain_manager_the_end_customer_experience

  • Bonus: Americans at Work: Philadelphia’s Municipal Offices

    While photographing in these spaces what stuck out most visually was the physical evidence of decades past, not only in the space’s aesthetics and architecture but in the office equipment itself. An employee can find themselves sitting at mid century desk working on a 21st century computer while referencing a ledger book from 1887. Philadelphia City Hall is like a time capsule no one is quite ready to put the lid on. Over time, as Philadelphia grew, more municipal offices have been built to accommodate the needs of the city. One of these offices—Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building—is a more modern office building, something office workers of today would be more familiar with.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/01/americans-at-work-philadelphias-municipal-offices/513209/?utm_source=feed

Photo: JoshWillink

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News You Can Use: 1/18/2017

  • What’s Adding To Supply Chain Risk? 3 IT Trends To Watch Out For

    This report mentioned the threat of “data overload” specifically in the context of health care, stating that it will be a “challenge for providers.” This is because the overwhelming bulk of data will create new and excessive amounts of work for industries to contend with.

    According to this report, the answer lies in customized alerts and filtering to help distinguish important data at any given time. It might work slightly differently, but the same principle could extend outward to other industries later on, with further devices connecting to the internet throughout the supply chain.

    http://www.strategicsourceror.com/2017/01/whats-adding-to-supply-chain-risk-3-it.html

  • Four Moves You Might Not Realize Make You Look Unprofessional in an Interview

    You Don’t Finish Your Homework
    But, cautions Adrian J. Hopkins, a Muse career coach, this isn’t homework you can half-ass. It’s not enough to spew off a couple of “top-line company facts.” If you want the job and wish to avoid looking unprofessional in any way, shape, or form, you’re going to have to “go above and beyond a basic understanding of the company.” Let the interviewer know how you plan to grow with the company and get him thinking that he can’t “believe” he hadn’t the good fortune of meeting you sooner.

    http://lifehacker.com/four-moves-you-might-not-realize-make-you-look-unprofes-1790770222

  • Christopher Kai: “Catapult Your Career Opportunities
  • 5 Steps to Organizing Your Life and Doing Great Things This Year

    Let it all go
    “Think of new goals, new expectations and new ways to achieve them,” he says.

    If you don’t have one already, buy a paper shredder and start shredding the piles around you that are just taking up space. Scan the files that are truly needed.

    “If you are realistic and hard on yourself, the ratio of what to shred to what to scan will be 10 to one,” Klosky says.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287141

  • Driverless Trucks, Robots and Chatbots Could Reshape the Supply Chain

    More than half of supply chain companies have so-called innovation centers to help test out new concepts. Of those, 20 percent have achieved a return on their investment, while half expect a payoff in the next two years.

    Robots are also on the rise, even though less than a quarter of organizations currently use them in their work, researchers found.

    Propelled by algorithms that allow them to accomplish more complex tasks, robots can help companies improve efficiency, cut costs, keep pace with competitors and limit errors, according to respondents.

    https://www.trucks.com/2017/01/05/driverless-trucks-robots-supply-chain/

Photo: Joshua Ness

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News You Can Use: 12/7/2016

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  • Management Thought is Bankrupt

    We are seeing the dominance of measurement.  KPIs abound. Big Data everywhere. Your personality is tested and measured. As is your engagement. On an ongoing basis. Every project has thousands of targets, deadlines and measurable processes. Data, data, data. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Measure, measure, measure.

    Taylorism for the hi-tech generation. A model we know does not work and does not motivate, but one we’ve re-embraced anyway. And we wonder why there is no meaning or engagement at work.

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/management-thought-bankrupt-dr-richard-claydon

  • Why Avoiding Office Politics Isn’t Always the Best for Your Career

    When it comes to office politics, Simosko warns, “There is no way around it. Once you start working with a team you are going to experience it. I am not a fan of politics, but I have learned that ignoring them can have negative consequences.” She insists that learning to deal with office politics is vital for leaders at any stage of their career. “It can determine whether you are successful in your career or not,” she said.

    http://lifehacker.com/why-avoiding-office-politics-isnt-always-the-best-for-y-1788946874

  • What everyone ought to know about Social Media (thanks JD!)

    How technology hijacks people’s minds

    http://www.timewellspent.io/
  • The tech that will feed the world

    Now computing capacity is cheap, and it’s possible to model all possible choices and their potential outcomes. A smartphone with Google Maps, for example, can evaluate every path from point A to point B to decide, based on the current traffic conditions, which will likely be the shortest or fastest route.

    Simulation and modeling also help from getting lost when it comes to growing crops. At the most basic level, plants need sunlight, water and nutrients at levels that vary during various stages of growth. It sounds simple, but at scale, optimizing each factor has a huge payoff.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/the-tech-that-will-feed-the-world/?ncid=rss

  • Microsoft executive bonuses could soon be tied to diversity goals

    According to Gwen Houston, Microsoft’s General Manager for Global Diversity and Inclusion, Nadella is working on a plan that will make meeting diversity goals a major factor in deciding if executives receive their full bonus each year. “Diversity and inclusion is something you’ve got to ingrain,” Houston said. “That’s what Satya has been doing.” Still, Houston says the company has more to do. Layoffs from sale of Nokia assets severely hurt the company’s percentage of women and minority workers, and new hires haven’t made up the difference yet.

    https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/18/microsoft-executive-bonuses-could-soon-be-tied-to-diversity-goal/

Photo: Vitaly Taranov

Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/23/2016

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  • Are Women In Procurement Still Earning Less Than Men? It Seems So

    A female CPO, for example, can expect to earn around 94% of a male colleague’s salary. For regional category managers, women have been found to earn only 69% of a man’s wage.

    This tends to get compounded by the ‘glass-ceiling effect’, in which women find it difficult to break through into the higher levels of an organisation. Only 14% of our CPO sample last year were women.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–jonathan-webb/are-women-in-procurement-still-earning-less-than-men-it-seems-so-649336

  • 7 Ways to Politely Shut Down a Conversation
    This one is my favorite…

    5. The ‘pass off.’
    When you are trapped in a rambling conversation, pull in another person to join you if possible. Introduce the topic to the new person, and once the other two get a conversation going, politely excuse yourself and don’t look back.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/284492
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  • DOD in ‘knife fight’ over supply chain, security chief says

    Department of Defense (DOD) officials increasingly view the Pentagon’s supply chain as a key vulnerability within the defense enterprise, with bad actors seeking to affect systems and steal innovative technologies. This risk extends beyond prime contractors, which have extensive resources to invest in security to medium and small contractors, which in turn may not have those resources.

    The Pentagon’s emphasis on affordability often pushes suppliers to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) items, said Frank Kendall, the DOD’s undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

    “All of this presents an opportunity for somebody with a nefarious purpose to get at our products,” Kendall said. “The thing that makes me most nervous is a high-end adversary who finds a way to hide something in our weapons systems and lets it sit there until it can be activated at the worst possible time.”

    https://about.bgov.com/blog/dod-knife-fight-supply-chain-security-chief-says/

  • Hang in there (from Seth Godin)

    Showing up day after day, week after week, sometimes for years, as your movement slowly gains steam, as your organization hits speed bumps, as the news goes from bad to worse…

    Showing up, it turns out, is the hardest part of making a difference.

    Make a list of the organizations and voices and movements that have made a difference. How old are they? How long have they been at it?

    Creating impact, building something of substance, changing the culture… this is the work of a lifetime, not merely a fun project.

    http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/11/hang-in-there.html
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  • Amazon’s logistics venture has yet to make up for costs

    “A full-blown Amazon parcel delivery operation would likely take years to complete, so we believe [FedEx] and UPS would have time to react,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahoney previously told Retail Dive. Similarly, although UPS and FedEx have decades of experience, Amazon’s entry to the logistics market comes with a learning curve, particularly when it comes to aircraft operations and regulations.

    The earliest signs of success, however, may come through the cost-to-sales comparison made by Seeking Alpha. If Amazon seeks to compete with UPS and FedEx, the company needs to see a downward trend in the metric, which would indicate the logistics services are driving profit to the company.

    http://www.supplychaindive.com/news/Amazon-logistics-UPS-FedEx-cost/429408/

Photo: Katie Montgomery