Tag: Career

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/15/2017

  • New FCC chairman: Net neutrality rules were a ‘mistake’

    During his speech at Mobile World Congress, Pai said a “new generation” of leadership at the FCC is focused on “renewal as well as change.” The agency will return to the light-touch regulatory approach of the past three decades, he said.

    Pai touted his decision to end an investigation into so-called zero-rating plans, in which some mobile providers exempted some services from their data caps. Promoters of the free data plans have called them pro-consumer, but some net neutrality advocates suggested that plans may violate the rules against selectively promoting some web content.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3175766/internet/new-fcc-chairman-net-neutrality-rules-were-a-mistake.html

  • Building a Hard-Working Team Starts With You

    Once you have the right people, surround them with hard-working peers. Create a culture of “all for one, and one for all” prepared to do whatever is necessary to help the company win the race. Create realistic targets for them to hit by certain dates, and create a competitive spirit within the company, where people can show off their skills.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/288954

  • The Making of a Podcast Network | Scott Aukerman
  • ‘Ugh, I’m So Busy’: A Status Symbol for Our Time (a follow up to last week’s post)

    The gleam of being both well-off and time-poor, the authors write, is “driven by the perceptions that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market.” In a curious reversal, the aspirational objects here are not some luxury goods—a nice watch or car, which are now mass-produced and more widely available than they used to be—but workers themselves, who by bragging about how busy they are can signal just how much the labor market values them and their skills.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/busyness-status-symbol/518178/?utm_source=feed

  • Toxic Workplaces Will Persist As Long As Fairness Is Just A Matter Of ‘Compliance’

    But HR, on its own, is poorly situated to fix a business culture that is indifferent to (or in denial about) offering meaningful opportunities for advancement to women or other minorities in the workplace. As political scientist Frank Dobbin has argued, human resources professionals have long struggled to establish their legitimacy within organizations.They are rarely the locus of power within corporations, which instead resides in revenue-generating departments like engineering and sales, and in the executives that preside over the business.

    HR advises. Business decides.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3068482/pov/toxic-workplaces-will-persist-as-long-as-fairness-is-just-a-matter-of-compliance?partner=rss

Photo: Justin Tietsworth

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/8/2017

  • Trump expected to cut federal IT spending

    “Initiatives like data center consolidation and adoption of cloud services – even though not completely successful – have set the table for leaner spending,” Bjorklund said.

    The Trump administration will be helped as well by declines in the cost of IT. It will likely put modernization investments on hold “until they can figure out the way ahead,” Bjorklund said.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3174085/it-industry/trump-expected-to-cut-federal-it-spending.html

  • Make your conference calls stink less…

    You need to assume that some of what you’re saying just isn’t going to get through. So go over your key points quickly yet frequently. Think of them as road signs that remind your audience where you’re heading: If you don’t check in every so often, they might get lost. You don’t have to repeat the message in the same exact way every time, but reinforcing your ideas is a must when so many other factors (both technological and human) are conspiring against you.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3068455/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/your-conference-calls-sound-terrible-but-you-dont-have-to

  • This Video Explains Why “I Don’t Have Time” Is a Poor Excuse
  • The Best Questions to Ask in Every Job Interview Round

    “What are the Immediate Projects You’d Like Me to Work on in the First 30, 60, and 90 days?”

    With this one, you’ll get a sense of what types of tasks your new manager will want you to work on when you first start work. The key here is to keep digging until you’re clear on the first set of expectations for the role.

    http://lifehacker.com/the-best-questions-to-ask-in-every-job-interview-round-1792859446

  • Rethinking Sourcing Suites and Their Sub Components — Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant

    And as procurement organizations increasingly mass-customize how they deliver value to the business and the technology approaches and providers they use to deliver those new capabilities and associated outcomes, we believe that evaluative exercises need to be ever more tailored to an individual organization’s needs. For subscribers, Gartner is moving in this direction as well (which we applaud). But static reports that take six months to create and then are updated every two years with monolithic graphics run counter to this trend.

    http://spendmatters.com/2017/02/09/rethinking-sourcing-suites-sub-components-gartners-2017-magic-quadrant/

Photo: Lionello DelPiccolo

Posted on

News You Can Use: 2/15/2017

  • It’s Time to Go Beyond Supplier Management, But Where is That?

    Organizations these days need more than traditional historically focussed spend analytics that tell them, weeks or months after, what was spent, on what, from whom, by whom, from where, to where, and in what quantity. You need to know what is being spent, by whom, on what in real time … and where the dollars are trending towards. Is a new supplier taking all of the spot buy spend, or even worse, spend that is supposed to be on another contract? Are product and services tastes changing? Are market costs changing? The application has to not only be able to keep up, but identify the most pertinent trends and options for dealing with them … it has to have advanced predictive analytics that, at the very least, identifies the most relevant changes (and ranks them by value or statistics or outlier distance from the expected norm), if not offering prescriptive analytics on how to take advantage of changes, minimize losses, or control them in (historically) well understood situations.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2017/02/03/its-time-to-go-beyond-supplier-management-but-where-is-that/

  • IT and Functional Departments – Finding the Middle Ground

    Procurement also brings market information (suppliers, price points, service levels) that IT may not be as focused on, but that could be critical to the overall solution. IT groups can at times limit themselves to certain suppliers for system or software solutions, but there may be alternate suppliers that easily integrate, or provide enough value to justify the effort required for working with disparate suppliers or systems. Procurement can bring that perspective forward and champion the needs of the business to balance the costs associated with IT change.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2017/01/23/it-and-functional-departments-finding-the-middle-ground/

  • How Levi’s is radically redefining sustainability

    Levi’s has always been a leader in sustainability. In 1991, it established “terms of engagement” that laid out the brand’s global code of conduct throughout its supply chain. This meant setting standards for worker’s rights, a healthy work environment, and an ethical engagement with the planet. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do,” Dillinger says. “At the time, we were worried that doing this would drive up our own costs and prices.” In fact, what happened was that these practices were quickly adopted by other companies, who used it as a template to write their own rules. “We were actually leading industry toward new standards,” he says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3067895/moving-the-needle/levis-is-radically-redefining-sustainability

  • Don’t Be the Kobe Bryant of Your Office

    It doesn’t matter how productive you are if no one enjoys working with you. Steve Nash, a former NBA player that the researchers found to be particularly valuable at making his teams better, was famous for constantly high-fiving his teammates. There’s never been a direct measure of a “high-five to productivity ratio,” but doling out praise and encouragement seems to be indicative of creating a high-quality team culture, which in turn increases performance.

    http://www.thesimpledollar.com/dont-be-the-kobe-bryant-of-your-office/

Photo: Oliver Cole

Posted on

News You Can Use: 2/8/2017

  • Think employers must protect workers’ personal info? Think again

    For example, the workers in the Pennsylvania case turned over their personal information as a condition of employment, not for safekeeping, according to the court decision. Using reasoning employed in a case brought by account holders against their bank, the judges decided the safety of the information wasn’t guaranteed.

    Referencing another old case, the court said UPMC isn’t obliged to pay up if the stolen data resulted in purely economic losses but not damages to health, safety or property. That ruling drew on a decision where workers at a tire store sued for lost wages when the business shut down for a week when the property was flooded.

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/3158565/security/think-employers-must-protect-workers-personal-info-think-again.html

  • Time for procurement to become entreprocurial

    So what does Entreprocurial behaviour look like in practice?

    • It is the CPO who convinces the executive board that building new factories to service a new and competitive market is high risk, but that the supplier network is reliable enough to contract manufacture and distribute the products, and so it is a risk worth taking.
    • It is the procurement manager who not only secures a great innovation idea from an external party, but also takes personal ownership to turn that into an actual product.
    • It is the CPO who shifts the focus from the supply market to a focus on adding value to the customer.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–guest-blog/time-for-procurement-to-become-entreprocurial-662294

  • How Journalism Was Corrupted by the Power of Privilege

    Journalism is a topic I care about deeply and will cover frequently on this blog. Getting facts to people in the best possible method is good for any career. That said, Gary was a bit heavy handed in his point, but the outsider view has value.
  • Why Silicon Valley is high-fiving over Trump’s SEC pick

    Perhaps more notably, says Tusk, Clayton “isn’t a policy activist. I don’t think this is someone with an ideological view about how security regulation should be expanded.”

    That’s in stark contrast to Mary Jo White, a former litigator who stepped down as the head of the SEC at the end of the Obama administration. White had visited Silicon Valley nearly a year ago and put investors and founders on notice that the SEC was becoming concerned by spiking valuations in the private sector, among other things. As we wrote back in October, the SEC seemed to be using an investigation into troubled Theranos specifically to expand its mandate into Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/why-silicon-valley-is-high-fiving-over-trumps-sec-pick/?ncid=rss

  • How to create your own opportunities at work

    While it can be scary to work on a project with no obvious stakeholders, if it’s a truly valuable undertaking, it’ll prove itself. Other people will see its value as it develops, and you yourself will become more certain of it.

    Keep in mind, however, that it’s essential that you believe in the value of the undertaking. If you’re not sure it’s worth pursuing, get a second opinion from someone you trust (a close colleague, a mentor), or table it until you find another opportunity that makes your heart beat faster with conviction.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3067743/career-evolution/how-to-create-your-own-opportunities-at-work?partner=rss

Photo: Javier Garcia

Posted on

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