Tag: Career

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/18/2018

Finding Happy: Joey Lombardi: The Source

  • Is insurance a rich enough game to disrupt?

    Tech innovation has long been a challenge for insurance incumbents. Old systems are difficult to displace in any industry, but the complexity of insurance, tradition of relying on the past to predict the future and silos of data can make it a Herculean effort. Tech giants, on the other hand, regularly cannibalize their own revenue with new products and can enlist tens of thousands of engineers to develop fantastic digital customer experiences and bring large-scale efficiencies to back-end insurance systems through better software and AI.

    So, yes, FAAMG has a number of major advantages over insurance incumbents. But for tech giants, new verticals and initiatives are also longer-term decisions around margins and market scope. It’s an obvious point, but if FAAMG wants to jump into insurance, they’ll want a decent return. Can they find that in insurance?

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/10/is-insurance-a-rich-enough-game-to-disrupt/

  • How to handle the job-search process when you just got fired

    Instead, go with something like, “For three years, my role involved analyzing market opportunities and then making recommendations to our product teams on potential new products and product enhancements. We worked incredibly well together and launched some amazing innovations. The firm recently reorganized and shifted leadership. My role was redefined, and much of the analysis work that I love was removed from my job. While I realized some key wins as my role shifted, the primary focus of the position was no longer centered on the things I do best, like [insert things you do well and know this company is seeking].”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90199718/how-to-handle-the-job-search-process-when-you-just-got-fired

  • Being happy has nothing to do with money (or drugs)
  • Why Corporate America is recruiting high schoolers

    Since 2011, more than 400 companies have partnered with 79 public high schools across the country to offer a six-year program called P-Tech. Students can enroll for grades 9 to 14 and earn both a high school and an associate’s degree in a science, tech, engineering or math related field.

    The companies offer input on the curriculum, bring students on site, pair them with employee mentors, and offer paid internships, or some combination of the above.

    “There’s a war for talent across all our competitors. We know we’re going to need a lot of different pathways to bring talent in,” said Jennifer Ryan Crozier, president of the IBM Foundation.

    https://www.clickorlando.com/education/why-corporate-america-is-recruiting-high-schoolers

  • Yes, open office plans are the worst

    In the study, researchers followed two anonymous Fortune 500 companies during their transitions between a traditional office space to an open plan environment and used a sensor called a “sociometric badge” (think company ID on a lanyard) to record detailed information about the kind of interactions employees had in both spaces. The study collected information in two stages; first for several weeks before the renovation and the second for several weeks after.

    While the concept behind open office spaces is to drive informal interaction and collaboration among employees, the study found that for both groups of employees monitored (52 for one company and 100 for the other company) face-to-face interactions dropped, the number of emails sent increased between 20 and 50 percent and company executives reported a qualitative drop in productivity.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/yes-open-office-plans-are-the-worst/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage

Photo by Maxim Medvedev on Unsplash

Posted on

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

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/30/2018

  • Why We Gave Up a Star Employee to a Top Customer, and Why You Should, Too

    For us, encouraging our former COO to take on a major role at a customer company has accomplished just that. “Close business relationships are more important than ever, and my moving from intive-FDV to DropCar has, if anything, made our relationship stronger,” said Leandro Larroulet, who is now that company’s CIO. “Because I still work with the same team in the same office at intive-FDV, we can all leverage our established relationships to easily communicate based on an underlying trust from years working together.”

    Even if the employee who makes the move doesn’t stay in the same office, the two companies involved can still build a similar level of trust and provide exceptional customer experience. Though most of our clients are based in other countries, we continue to be able to cement relationships by making communication a matter of culture and habit. The same practices apply to the case of an employee leaving to work with a customer.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313637

  • Is Remote Work Taking a Psychological Toll on Your External Workers? Researchers Say Yes.

    Concerns about remote work are why a country like France has passed a “right to disconnect” provision to keep work at work. And while a similar provision was recently introduced in New York, it may be a long time before other cities — let alone the nation — embrace this kind of thinking.

    So, where does this leave employers in the United States? Companies can’t just tell their employees “We know what’s best for you,” and revoke remote work policies. That could upset employees by removing flexibility, while also decreasing productivity.

    The best compromise may be to add flexible policies, rather than remove them. To avoid the issues of isolation, companies can require employees to work in-office two or three times per month or per quarter.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313496

  • Has our ability to create intelligence outpaced our wisdom?
  • Report: Demand for these skills will rise dramatically by 2030
    1. Demand for technological skills, both basic digital and advanced tech, will rise by 55%
    2. Demand for social and emotional skills, such as leadership and managing others, will rise by 24%
    3. Demand for basic cognitive skills, which include basic data input and processing, will decline by 15%
    4. Demand for physical and manual skills, which include general equipment operation, will decline by 14%

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40577234/report-demand-for-these-skills-will-rise-dramatically-by-2030

  • What’s the Secret to Becoming a Leader? Stop Being a Boss.

    Having trouble delegating? You’ll never get far in your role as a leader if you hoard the major responsibilities for yourself. Imagine you’re jogging along a path at your local park: Not only will you stumble and potentially fall if you’re carrying a lot of luggage, but you also won’t move very efficiently. Instead, evaluate which responsibilities you should continue to shoulder, and delegate the rest to other team members.

    Transitioning from being an ear-to-the-ground manager to an effective leader isn’t possible if you can’t tell others what to do and then allow them to finish the job their way. To help you feel more comfortable doing that, try providing context to your team members about how their role fits into the big picture. Remember that teammates may not take the routes you would to achieve results — and that that’s OK. If they make missteps, be a leader they can come to for suggestions rather than reprimands. Not only will you get more done, but your employees will get a boost of self-esteem and empowerment.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313388

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/28/2018

  • Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask teenagers for images?

    On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

    The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.
    **
    In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/facebook-men-children-sexual-images
    I called out Facebook on SourceCast 106 for “outsourcing” policy to users instead of doing it themselves. This survey is even worse. Facebook needs to decide what kind of community it wants to be. Users will come and go as a result. Also – Facebook should not be trying to attract children and teens, so this line of question is problematic on a whole other level.

  • For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

    On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

    There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

    Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

  • What Happens In One Lifetime?
  • Another new survey underscores that skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want

    According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

    In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/another-new-survey-underscores-that-skilled-workers-can-pretty-much-live-wherever-they-want/?ncid=rss

  • United Airlines’ Bonus Lottery Was Doomed to Fail. Don’t Make the Same Mistake With Your Team.

    If you want to know what your employers need or want, try asking them what they’d change about the culture of your workplace. I doubt the answer will be, “We need a Ping-Pong table” or, “I’d love to have my name picked out of a hat for a bonus” but instead, “I don’t understand what I need to do to get promoted or a raise,” “I’d love to be able to attend a conference to learn more about our industry” or, “I would love a mentor who could help guide me.”

    If your employees want to play the lottery, they have that option outside of work. Adults don’t want to play games at work, and United Arilines found that out the hard way. We don’t need toys; we want job satisfaction. And most importantly, employees want predictability.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309984

Photo: Joshua Earle

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/14/2018

  • China using big data to detain people before crime is committed

    Chinese police theorists have identified specific “extremist behaviours, which include if you store a large amount of food in your home, if your child suddenly quits school and so on,” she said. Train a computer to look for such conduct, and “then you have a big data program modelled upon pretty racist ideas about peaceful behaviours that are part of a Uyghur identity,” she said.

    The report “adds some pieces to the puzzle” over what is happening in Xinjiang, where it became clear over the last year “that tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs were disappearing without having done anything illegal,” said Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has travelled extensively in Xinjiang.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-using-big-data-to-detain-people-in-re-education-before-crime-committed-report/article38126551/
    The dark side of “big data” and “AI” need to be reported on and discussed.

  • This One Aspect of Your Office Design Is Wasting a Lot of Time and Money

    Meetings are expensive — the rent of the office space combined with the wages of each attendee — but a lot of that investment is wasted. A UCLA and University of Minnesota study finds that executives spend up to half of their working hours in meetings and that as much as 50 percent of that time is unproductive. With 17 million business meetings in the United States every day, there are a lot of frustrated workers: 88 percent of people are annoyed by technology problems in meeting rooms, and 20 percent of meetings run late due to those issues, wasting 2.83 working days a year for the average employee.

    Also:

    Making meeting rooms more interactive and easier to navigate is part of a movement to upgrade our office spaces to better reflect how we work today. Real estate executives acknowledge updating is needed with 86 percent saying they are remaking or adapting offices and another 51 percent are planning to reinvent shared workspaces this year, according to the CBRE’s 2017 Americas Occupier Survey. Employing technology to more efficiently use meeting space is a vital part of those efforts and can make a big impact on a company’s bottom line.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309625

  • Can DIY Solar Panels Solve Puerto Rico’s Power Crisis?
  • Everyone on LinkedIn is a “passionate, experienced, motivated” leader

    While it’s awesome that we’re all so “experienced,” “passionate,” and “creative,” these labels won’t help any of us stand out. Slinging around the same generic language as everybody else is among the worst strategies for getting ahead.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40538110/everyone-on-linkedin-is-a-passionate-experienced-motivated-leader
    4 Signs You’re Trying Too Hard On LinkedIn

    The number one sign Marco Montinari, a recruitment consultant at Mason Frank International, sees repeatedly is LinkedIn users trying to be philosophers or motivational speakers. “It usually involves reflecting on their own successes while also advising people to stay humble,” Montinari says. While there’s nothing inherently bad about trying to deconstruct common professional issues or trying to uplift people through motivational words, unless you actually are, you know, a philosopher, what you think is deep or uplifting often comes across as simply trite or self-congratulatory. As Montinari points out: “A lesson in self-awareness is often needed for people who spend time telling others how to live their lives.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40523265/4-signs-youre-trying-too-hard-on-linkedin

  • Science Says Money Does Buy Happiness If You Spend it the Right Way

    The reason that money demonstratively increases happiness levels up until a point is that it takes a certain salary to feel financially secure.

    Having enough money means no anxiety when shopping at the grocery store, going out to eat or paying your rent. This type of security is overlooked when you are used to it.

    Remembering and being appreciative of the fact that you are free to purchase things, though, will make you happier even after it has settled in as normal amount of your finances. Fundamentally, having enough money to buy these basic necessities will no-doubt increase your happiness levels.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309814

Photo: Brooke Winters