Tag: Office Culture

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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

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News You Can Use: 2/21/2018

  • Whatever Happened to Generation X?

    That’s partially why, collectively, no one’s ever thought much of us. The boomers have for the most part ignored us, treating us like hapless little kids. And when the millennials came along — a group just as large and self-obsessed and overly dramatic as their parents — we became the forgotten middle children. We weren’t the “me” or the “me, me, me” generation. We were more like the “meh” generation, stuck between two cohorts who never stop talking. Lately, our sense of invisibility has felt particularly acute in Philly, a town still run by people in their 50s and 60s — but being remade to suit the tastes of people in their 20s.

    http://www.phillymag.com/news/2018/01/27/generation-x-philadelphia/

  • Comcast may force us to rethink the definition of “cord-cutting”

    For the fourth quarter, Comcast said it lost 33,000 traditional pay-TV subscribers while gaining an impressive 350,000 high-speed internet customers. All told, the company ended the quarter with a net increase of 243,000 new customers. For the full year, that number was up by 777,000 customers.

    Comcast further boasted that it has signed up more than 1 million high-speed internet customers for 12 consecutive years. In other words, a lot of cord-cutters still need that cable cord–even if they’d rather watch Netflix than channel surf through an old-fashion cable TV lineup.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40521015/comcast-may-force-us-to-rethink-the-definition-of-cord-cutting

  • The hidden role informal caregivers play in health care
  • HR has lost the trust of employees. Here is who has it now

    A superior has made a pass at a subordinate, and an executive of the company asks that the subordinate be fired to “clean up” the situation. An employee repeatedly makes homophobic, racist, or sexist remarks to their colleagues, but the company has deemed the individual critical to the functioning of the sales team, and so is merely given a warning. Company morale is suffering and complaints are showing up on online sites like Glassdoor, so HR is charged with “fixing” the company’s rating. A well-performing employee is repeatedly given poor performance reviews to make their firing tidy.

    All of these examples are hypothetical, but they are archetypes for the near daily news of HR abuses that are now been regularly published around the world.

    Independent Apps are becoming a solution:

    Clearly, people want to talk about the problems at their workplace. But venting to anonymous colleagues is about the least effective approach to ameliorating the underlying conditions making workers unhappy in the workforce. That’s why other apps are exploring how to handle difficult conversations at the workplace in a better light, often with the blessing of HR departments themselves.

    Bravely is one such app. The company, based in New York, was founded by Toby Hervey, Sarah Sheehan, and Rasesh Patel as a platform to facilitate the kinds of hard conversations that need to happen for a workplace to thrive. Their concept is to connect workers who might be struggling bringing up a matter at work with expert “Pros” who are trained executive and life coaches who can help a worker think through their options and how best to raise their voice at a company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/10/hr-has-lost-the-trust-of-employees-here-is-who-has-it-now/?ncid=rss

  • Conversation Topics That Should and Shouldn’t Be Discussed in the Office

    Despite the strict views that some people and industries have about what’s appropriate office conversation, talk is talk and people are going to do it either way. So what’s the hottest topic of conversation? Politics. Seventy-four percent of people agree that politics is the most common subject, and that’s likely due to the rocky 2016 election and the current state of American politics right now.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308815

    Source: InsuranceQuotes (click the link to see the whole infographic)

Photo: Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez

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News You Can Use: 1/31/2018

  • Apple CEO becomes latest tech bigwig to warn of social media’s dangers

    Cook joins a multitude of tech personalities in recent years worrying about the negative impact of technology, and social media in particular, on our lives. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, admitted last year that he’d helped Mark Zuckerberg build “a monster,” stating: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

    Another former Facebook exec, Chamath Palihapitiya, told a group at Stanford Graduate School of Business that the social network could be “destroying how society works” through “short-term, dopamine-driven, feedback loops.”

    https://thenextweb.com/apple/2018/01/20/apple-ceo-becomes-latest-tech-bigwig-to-warn-of-social-medias-dangers/

  • Is Procurement Responsible If Suppliers Are Stupid and Bid Too Low?

    So during our discussion, my friend and I had a philosophical debate about whether it was in any sense “our problem” as buyers if a supplier put in a stupidly low bid. At what point should procurement worry that an offer is too low? Does procurement have a moral or ethical obligation to stop firms getting themselves into trouble?

    Our conclusion – after another beer – was no, we don’t. We must protect our own organisation, so we should think hard about the issues if, for instance, a firm was likely to go under because of the deal. Do we have contingency plans in place for that? (It’s rarely a positive for the buyer obviously if this happens to an important supplier).

    And we should build protection into the contract to make sure the supplier can’t just walk away from the deal if it becomes too onerous – or at least, to ensure we are very well compensated if they do. But it is not our role to protect suppliers from their own stupidity, particularly if it is a large firm with many customers and financial strength itself. Indeed, our role is to drive competitive advantage, which often means we are paying less than our competitors for a similar product or service.

    http://spendmatters.com/uk/procurement-responsible-suppliers-stupid-bid-low/

  • How faster computers gave us Meltdown and Spectre
  • Good-bye, Fluffy Office Perks, and 3 Other Tech Business Predictions for 2018

    Office perks are always a hot topic in the tech world. However, more companies realize that fluffy office culture doesn’t actually attract the best talent or cultivate the highest performing team. Those perks you think your employees want can actually be more distracting and detrimental to productivity. To really reap the benefits of the “perk” in the first place, find out what motivates employees. Ping-pong tables and nap rooms will move out and more meaningful perks will take their place. Companies that attract the most talented and passionate teams will do it with job descriptions and mission statements that inspire a deep sense of purpose.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/307509

  • On Second Thought, You Should Maybe Talk Less In Meetings

    Research on creativity suggests that the people who have the most ideas are also most likely to have the best ideas. So it’s a good idea to generate a lot of ideas while you’re in a meeting–at least inside your own head to start with. But before deciding to contribute your latest thought in the meeting, write it down. Take a look at it, and decide whether you think it’s one of the best you’ve come up with. If so, go on and share it! Then you can keep your others in reserve in case the group isn’t happy with the options they have so far.

    There are two benefits to writing your ideas down and looking them over before speaking. Obviously, one is that you can privately rank your own contributions rather than subjecting all of them to your team’s assessment (or risk even the good ones getting lost in the shuffle). This way you’re maximizing the chance that other people will actually rally to your point of view–and form a positive impression of you in the process.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40516098/on-second-thought-you-should-maybe-talk-less-in-meetings

Photo: Daniel Cheung

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News You Can Use: 1/3/2018

  • The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought

    When virtually all online advertising goes through two companies, however, they have the power to harm websites arbitrarily. One political blog that posted an article trying to distinguish the “alt-right” from white nationalism received a warning email from Google’s AdSense team. An editor took the article down, explaining to readers that the blog “needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive.” You needn’t agree with the editorial decision to publish the article to be troubled by Google’s vetoing it.

    In his 2014 book “Zero to One,” Peter Thiel notes that because Google “doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about . . . its impact on the wider world.” If executives at a Silicon Valley monopoly believe that censoring certain content will push the world in a positive direction, market pressures cannot sufficiently restrain them.

    Journalists also argue that tech companies are pushing media toward the lowest common denominator. Social media rewards clickbait—sensational headlines that confirm readers’ biases. Google and Facebook’s advertising duopoly bleeds traditional publishers of the revenue needed to produce high-quality news. At the same time, Google’s search engine is biased against subscription content, depleting another source of funding.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-google-facebook-duopoly-threatens-diversity-of-thought-1513642519

  • China’s New Lenders Collect Invasive Data and Offer Billions. Beijing Is Worried.

    In November, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, stopped companies and people from starting new online cash lending platforms. In early December, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said it would crack down on unlicensed cash loan companies and put a lid on high-interest loans.

    China’s small loans are piling up. More than 8,600 companies offer some form of small loan, and about $145 billion of those debts remain unpaid, according to the People’s Bank of China. Other estimates run as high as $392 billion, according to the Boston Consulting Group. The government does not track default rates among online lenders, which disclose little on their own.

    “We are worried that in an environment where there is no effective credit system, people tend to overborrow, especially when capital comes in,” said Bai Chengyu, an executive at the China Association of Microfinance, who is no relation to Bai Shichao.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/business/china-online-lending-debt.html

  • 2017 in 7 minutes
  • Internet Tightens: Popular Chinese WeChat App to Become Official ID

    “The data these companies collect is richer and thicker than what the government can collect, so the typical case now is the government going to the companies to get information,” said Severine Arsene, managing editor of AsiaGlobal Online at the University of Hong Kong’s Asia Global Institute. “This shows how much power the companies hold.”

    The move from physical ID cards to digital images makes sense in a country where people use their mobile devices for an array of daily functions, from shopping to paying restaurant bills to streaming videos, Ms. Arsene said, but it also carries risks that the companies might be seen to be working too closely with the government.

    Hosting a huge repository of government data also increases the threat it could be compromised, said Paul McKenzie, a managing partner of law firm Morrison Foerster.

    “In the course of deploying this technology, WeChat may end up with huge volumes of data associated with people’s ID cards and other personal information,” Mr. McKenzie said. “If that’s the case, the security of WeChat ’s network from hacks will be critical.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/internet-tightens-popular-chinese-wechat-app-to-become-official-id-1514541980

  • Use This Five-Point Guide to Find Patience When You’re Annoyed

    Over at Quick and Dirty Tips, Psychologist Ellen Hendriksen, PhD, writes that patience is a kind of self-control, which, she says, is “the ability to regulate your emotions and behavior, even when your impulses are screaming otherwise.” Thus, patience is a state of mind that can be trained and strengthened—it’s not a rarefied state for saints and superheroes. And annoyance, as anyone who’s stewed in it will recognize, is a subset of anger.

    Hendriksen draws on research about self-control and anger to draw up this five-point guide to letting go of annoyance and find patience:

    1. Know that your goal will still be achieved.
    2. Give yourself what you need in your imagination.
    3. Change your conclusion.
    4. Pretend you’re being watched.
    5. Save the story for later.

    https://lifehacker.com/use-this-five-point-guide-to-find-patience-when-youre-a-1821563720

Photo: Geran de Klerk

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News You Can Use: 12/27/2017

  • Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society

    Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

    He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. “That’s what we’re dealing with,” said Palihapitiya. “And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.” He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” He later adds, though, that he believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

  • The Services Procurement Machine is Broken — Here’s Why You Should Trade it in for a New Approach

    Engagements measured on cost and milestones alone fail to secure the best value for the business, as quality and innovation are often the first casualties to such an approach. What’s more, the structure of the machine has forced procurement to accept increased supplier rationalization and a narrow preference for larger services providers. Stuck working with big, “safe” firms, businesses have lost access to the high-performing talent and innovative solutions smaller firms can offer.

    But let’s not get all touchy-feely here: no gently swung process automation hammer is going to shatter an old system. What’s needed to creating lasting improvement is a root cause analysis of why the machine broke in the first place.

    Also:

    Second, the machine’s focus on cost and risk avoidance has led to increased supplier rationalization. This can be great for MRO, but the same strategy for safety supplies or lightbulbs is not necessarily the right one to tap specialized creative or strategic talent. The result is small and medium-sized suppliers that have the expertise and connections to drive greater success on a localized basis in a global world end up getting locked out of the process.

    http://spendmatters.com/2017/12/04/services-procurement-machine-broken-heres-trade-new-approach/

  • How Will the Web Look Without Net Neutrality? We Travel Into the Future to Find Out

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-will-the-web-look-like-without-net-neutrality-we-travel-into-the-future-to-find-out-1513369387
  • How A Flexible Work Culture Works For Everyone

    Reduce the barriers to attracting top talent: Work-life balance ranks as the number one career goal for all three major generations — baby boomers, Generation X and millennials — according to our research with Intel. Offering flexible work arrangements can help remove geographical barriers, ensuring that you can hire and retain the best candidates, regardless of location or other barriers. (I recently wrote more on generational workplace values.)

    Benefit the planet: Flexible work practices also help businesses to conserve natural resources and energy. With fewer people in the office and on the road, you’re helping reduce transportation-related pollution and can maximize office space usage. An internal Dell study in 2015 revealed that its Connected Workplace program in the United States alone helped reduce an estimate 25 million kWh of energy. Gallup data suggests that the U.S. workforce avoids 2.7 billion round-trips per year by telecommuting — a reduction of 30 million metric tons CO2e per year.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2017/12/08/how-a-flexible-work-culture-works-for-everyone/#201ae4373b7f

  • Estonia, the Digital Republic

    Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic

Photo: Jaanus Jagomägi