Tag: Work Life Balance

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News You Can Use: 9/20/2017

  • The Surprising Upsides To Getting Angry At Work

    So it’s no surprise that in measured doses, anger can prove a useful performance catalyst. Of course, this requires self-control and emotional intelligence. If you can tap into the driving and energizing force that anger provides, you may be able to produce better outcomes than you would trying to suppress those feelings. But the key is to feel a moderate amount of anger (or what psychologists call “arousal”–the mental stress or pressure that motivates people to act) that leads to higher performance than just being pumped with adrenaline on the one hand or being too bored, calm, and cool-headed on the other.

    Likewise, anger can help you become more aware of your values and motives, highlighting your inner compass and system of beliefs so you can realize how much you actually want something–and why. Conversely, the Zen-like ability to eliminate both anger and its sources will also extinguish any passion or desire to achieve. No wonder, then, that exceptional achievers–entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and even scientists–are often motivated by an intense sense of dissatisfaction, frustration at their past performance, and even anger. They’re rebels with a cause, always work hard to create change.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40464734/the-surprising-upsides-to-getting-angry-at-work

    Yeah… measured doses

  • Blockchain In The Supply Chain: Too Much Hype

    In summary, blockchain is an interesting technology. But it may be the least mature of all the technologies described in this report. On the other hand, because blockchain is a back-end technology, most companies don’t need to proactively invest in exploring its value.  We will know the technology is mature when people don’t even use the term “blockchain,” much as people don’t use the term TCP/IP when talking about their use of the Internet. If the technology does mature, the providers of Public Cloud supply chain solutions will be adversely impacted.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2017/09/01/blockchain-in-the-supply-chain-too-much-hype/#53715b4e198c

  • What moral decisions should driverless cars make?
  • Japan Is No Place for Single Mothers

    Women in Japan tend to struggle economically following divorce. That’s because traditionally in Japan, men work, and women stay home to take care of the children. About 62 percent of women drop out of the workforce when they have their first child, according to Kingston. When couples divorce, women have often been out of the workforce for a long time. Many institutions incentivize this arrangement: Japanese corporations often give husbands whose wives stay home a bonus, and the Japanese tax system punishes couples with two incomes. When women do try to return to the workforce, they usually can only find low-paying part-time work, if they find a job at all. And women who do work earn 30 percentless than men who do.  “In both the U.S. and Japan, you have a situation where women are forced to work, but if the economy doesn’t allow women to feed a family with 40 hours a week, you have a very difficult economic situation,” Ezawa said.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/japan-is-no-place-for-single-mothers/538743/?utm_source=feed

  • Stop Calling It ‘Coaching’ When All You’re Really Doing Is Scolding Your Team

    Unfortunately, when someone is “coached” they are typically being criticized. The overuse of criticism leads to a host of problems from escape and avoidance to the elimination of related, desirable behaviors. But what’s most damaging is get a dressing down for something that bothers someone but really isn’t that big a deal. If I get an earful (does it still count as an earful if the feedback is given via email?) about the content of my emails I am likely to say “okay fine, I won’t send any emails at all.” If I get blasted for using less-than-professional language on an internal message board, I am more likely to stop reading and posting altogether than I am to watch my word choice in the future.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299804

Photo: Andre Hunter

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News You Can Use: 8/2/2017

  • Is IT having an identity crisis?

    Forty percent of the CIOs said that they make 50% or less of the IT decisions for their companies. And 39% said that business departments buy their own technology without consulting IT “often,” “very often” or “most of the time.” Meantime, IT departments themselves perform a shrinking proportion of the technology work they still oversee, with 24% of the respondents saying they outsource more than 50% of their IT and only 9% saying they outsource none at all.

    If outsourcing is the norm, and business departments outside IT are increasingly procuring their own technology, it may be time to ask exactly what IT’s role and identity is in the modern workplace.

    Also:

    Whatever IT’s identity within an organization may be, if it’s primarily viewed as a cost center, that’s not a good thing. “IT is a foundational element,” says Ed McLaughlin, CIO at Mastercard. “You really have to cease thinking of technology as a cost center. Technology is one of the primary assets of a business.”

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3191986/it-management/is-it-having-an-identity-crisis.html

  • Do Raises Make Employees Happy or Is It Something More?

    “One of the most striking results we’ve found is that, across all income levels, the top predictor of workplace satisfaction is not pay. It is the culture and values of the organization, followed closely by the quality of senior leadership and the career opportunities at the company. Among the six workplace factors we examined, compensation and benefits were consistently rated among the least important factors of workplace happiness.”

    However, there was a study from Princeton that found that “having a higher income increases happiness but only up to about $75,000 per year.” After that, “higher pay doesn’t influence happiness much, and other factors take over.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297326

  • The Case for National Childcare
  • 8 Ways Any Millennial Can Be a Millionaire in 5 Years

    Investing can be tricky, but it’s one of the best ways to get a return on the money you currently have. If you want to make significant money quickly, you’ll need to take some major risks, which means being willing to lose all the money you put in. For best results, start by investing a good amount of money. You can make more potentially if you risk more. Pick certain sectors that you find yourself most interested in and concentrate on investments in those spaces. Before any of this though, take time to learn as much as possible about the stock market.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297322

  • Six Words And Phrases That Make Everyone Hate Working With You

    3. “IT IS WHAT IT IS”
    Clichés like this make you sound like a lazy thinker. We default unthinkingly to empty expressions when we’re trying to give the impression we have something to say but really don’t, and also when we want to sound as though we’re comfortable with something but might not be. “Business is business,” “it is what it is,” and phrases like them aren’t just meaningless and repetitious—they sound like you don’t really care or that your brain just isn’t in gear. Good luck getting promoted that way.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40441775/six-words-and-phrases-that-make-everyone-hate-working-with-you
    This is my dad’s favorite saying, guess he won’t be getting that big butcher shop promotion…

Photo: Brodie Vissers

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News You Can Use: 5/17/2017

  • LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: To Scale, Do Things That Don’t Scale

    “Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more,” says Hoffman. “But here’s the thing: You don’t start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.”

    Adds Chesky, “It’s really hard to get even 10 people to love anything but it’s not hard if you spend a ton of time with them.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293393

  • Why ‘Vacation-Shaming’ Hurts You More Than Your Employees

    Gary Beckstrand, vice president of O.C. Tanner Institute, in Salt Lake City, described an acquaintance who worked for a smaller company where long hours and lots of work travel were common. “While she was very passionate about her work — in fact, she says she loved it — after three years and only one very short vacation mixed in, she was completely burned out and she left the company,” Beckstrand told me.

    “You lose great experience and talent with employees who leave, and it costs the company money to bring in and train a new person.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293711

  • Irrational Thinking Is a Virtue, Not a Vice
  • DHS ‘likely’ to expand laptop ban on flights

    Expanding the ban to and from other countries, including European countries, is being weighed by DHS, according to various reports. There is also an internal debate at DHS about what to do about lithium batteries inside devices stored in the baggage hold of a plane that could overheat and catch fire, causing a catastrophic explosion, according to Reuters and others.

    Expanding the DHS ban would require a herculean adjustment for many business travelers, some accustomed to writing and editing reports and presentations for hours on long flights. Suggested workarounds include the ability to check out a lightweight laptop or Chromebook near an airport gate to use just for that flight. It would then be checked in after all data was erased at the end of the flight.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3196146/it-industry/dhs-likely-to-expand-laptop-ban-on-flights.html

  • Why your mom is the best CPO you know

    By the time my son was 5, I had learned a valuable lesson: the $30 double-reinforced-knee pants from the catalog were a smarter purchase than the $9 pants from the big-box store. Why? Because my son, God bless him, can wear holes in the knees of his pants in no time flat. The $9 pants seemed like a bargain, but I had to replace them often. After two winters of trying to find long pants in his size when the stores had transitioned to Spring duds, I realized that the better quality, more expensive pants saved me time, gas, frustration in the long run.

    https://www.jaggaer.com/mother-procurement-posts-mom-best-cpo-know/

Photo: Eva Darron

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News You Can Use: 5/10/2017

  • Microsoft’s CEO Just Gave Some Brilliant Career Advice…

    “I was reading it not in the context of business or work culture, but in the context of my children’s education. The author describes the simple metaphor of kids at school. One of them is a ‘know-it-all’ and the other is a ‘learn-it-all,’ and the ‘learn-it-all’ always will do better than the other one even if the ‘know-it-all’ kid starts with much more innate capability.”

    Going back to business: If that applies to boys and girls at school, I think it also applies to CEOs like me, and entire organizations, like Microsoft.”

    https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/microsofts-ceo-just-gave-some-brilliant-career-advice-here-it-is-in-one-sentence.html

  • How to plan for future supply chain leadership

    To keep up with the growing demand for supply chain leadership, companies need to have a succession plan that helps them identify and develop new leaders who can replace existing leaders as they transition out of the company. Unfortunately, most have no such plan in place. According to a recent study from the American Management Association, only 18 percent of managers and executives have a succession plan in place to respond to a sudden loss of key executives—not nearly enough to keep business productivity up as people retire, despite the added number of supply chain undergraduate and graduate programs.

    http://www.supplychainquarterly.com/news/20170428-how-to-plan-for-future-supply-chain-leadership/

  • Alison Bing: ” High-impact Travel”
  • Tech employees quit their jobs mostly because of unfair work environments, study says

    The study looked at four main types of unfair treatment, behaviors and experiences: unfair people management practices, stereotyping, sexual harassment and bullying/hostility. As it turns out, turnover due to unfairness is a $16 billion per year problem, according to the study. The silver lining, as pointed out in the study, is that people would be down to stay if companies took steps to improve culture.

    Other takeaways from the study were that experiences differ dramatically among groups of people, depending on their race, gender and sexual orientation. For LGBT people and women, bullying was the main reason for reporting unfairness. For people of color, stereotypes were the main driver for leaving due to unfairness. Nearly one in four people of color surveyed (23%) reported being stereotyped at past jobs.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/27/tech-employees-quit-their-jobs-mostly-because-of-unfair-work-environments-study-says/?ncid=rss

  • How to find friends when you move for your job

    Doing so takes a bit of creativity, plus courage to put yourself out there. Oh, and one other thing: “When you’re moving into a new community and trying to find your tribe, let your freak flag fly a little bit,” she says. It’s easier to find real friends when you’re sharing what you’re passionate about and not trying to fit in for the sake of making friends. Relationships built on false impressions aren’t the ones that are going to stick, anyway. And here are some ways you can find likely prospects.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40413637/how-to-find-friends-when-you-move-for-your-job

Photo: Sam Burriss