Save money by hiring better

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The Holstee Manifesto. Words to live by.

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Pinball Wizard

No idea what ever inspired this, but pinball fans everywhere — you gotta love it! I still love to play classic pinball, and would enjoy getting a chance to take a spin on this set-up… enjoy.

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Kyoto, Durban, COP17, and me

Nope. I did not go to Durban. No, I have not been to any of the global climate change confabs that have been held regularly since the earlier 1990′s, seemingly to little actual tangible successes. With Canada now officially withdrawn from the Kyoto Accord and the big tangible output from Durban/COP17 being the “establishment of an

Shows in graphic form the projected increase i...

Ad-Hoc working group” for “enhanced action”, it is pretty easy to be cynical about ever implementing any successful measures to combat global warming/climate change. Of course, that is only important if you think climate change is real. And one of the best tactics for ensuring a lack of action on this file is continuing to fan the flames of the debate towards “is it real?”, “are we all equally responsible?” and “who goes first?” flashpoints rather than “what do we need to do to reduce our pollution levels across the board?” Continue reading

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Blogger’s Remorse? Get inspired by great copy

I have been busied out getting up to speed on several new business projects lately, and it has been many months since my last post.  Truth be told, I’ve been struggling with what I suspect is a wide ranging problem in these early social media days — I’ll call it “blogger’s remorse”, similar to the concept of “buyer’s remorse” that for many people accompanies that string of “must have” purchases… “what was I thinking…?” Continue reading

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Everyone needs heroes. Ray Anderson is one of mine.

"The Corporation" (DVD)

Image by jetalone via Flickr

I first came across Ray Anderson in the 2003 documentary “The Corporation”. After having spent 25 years in business and just recently “hung out my shingle” as a free agent, sitting through “The Corporation” in early 2004 delivered my epiphany. In a couple of brief hours, more than a quarter-century of business fascination, experiences, and concerns were focused and crystallized in a clear, obvious, and undeniable truth: business as we know it is fundamentally “toxic” (my term); it must be — and can be — re-engineered to be “less toxic”. Quite possibly nothing less than our continued prosperity as a civilization depends on it. Continue reading

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Fixing higher education

Clinical teaching

Image by paukrus via Flickr

I read with interest a recent editorial in The Economist, titled “How to make college cheaper”. It is an interesting read, and talks about a researcher’s thought experiment around how to offer an education currently priced at $26,000 annually for the much more reasonable price of $6,700.

Partly because I teach at one of the local universities, I’ve thought quite a bit about some of what I perceive to be “wrong” with our universities and have written previously about it here. I was quite heartened in reading through the Economist Continue reading

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Businesses behaving badly

We are suffering some significant shocks to our economy, from oil prices and environmental anxiety, to a variety of contaminated consumer products, and now a major financial crisis. Corporate greed, stupidity, regulations, and corruption are blamed for these problems, but the causes run much deeper. Continue reading

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The frustrating lottery we’ve all played…

Imagine the introduction of a new lottery game that promises a “lifetime of cash and security” to those lucky enough to win. You’re intrigued, and so you check out the rules of this game: Continue reading

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Oil and water don’t mix… or do they?

When poured in a jar with water or spilled in the ocean, oil rises to the top. Business works the same way, raising the commercial value of oil far above the value of water. An extreme example of this is the tar sands projects (oil sands) in Canada, which use up to four barrels of fresh water to Continue reading

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A grain of salt

Salt (sodium chloride) is an inexpensive way to enhance taste and preserve food

Salt is addictive to many food companies. It is a cheap way to preserve food and make it taste better. Cheap if you don’t count the health care costs of high blood pressure. In North America, Continue reading

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Just a spoonful of sugar

Calories from sugar have increased, contributing to obesity and diabetes

A spoonful of sugar may help for medicine, but does it really take eight to ten teaspoons of sugar to help drink a cola? That is how much sugar (as corn syrup) is in most soft drinks. That would not Continue reading

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Don’t just search under the street light..!

In an earlier post “The Frustrating Lottery…” I compared the traditional job search of focusing on posted jobs to an opaque, poorly designed lottery that offered a very small chance of success for the job seeker.  I suggested that the alternative to squandering your precious time Continue reading

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Resolving the job search “jigsaw puzzle”

Do you like doing jigsaw puzzles? For me, while I find that the early stages can be a bit frustrating, it is always a great pleasure when the picture has started to take shape and every new piece inserted adds a bit more clarity to the puzzle.

Now, imagine the same jigsaw puzzle, but this time there are just the puzzle pieces with no packing box, so there is no guiding picture to work from. Continue reading

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A competent engineer with a passion for business

What I learned from my undergraduate engineering schooling was that with reasonable tools and assumptions about operating conditions, you could break things down into their component parts, illustrate your solution, state your assumptions, and show your work. You could always get Continue reading

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Our current path is not sustainable

I live in a time when we – and I believe that to mean the majority of the human species – are starting to awaken to the reality that we live in a physically closed system. I stress physically closed to properly differentiate from a fully closed system, which of course our Earth is not as we Continue reading

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What CCI means to me…

People will  tell you that for a business to be meaningful, it must connect up with something that is important to the customer… and so of course in promoting the business in public, we tend to lead with a customer-centric statement  — more often than not, its expressed as “..this is what we can do for you and how we can improve some aspect of your life…”. Continue reading

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The reality about business – a toxic “machine”

I am troubled. I am deeply troubled by much of the wreckage of the outcomes of the modern corporations and its current business practices. I want to be, and generally am, an unfettered advocate for open markets, for globalization, for ownership and private property rights and for Continue reading

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At the heart of business — 3 ironies

Being fascinated by business I have spent some time studying the specific toxic natures of the machine. And as any good engineer is taught to proceed, I have deconstructed the machine to try to better understand how and why it operates the way it does. And as that has proceeded, I have Continue reading

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Detoxing — some straightforward solutions

In earlier posts, I’ve laid out in some detail the “problems” that businesses generate in our society, which are both intended and unintended consequences of the construction of our market economy. The solutions to these challenges are straightforward, and based on directly addressing these three ironies that are at the heart of how businesses are engineered to function: Continue reading

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Who is controlling your career?

Our working motto is: “Helping you to take control of your career.” It’s got a nice buzz to it, and certainly it’s true that most people want to feel that they are in control of their own career. It does beg the larger question, however — how much control you really have over your own career…? Continue reading

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Results-Only Work (ROWE)

I heard an interesting interview on CBC radio a couple of days ago — it was a discussion of ROWE, which stands for Results Only Work Environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

In a nutshell, ROWE is attempting to break the concept of paying an hourly rate (or essentially Continue reading

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The 5 major “career ailments”

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably doing some soul searching about your job, your life, your work, however you label it. Otherwise, why be here? So, truth be told, I’m not sure if this will be of any interest to you, but I figure you’ve got one of five major “career ailments” if you’re swirling around here. Continue reading

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A challenge with food labeling…

As one indicator of the challenge of having accurate and consumer-friendly (ie: useful to the lay person) labeling, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is now consulting with various groups to Continue reading

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Definition of insanity: the standard job search

Albert Einstein defined “insanity” as doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Unfortunately, this sounds a lot like a conventional job search strategy that Continue reading

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6 necessary conditions for effective job search

I meet lots of people every week who tell me about how bored or stressed they are in their jobs, or how frustrated they are by not having meaningful employment, or how confused they are about what they should do in terms of a “career transition” decision looming on the horizon.  And most of them ask some variation on the same basic question: “What are MY chances of being successful in finding something that is a really good “fit” for me?” Continue reading

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Costs, the Market, and BP

One of my major beliefs (and the rationale behind much of the philosophy of the Business Detox Project) is that the world would be a much better place if we worked to price “externalities” into our market transactions. The current fiasco that is playing out in the Gulf of Mexico with BP provides a real-life case where we explore what this might look like. Continue reading

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Labour unrest… in China

A couple of news items struck me as note-worthy over the past couple of days. One was the rash of suicides at the Foxcomm plant in China (where they make iPhones for Apple), and the other was the recent strike by Honda workers in China over their wages. Continue reading

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Career change — lessons from business transformation strategies

I came across an article today in Strategy+Business about managing business change, and it struck me that it was very applicable to how we coach our clients to manage/drive their career transformation — essentially just replacing the words “business” or “company” with “people” drives the key points home of effective career transformation. Continue reading

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Truthiness in resumes…

Interesting article from Wharton that asks: “When do exaggerations and misstatements cross the line?”

Here is a short extract from the article, just to get you chuckling a bit –

He recounts the story of Marilee Jones, a former dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a popular guide to the college admissions process. Although she encouraged college applicants not to overstate their accomplishments, Jones resigned from her position in 2007 after it was discovered that she had fabricated two academic degrees on her initial job application in 1979 and added a third later on. “I think what happens is that people feel under pressure, so they misrepresent something to give themselves an edge and it becomes very hard to correct,” Schweitzer notes. “In the case of Jones, she lied about her educational background when she started working at MIT and it was 28 years before they caught it. At some point, it becomes hard to take [fabrications] off a resume.”

So my take is — you definitely don’t want to be making things up!! As the article points out, we now live in an always-on, 24×7 world where most information is only a search term or two away.. comments?

 

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Do you know what you are worth?

If you are like the majority of working people out there, you willingly exchange a significant portion of your labour and talents for the ongoing promise of some kind of stability, predictability, and financial remuneration. You know this as your employment contract. Do you ever wonder how much you are worth? Maybe you think that you should be paid more for your efforts? Continue reading

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Shooting down some common career myths

I came across this article in one of the many newsletters I receive in my in-box; this one struck me as a well constructed set of “myths” that many of us have bought into over the years. This blog post is from “Tech Republic” which is an IT centric newsletter, so the blog itself is IT-centric and also US-specific. The original blog entry is here and is well worth skimming through. Continue reading

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More on the BP disaster

Just posted this comment to the Economist, after reading the latest article on the BP disaster and the mounting costs. The article is here; here is my posted comment: Continue reading

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BP: When a "wake-up call" probably isn’t

There is lots of discussion about how the current BP Gulf of Mexico situation is a “wake up call” for the government and for Big Oil. We said the same thing about the banks and the global economic meltdown of 2007/08.  It is not that I don’t think that we will evolve our regulations over the Continue reading

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More (or less?) skills needed…

I came across this job/career article in the San Jose Mercury News which is definitely worth a quick spin through and some noodling about how it relates to you and your career (or job search). The headline grabber is about how many job seekers in the US are now finding that they can’t even qualify for their former jobs as those job requirements now state the Continue reading

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The world of the Recruiter

Here is a great article I just stumbled across today — it is titled “10 Things Recruiters Won’t Tell You” and it certainly rings true to me. So if you are currently in a job search and you’ve shopped your CV around to a bunch of industry “head hunters” in the hopes that they’ll be pushing your case, you definitely want to read this to get a bit of a reality Continue reading

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Deregulation: it’s not the "easy" answer…

A recent article from George Monbiot over at the Guardian examines the role of government and regulation in the market and looks at the new announcement coming from the UK Health Secretary regarding “streamlining regulation” in the food industry. Fittingly the article is titled “Sending off the Ref” and makes the point that the role of government is akin to the role of the referee in football (soccer) and that the game would be very different indeed with “de-refereeing” or “self-refereeing”… Continue reading

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BP “buying” researchers…?

BP Logo

Image via Wikipedia

Chris MacDonald, in his business ethics blog, pointed out an article highlighting how BP was approaching the university research community and effectively “buying up” their support and silence for their upcoming legal battles. The blog entry (and link to original article) is here. Continue reading

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The evolution of entrepreneurship

Came across a great article in one of the Silicon Valley technology newsletters I subscribe to — guest blogger Steve Blank lays out his somewhat contrarian viewpoint that we (the US specifically, but my read is that it is equally applicable to the world’s free-market, open economies) may be just entering the “golden age of entrepreneurship and Continue reading

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How to detoxify your business

If you buy into the concept that business is — by design and structure — an inherently “toxic machine”, then one question that has to be asked is…. How would one go about truly detoxifying their business? While a fundamental belief of this initiative is that ultimately we need to change the rules such that businesses have strong economic incentives to detoxify (and by extension, are penalized in the market and possibly by regulators for “being toxic”), one could see a Continue reading

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Repost: "11 Career Tips for 2011"

This post is a re-print from the newsletter by Tech Republic (if you want to see the original you can find it here). I found the tips to be excellent advice for anyone at any point in their career — the earlier you are in your career and you embrace these ideas, the more they will pay off for you in the long term. Here is the full post… Continue reading

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HBR guest blog: new Sustainability tool

I just came across this blog entry from Andrew Winston, writing in the Harvard Business Review — it presents a nice conceptual wheel that can help companies better strategize about how to develop meaningful, strategically relevant sustainability practices for their companies. Continue reading

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“What to do after you’ve made a mistake”

This is a posting from a blog entry on “Tech Republic” that I thought would be useful, re-posted in its’ entirety. Not really much to add to this, although I would suggest dwelling on the thought at the end of post: “When someone says they don’t make mistakes, it makes me wonder if they have taken enough risks.” Continue reading

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What motivates us?

Just finished reading a great book with the byline “The surprising truth about what motivates us”… the author is Dan Pink and the book is titled “Drive”. It is a really good read (like all Dan Pink books — I’m definitely a fan) and continues with Pink’s usual theme of exploring — from some perspective or other  –  the future of work. Continue reading

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The trouble with our approach to "education"

After a breakfast discussion with a friend about many of the themes explored in the “detox project” (notably about trying to design a blueprint for a more harmonious 21st century), he emailed me this link to a video exploring some of the ways in which our institutionalized education systems fail us. It is a very engaging video, presented by Sir Ken Robinson, and well worth watching. Continue reading

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Welcome to the Detox Project

This blog is going to explore various aspects of a research and advocacy initiative that I have taken to calling “The Business Detox Project”. I’ve been cobbling together my ideas on this for Continue reading

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Reform, withdraw, or “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!”

In a recent blog entry “Money’s Hunger”, Guardian newspaper columnist George Monbiot ponders the quandry we’re in by asking: “Industrial civilisation is trashing the environment. Should we try to reform it or just watch it go down?” (his blog at www.monbiot.com is well worth reading on a regular basis).

Essentially, he challenges the underlying assumptions of the Dark Mountain Project, which an early entry in Wikipedia introduces as:  “Believing that ‘civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the Continue reading

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Business reform, not (just) bank reform

Now that the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 is starting to shrink away in our rear-view mirror, all the talk through the US, the EU, the G20, and various other camps is centered on “bank reform”. Whether we’re talking about new taxes on them, regulation around capital limits, compensation caps or the like, we’re still only talking about the banks and regulating their “performance”.  While I certainly don’t disagree with the concept of reforming the banks, I think we aren’t looking holistically enough at what is really going on. We need “business reform”, not (just) bank reform. Continue reading

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Toxic Consumption — toys

An article this morning in the local paper — The Ottawa Citizen — caught my eye. You can read the article here;  it is planned as a three part series that looks at how illegal toxins (like lead) get into child’s toys….

Of course, there is nothing unique about toys and toxins — the article series itself looks to be specifically focused on the toy industry, supply chain management, and Health Canada regulations as they relate to the toy industry. However, for “toys” replace “food”, “automotive parts”, “cosmetics”, or just about any other product or service — they all have the same basic constructs as the toy industry which includes a global supply chain with myriad suppliers and sub-suppliers, paper-based inspection criteria and lots of self-regulation requirements, and strong profit motives which create incentives to “cut corners”.

 

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Johnson & Johnson and the 1982 Tylenol murders

As I was scanning through some of Andrew Winston’s previous blog entries at HBR, I came across this one that I thought had some interesting take-aways relevant to the Business Detox Project. The specific “lesson” that I was intrigued by was labeled “Downplaying your mistakes is, well, a big mistake“, and it referred to the 1982 Tylenol murders and the crisis response of Johnson & Johnson, which is still held to be the “gold standard” of crisis management. I commented: Continue reading

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Paying for externalities?

Great article here from Chris McDonald’s business ethic blog about companies voluntarily paying for externalities and how this should be interpreted — as hush money or doing the right thing…

The basic idea is, I believe, sound (no pun intended if you have read the article). Paying for externalities imposed on a specified group is the first step in putting a price on the estimated cost imposed (in this case, the perceived social cost of excessive noise from wind turbines) and then administering it through market mechanisms.

What I found interesting here is that it is one of the few examples of companies voluntarily acknowledging their imposed externalities and offering payment for them. While it is clear that the company is trying to “buy peace” (in that in return for payment made, you are not allowed to formally complain/protest about the noise) it is an interesting example that might be classified as “corporate social responsibility” (CSR).

Readers — do you know of other forms of voluntary externality payments being made by corporations?

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Paying to not produce oil

Came across an interesting article in TreeHugger about the UNDP paying Ecuador up to $3.6B not to develop a specific oil field. In my mind the interesting thing this does is set another price-point that can be used to help estimate the total cost of externalities assumed in the project.

In this case, we are paying not to develop a field,so the business case for this payment has to take into account the initial cost of developing the field, the tax revenue that would have been gained from the company and employees, the value of the oil exports themselves, offset against any environmental and social damage caused.

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Anti or pro business…?

I’ve just come from a very productive meeting with a gentleman who has very a impressive business and government policy pedigree; the intent of the meeting was to get some feedback from him on the Business Detox Project and some insights on how I might accelerate moving it forward. Continue reading

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Collaborative consumption

Opportunity Infographic - The New Sharing Econ...

Image by latddotcom via Flickr

An interesting TEDtalk I’ve come across —Rachel Botsman on the “new” internet-enabled sharing and swapping business models that she is labeling “Collaborative Consumption”. In this 16 minute TEDtalk from Sydney Australia in 2010 Rachel presents her views on why this trend is an emerging reality that will have a profound impact over the next decades as our current “buy-centric” consumption model evolves into more of a “rental” market. Continue reading

Posted in Business models, Consumption, Reputation management, Technology | Tagged , | 27 Comments

The confusing world of labeling

Skull and crossbones

Image via Wikipedia

I came across this article today in the TreeHugger newsletter and it got me thinking (again) about the general challenge of desiring accurate, meaningful, and useful labeling to aid us in our role as active consumers. What I find most interesting is the seemingly inverse relationship between disclosure laws and the actual end-user value of the information disclosure. Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Consumer labeling, Consumption, Ethics, Regulation, Risk management | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Networking & the “credibility threshold”

Generic potential energy diagram showing the e...

Image via Wikipedia

I came across  a great blog entry this morning which I wanted to share here as it has a great deal to do with how job searchers have to build credibility in the early stages a  networking activity before people will be receptive to their message. Continue reading

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Measuring the intangible…

Measuring time

Image by aussiegall via Flickr

A new subscriber to this blog (thank you, renju87!) had this TED talk posted on their blog and brought it to my attention. The speaker is Chip Conley (CEO of American boutique hotel company “joie de vivre”) and this TED talk dates back to mid 2010. The basic message is about moving from using GDP (gross domestic product) metrics to exclusively measure our Continue reading

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Top buzzwords the job market uses

In trolling through some old postings, I came across this entry from the LinkedIn blog that gave me pause for consideration.

Scanning the list you see the usual suspects one almost expects to see these days on all resumes.  When you consider that in many cases the job postings that people are responding to contains statements like “…this role requires a strong, results-oriented manager that is a proven team player…”, is it Continue reading

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Wal-Mart, me, and “green” consumption

Street sign for Wal*Mart Drive, south of Gordo...

Image via Wikipedia

Wal-Mart fascinates me and, in terms of it’s relentless growth in size and scale, it also concerns me somewhat. It clearly has the market power to strongly influence consumption choices and to drive any kind of business practices throughout its’ supplier network, depending on what business goals it wants to accomplish. To fully comprehend just how much Wal-Mart is changing the landscape in all ways, one of the best books on the subject is the Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman. Over the past Continue reading

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“Corporate Social Responsibility” is a fundamentally flawed concept

Corporate Social Responsibility

Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

The vast majority of business practitioners that I have met and worked with throughout my career are caring, honest people who one would generally regard as striving to be morally and ethically responsible. They don’t particularly want to run companies that have to put the squeeze on employees and lay them off during tough times; they don’t like being viewed as massive polluters or plunderers of the planet’s resources, and they are very concerned about any Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Ethics, Externalities, Reputation management, Risk management, Toxic performance | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Monopoly-bashing in the new economy

Monopoly (game)

Image via Wikipedia

I came across a wonderful blog post today that examines the issue of what it means to be an “engineer” and more specifically, the monopolist position taken by an individual certified engineer laying claim to ownership of a specific class of engineering problem. The post I’m referring to is here and a follow up and slightly altered post is here. Both posts are worth a quick read. Continue reading

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Career Tip: Work to Put Yourself out of Your Job

Termination Notice Letter

Image by and parsecs to go via Flickr

OK. I admit that the title  might be a bit confusing — why the heck would you want to put yourself out of a job? What kind of “career tip” is that? In fact, it is one I believe strongly in, and when I look back over my own career I realize that this was pretty much my strategy throughout my whole working life in the corporate world… let me explain… Continue reading

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Career Tip: Don’t be an a**hole!

Minimum Asshole Distance

Image by Davezilla was taken via Flickr

This “career tip” probably seems very straightforward as obvious advice — we don’t like assholes and nobody should aspire to be one. However, this advice comes from a significant lesson learned in my own career many years ago; it’s a real story that I think has great instructional value for everyone. Here is what happened… Continue reading

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Monopoly-bashing Redux: university edition

Title page to Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning...

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A reader’s comment on my earlier blog post Monoply-bashing in the New Economy starting me ranting on and on about the ironic nature of “higher education” institutions that present one face to the public but manage their operations in a totally different way (OMG — I’m ranting again…!) and I soon realized that I probably should just make it a blog post instead… so here it is…

My father once told me “..if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail.”

For me, “business” is my hammer so of course everything looks like business to me — when I look at our educational system, or our health care system, or our public administration system, I see a “business” lurking there and I generally analyze it the same way I would analyze and reflect on a “real” business. Continue reading

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Why work doesn’t happen at Work (TEDtalk)

Just viewed this interesting TEDtalk from Jason Fried, who is the co-founder of 37signals.  The talk lays out Jason’s views on why it is so hard to get work done in a formal office setting, and anyone who has worked — or is working — in a traditional office setting where there are lots of co-workers around will find his observations ring true! There is a nice dose of humour running through the talk so even though I found it running a bit long at 17 minutes, it’s pretty easy to Continue reading

Posted in Employment, Technology, Toxic performance | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Thoughts on time management

Stopwatch

Image by wwarby via Flickr

I’m just reading Ricardo Semler’s fascinating book from 1993 — it’s his story of building and running the large Brazilian conglomerate Semco. The book is “Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, and only 72 pages into it, I’m really enjoying the story so far — can’t wait to pick it back up and keep reading! Continue reading

Posted in Heros and Zeros, Measurement systems, Stories from the front line | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Serious jump in US unemployment duration…

Wow. Takes my breath away… I think there might be a few different things behind this alarming curve, however these are only my own speculation: Continue reading

Posted in Employment | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Incentives Matter

Incentives for Panel Evals

Image by gtmcknight via Flickr

One of the things that I have learned over my few decades of “business-as-trench-warfare” experience is that properly thought-out and structured performance incentives are a critical component in getting people inside an organization to “do the right thing”, whatever that may be. Those may be economic incentives, however they don’t always have to be. Continue reading

Posted in Business models, Ethics, Measurement systems, Stories from the front line | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Pricing the “priceless”

Lolonomics - Abusin' Externalities

Image by spatulated via Flickr

As I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, one of the ironies of living in a market based economy is that “if you truly believe something is priceless, you need to be prepared to put a price on it.” You can rail against the injustice and preach the unfairness of it all, but the big wheels of the economy just keep grinding away and blissfully ignoring you. The hard-wired logic of the capitalist machine dictates that no price at all means it is a free good, and so treats it as a value-less input/output. Unfortunately, this is quite the opposite of what we think we mean by stating something is “priceless”.

And so I present a modest proposal for “pricing the priceless…” which is intended to provide specific pricing signals to businesses. This in turn leverages the profit incentive to drive their businesses in a direction that is beneficial to society’s desires (cleaner air, cleaner water, better health, etc.). Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Environment, Externalities, Globalization, Measurement systems, Regulation, Risk management, Social Issues | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

In Praise of Older Workers

Trabajar hasta los 100

Image by Heart Industry via Flickr

Now, as part of the tailing edge of the baby boomers myself, this all might seem to be somewhat self-serving to the younger audience, but hey, apparently there is a lot to be said about older workers — not least that there are boatloads of us around…

I came across this illuminating commentary in the Economist — “Age shall not wither them” — and wanted to share some of the highlights. If you have a few minutes it is certainly worth circling back and reading the original column from the Economist… in the meantime, here are some of the highlights I’ve extracted for your reading pleasure: Continue reading

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100 days of stepping out

Right now I am a-roaming (again)

Image by dhammza / off via Flickr

I’ve been focused on walking my 10,000 steps per day for several months now, so I thought I would provide a quick update on my progress here. I first mentioned my “new walking habit” in this blog post…  What does this have to do with business engineering, you might ask? Truthfully I really don’t know, however reading this you may well get a better perspective on how I think about things. So off we go — Continue reading

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Who’s in charge here?

Point!

Image by a2gemma via Flickr

I came across a wonderful blog post today from fellow blogger “The HR Capitalist”. I’m a fairly recent reader of his and while I’m much more of a business guy than an HR guy I do like his take on the intersection of HR and business. His post is titled “S**t Steve Jobs says: the Difference between a VP and a Janitor”, and it recites the story of how Steve Jobs apparently introduces responsibility and accountability to his newly minted Vice Presidents at Apple. It really struck Continue reading

Posted in Career management, Employment, Heros and Zeros, Stories from the front line | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Porter’s “Shared Value” idea: Where’s the Beef?

idea

Image by orkboi via Flickr

As I have been exploring various pathways of my “business detox” investigations, a number of colleagues have suggested that I really needed to read Michael Porter and Mark Kramer’s (apparently provocative) HBR article entitled “The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value”.

Now, if the authors really believed in “shared value”, one would presume that they would openly provide their article — with no strings attached — with the idea of driving up “shared value”. Well, not quite. You can read the first bit of the HBR article here, but after the teaser you’ll have to register with HBR and pay for access. Mark Kramer has put a PDF of the article on the internet, however interestingly Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Business models, Externalities, Measurement systems, Reputation management | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Humor — the best preparation for crazy interview questions?

Sherman Tank

Image via Wikipedia

I recall at various times when going through formal job interviews being asked the odd “crazy” question that had little to do with the company or the role I was being interviewed for. They were questions like: “what is the weight — in kilos — of a Sherman tank?”, or “tell me the number of households in Canada that own a VCR?”. The point of them was to determine how you thought and how you could provide a reasonably valid approximation of something by starting with only a passing knowledge of the subject. As an engineer trained to “state your assumptions” and “show your work”, it Continue reading

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Tainted Supply Chain — here we go again…

Sodas and soft drinks at a Supermarket

Image via Wikipedia

In the June 18th 2011 issue of the Economist newspaper (look — it’s in a magazine format, it gets issued weekly, it looks, feels, and smells like a magazine — why do they insist on calling it a newspaper…??? That’s my only criticism of the Economist) I came across this short article outlining how industrial plasticisers have been found in sports drinks and soft drinks manufactured in Taiwan. Apparently it’s their biggest ever food scare and might Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Consumption, Globalization, Risk management, Toxic performance, Traceability | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Business truths — realities & outcomes

Enjoy Capitalism

Over my many years as a business practitioner and amateur researcher/reader, I have been trying to “figure out” business, in all of its fascinating complexity. By being able to break it down into it’s component pieces I hope to be able to better understand the real essence of “how businesses operate” and then to be able to somewhat elegantly communicate the simple rules for how businesses operate.

As I read through the following thoughts, I realize that I am hopelessly far away from my own stated goal and that I haven’t really Continue reading

Posted in Business Detox Project, Business models, Measurement systems, Risk management | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Green marketing — the reality

The carbon footprint as it is understood by pe...

Image via Wikipedia

I’m fascinated by the idea and practice of “green marketing”. What this looks like currently is labeling on products that tell you that the carbon footprint is lower (Than what? Than it used to be? Is that OK, or just better?), the food is organic (too bad there is no agreed standards about what “organic” means, but I doubt that most consumers know that), or some other “eco” or “green” labeling. When you boil it right down, all that these labels are really telling you is that: Continue reading

Posted in Consumer labeling, Consumption, Toxic performance | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Another supply chain contamination incident…

Food Chain

Image by Meffi via Flickr

Just a few days ago, I blogged about the tainting of soft drinks through supply chain malfeasance here. I just came across this blog entry by Guardian writer George Monbiot which outlines the facts behind a very interesting — and hard to trace — contamination of a supply chain in the UK. Here, the culprit is a highly regulated chemical that is unfortunately quite persistent and hangs around in the supply chain (in this case the food chain) long after it’s initial use. Continue reading

Posted in Consumption, Measurement systems, Risk management, Traceability | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

More intelligent food labeling

rethink the food label

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I’ve written some previous blog posts about how confusing (and generally useless to the lay person) food labeling is. My musings on the topic are found here and here… now, I’ve just stumbled across a very interesting design competition where the task is — you guessed it — redesigning food labeling.

RETHINK THE FOOD LABEL is a design competition is put on by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, and I believe is/was an open design Continue reading

Posted in Consumer labeling, Consumption, Measurement systems | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Things to never say on the job

No political correctness

Image via Wikipedia

I came across this list of “10 things you should never say on the job” and I remembered my own painful little lesson about something you should never say. Figuring that the statute of limitations on saying stupid things is long over on this one (it happened a decade ago, possibly more), I thought I would share it with the world. Here goes:

We had hired a new COO in our modest, $2B global company (note: he liked to refer to himself as CEO but he was in fact formally the COO — this probably tells you a little about this gentleman already) and I Continue reading

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