The Hiring Process Speaks Louder Than You Do

I recently came across a good post on the on-boarding process for executives, and how it is often given short shrift in organizations, to the detriment of the new leader. In my experience, staffing routinely goes off the rails much earlier than that, during the hiring process itself. A prospective team member may learn much more about you (and your organization) through experiencing your actual hiring process than what is said in the interviews themselves, or from the slick information packet [...]

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Choosing The Right Social Media Icons

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The False Choice Between Enterprise IT and Startup IT

There is much to like in the new book Rework, from the founders of 37signals. The book, geared toward small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs, is a collection of common-sense and (self-described) contrarian views on everything from the work hours necessary to be successful when starting a business… “Send people home at 5…You don’t need more hours, you need better hours.” to the need to focus on building your company rather than on external financing or the minuscule odds of making a [...]

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Can Web Business Really Be Frictionless?

In the discussion of eBusiness / eCommerce / Web 2.0 companies you will frequently hear the word ‘friction’ being used, and it’s always something to be avoided. Friction is anything that will slow you down as you scale up your business model and increase revenues, from the movement of physical bits across the country, to a dependency on another firm in the middle of a transaction, to that most friction-full of items, pesky human staff. If one could only find [...]

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IT Project Communication and the NASA Launch Process

I’ve always been a space nut.  I was one of those nerdy kids in the 60’s-70’s who sent handwritten letters to NASA asking for mission photos, and actually received several back, which was quite a thrill. Do they still have the money to do that?  Probably not. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of communication in large-scale IT programs, how prone to failure our programs/deployments are, and the lessons I had by listening in on the Ares [...]

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Stop Blaming Bad Management On The Recession

The nightly news is full of reports on companies going out of business or struggling during this difficult economic period. Its natural and convenient to place the blame for what has transpired on the recession we are now (hopefully) beginning to climb out of. However, digging a little deeper into the operations of some of these firms and the management decisions made, one gets the sense that there is something else going on: A major catalog retailer sends out its [...]

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The Width of Men’s Ties and Waste in IT

A look at my prom picture from 1980 provides a wealth of information on how styles change over time, along with significant comic relief. Light brown suits? Fabrics not found in nature? And what’s with that tie? As we leave adolescence and join the workforce we quickly notice that even professional clothing styles seem to rotate through a never-ending series of changes, almost as if a system in New York was sending out random instructions to all clothing sales associates…“Three-button [...]

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