Here is a great interactive map of how stimulus dollars are being spent across the country. Lots of road construction and bridges are on the agenda. Click on the map for more details – you can mouse over the various cities and also drag ‘n’ drop to view by state.
I’m feeling very hopeful this morning reading about a new digital field guide to identify leaves (beginning in Central Park) on your phone! (New York Times “Digital Field Guides Eliminate the Guesswork” by Anne Eisenberg). Here in Florida, scientists are identifying dolphins by using a photo of their dorsal fins, which carries characteristics much like a fingerprint.
Design-minded as I am, I’ve always fantisized about being able to identify some interesting chair or table or object by using the image. Can it be long before we can photograph a vase or painting (or, for that matter, a building) and be able to identify it in an instant? Of course, probably the ones I’ll find most interesting will be those that confound the system. But, hey, it will be great to know you have a George Nakashima table before you unload it for $300! Bring on the app!
Ironically, the most effective telecommuters and home-based workers are those who are naturally great at connecting with people and intuitive, good communicators. This is one of the messages in Kate Lister and Tom Harnish’s new book, Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). Introverts tend to be less successful working from home. Another key message is that slackers need not apply — successful home-based workers tend to be self-starters, highly motivated, and dedicated.
With technology now making it possible to work from virtually anywhere, this book offers some advice on whether you should try to do so, and how.
This book covers all variety of work that can be done away from the conventional office. Besides the option of shifting one’s regular corporate or government job to home, the authors cover other possibilities such as becoming a virtual assistant, medical transcriptionist, writer, or virtual nurse or doctor – and detail what’s involved in doing this as an employee or as a freelancer (your own business), including contracts, taxes, self-marketing, and pricing your time.
Although the authors personally have thrived operating their own businesses from home, they are quick to point out the pitfalls, drawing on others’ experiences as well. Among the challenges presented:
The audience for this material appears mainly to be baby boomers, the authors’ generation. Most of the suggested work-from-home options require a number of years of professional experience as well as specific education. The book also devotes considerable time to explain how Google, Facebook, MySpace, Monster.com and Craigslist works, which may be helpful for baby boomers ready to try something different, but probably information that the average gen x’er or millennial person already knows.
Indeed, the authors have been away from the office for so long – and clearly had negative personal experiences with it – that they begin their book with two chapters and a foreword basically saying how ridiculous it is that anyone would want to work in one. They assume that offices are simply places where people waste time at the water cooler and no social interaction that takes place there is productive – which is far from the case in many office environments today where engineers collaborate, researcher-writers get new ideas, video game strategy is debated, and business direction is discussed. The authors miss that workplaces today are increasingly being designed as a resource to support this productive activity, rather than being a generic destination for spending time in exchange for a paycheck.
Most of their examples of office-building-based work sound like the office of the 1970s where strict hierarchies, rote work, and a micro-management approach reigned along with a different dress code. Indeed, Ms. Lister states several times that she left office work because she hated wearing pantyhose – it’s been at least a decade since women routinely felt they needed to wear those (pant suits anyone? or just more casual attire?).
For those readers seriously interested in how to work from home, and whether they possess the aptitudes and skills to do so, this book is a valuable resource – especially if you are over the age of approximately 40 and therefore have the experience to fit yourself into their examples and options. I do suggest you start your reading at chapter three however, where the writing becomes stronger and the inaccurate assumptions about today’s office as well as the forced cliches around working in your underwear are dropped.
Would you want to work from home 100 percent of the time? If you do, what are the pitfalls and benefits?
Matt Yglesias, responding to the automotive bailout debate, argues that it does:
What I find interesting, however, is not so much how irrational it is to attribute nationality to a business enterprise but how much nationality really does seem to matter. For example, the oil business is an global business. And the six “supermajor” firms are all global firms. But the CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell is Dutch. The CEO of Total is French. The CEO of BP is British. And the CEOs of ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil are Americans. It’s a bit hard to understand why a competitive international labor market would work out that way. And beyond CEO nationality, local norms seem to make a big difference. The CEO of Total earns way less money than the CEOs of the other supermajors and to a first approximation the reason is that he’s French, and French CEOs just don’t get paid very well. More broadly, European and Japanese executives earn less money than American executives, with British executives in the middle. I recall that one of the issues with the DaimlerChrysler merger was that the executive pay scales were totally out of whack.
Beyond CEOs, Nestle has 15 directors. Of them one is Indian, one is Swiss/American, seven are Swiss, and the rest are from other European countries. But there’s nothing especially “European”—and certainly nothing Swiss—about the company’s actual operations. They earn a lot of money in Europe, but the majority of their revenue is from outside of Europe, and there’s production all over the world. It’s also totally normal for large multinational firms to be disproportionately owned by shareholders located in their “home country” and home continent.
Corporate nationality, in other words, doesn’t matter. But it seems as if it actually does. And for somewhat mysterious reasons.
Reasonable points all. (BTW, this is a huge deal in Canada, maybe even more so than in the U.S.).
But GM and Chrysler had U.S. management and ran their companies into the ground. Toyota, Honda, and the transplants have created jobs in America. Nationality cuts several ways.
Some time ago, when I was studying the globalization of the automotive industry and the rise of off-shore transplants, I discovered something interesting. U.S. and European companies all said it was much easier to set up cutting-edge plants outside their home company. New greenfield plants could be built from scratch, filled with new equipment, laid out flexibly, and staffed with “fresh” managers and workers. Older plants back home suffered less from being in old buildings but from built-up and near-impossible-to-change organizational structures and relationships.
Seems to me the real issue isn’t nationality of ownership or management but its quality. From an economic development perspective, I’d much rather encourage companies and plants with great management to invest and develop in my country or location than to protect and shield ones owned by my far less capable compatriots.
UPDATE: The governments of Canada and Ontario apparently now own a two percent equity stake in Chrysler, according the Conor Clarke of The Atlantic who notes: ”Chrysler is going to become part of an Italian car company. And it’s doing so with Canadian dollars”
The New York Times asks leading experts whether America “needs an auto industry.” Robert Lawrence and Tyler Cowen both point out that Japanese companies like Toyota make cars very effectively in the U.S. with American workers. As Lawrence writes, the problem is continuously “framed” in terms of costs and competitiveness, but that’s not really what’s the matter. The real problem is about out-of-touch, outmoded, ineffective Big Three management.
We’re told Chrysler needs a massive injection of “cutting-edge Fiat technology” to survive. Huh, why? What were these guys doing? Did they just forget that… er… new technology might be important to their long-run future?
Robert Reich lays down the gauntlet on jobs:
What? Having General Motors or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs in order to be eligible for a government bailout reminds me of “saving” Vietnam by bombing it to smithereens. Aren’t we giving these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to save jobs? If not, we’re just transferring money from taxpayers to GM and Chrysler bondholders and shareholders …
[T]he “American auto industry” shouldn’t be defined as auto companies whose headquarters are in the United States. The true “American auto industry” is Americans who make automobiles. At the rate the Big Three are shrinking even as they’re bailed out, foreign automakers with American plants may soon employ more Americans than the Big Three do.”
Your thoughts?
There is more data than ever available for human resource specialists, including:
And, within certain large employers such as the big accounting firms, retail chains, or large information technology companies such as Google or Microsoft, further internal data can be scrutinized.
Jason Warner, the VP of HR at Google (and formerly Starbucks), recently pondered the role of enhanced information on the human resources field:
I’m not a statistician, but for large sample sizes at large companies, there is a LOT of information that is just waiting to be discovered by progressive HR organizations who can pull the data and turn it into meaningful information. We had talked about doing this at Starbucks right before I left; running multivariate regression analysis against the thousands of store level staff to better predict attrition and the demographic trends that play out when you have large sample sizes of people.
But HR is rarely predictive. It tends to be more like ‘old medicine’, identifying what is wrong and then prescribing a fix. “You see, your attrition spiked so now we need to recruit more…..” Exit interviews. Employee relations. Compensation reviews. Most all of it analyzes post data.
It is admittedly difficult to be predictive, but it is also because we don’t ask enough smart questions. We ought to be significantly better as an HR function at predicting things. Because predictive HR is a lot more helpful that diagnostic HR.
For example, we can reasonably predict what range the US unemployment level is likely to be in the next 2 years, by comparing the delta in unemployment from the top of the boom in 1999/2000 to the peak in unemployment in 2003 (50 basis points, or 2% points overall) and fudge a little for the gravity of the economic issues that we face. It’s probably going to jump to about 8% (we can now wait and see if I’m right). And from that, HR should be able to extrapolate candidate flow and inform a recruiting strategy and resourcing plan. But the vast majority of groups won’t ever do this.
I expect in the next decade (provided I make it that far), that we’ll see much more predictive HR at the best companies.
I think Warner is right. Workplaces will start to be shaped by this knowledge.
A firm that has below-average employee retention rates might change up the workplace, offering employees something different.
Maybe we’ll soon know much more about how turnover really affects productivity, for example. The conventional wisdom is the cost to recruit, hire, and train a replacement is very high in terms of dollars and lost productivity. But maybe, based on our discussion here last week, it may be that some turnover is desirable and actually raises productivity through the introduction of new ideas – even best practices – from new employees coming from competitive and complementary firms.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created and diligently monitored by scores of regular users mass collaborating over the internet, has been a source of immense controversy since it first appeared online seven years ago.
While most of us (I think) regard the online encyclopedia as a very useful resource for initial research into an unfamiliar topic (not to mention one of the world’s greatest time killers), and see its method of creation (mass collaboration) as both novel and strikingly accurate, there has been no shortage of bluster from both sides of the aisle to just how best to describe/exalt/deride the online phenomenon.
The staunchest self-described ‘Wikipedians’ see their community as the first real democracy, a new egalitarian mode of production and a nation online.
Critics argue that Wikipedia is, quite literally, the death of knowledge. Wikipedia embodies a generation (mine) of lazy cheaters – using half-baked, ‘user-generated’ (re: inaccurate) articles written by computer-nerds and other weirdos that skew the truth and focus only on the trivial. Wikipedia is lowering our standards for accuracy and simultaneously lowering our collective IQ.
Describing Wikipedia as either a Virtual Utopia or The Death of Knowledge is reductionism at its finest. While I am generally skeptical of these far-flung metaphors that try to pin down the online encyclopedia, I was intrigued by one recent attempt by Noam Cohen in the New York Times. He says Wikipedia most closely resembles a vast, diverse, online fact city- and quite a creative one at that.
Cohen adapts a Socratic tone in asking a number of thought provoking questions. He says:
“Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?”
He could just as easily ask: why don’t people sabotage Wikipedia pages? Why don’t people post misinformation?
The reality, of course, is that they do. Just as sometimes in our real cities, people are attacked, lines are budded, and people with blue hair get ridiculed- occasionally. But the stronger the city and the sense of community, the stronger the social forces that combat devious behavior. The same is true for Wikipedia.
To support his claim, Cohen consults the writings of Urban Oracle Jane Jacobs. He quotes the prolific Wikipedian Andrew Lih (who paraphrases Jacobs) saying she “argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact, and the assimilation of children.” He continues, “She may as well have been talking about wikis. A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’s sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.”
So is Wikipedia perfect? Or another question: will we (because it really is we) ever ‘finish’ Wikipedia? The same question could be posed for Chicago, Paris, or Toronto. Of course it isn’t perfect and it will probably never be finished – just as a city is constantly changing, evolving, and reinventing itself.
For the sake of all people who can access this vast, unprecedented body of knowledge, I hope Wikipedia grows – especially in the 100+ versions that exist now in other languages. Never before have we been given such a low barrier – the internet – to access this vast canon of human knowledge.
So forget the controversy, the metaphors, and the bluster and take a stroll down one of the long, wide information boulevards of the online city – you never know what side street you may end up on, or what secrets you might find.
On a lighter note: College Humor’s take on the Wiki-phenomenon.
Right now, many in the media, at watercoolers, and in the blogosphere are busy castigating a variety of CEOs and individuals at upper and mid management levels for a variety of failures. Although some individuals certainly deserve a virtual lashing, many were just being creative (inventing new hedge funds, derivatives, CMBS, etc.).
Excessive condemnation runs the risk of creating a broad-based workplace culture across a wide spectrum of industries in which leaders and brilliant thinkers only look to avoid risks rather than seek opportunities. Indeed, that is in part the nature of recession – collective attempts to minimize the possibility of failure.
While we all try to sort out how the world fell into this recessionary hole, it’s also important to remember the value that embracing failure can have in our 21st century economy.
Diane Jermyn in her Incubator column in the Globe and Mail did just that last week. She interviewed three specialists on business and entrepreneurial culture and asked about the role of failure in successful enterprises. Here are some noteworthy passages:
“If you’re going to have an innovative culture, you must understand that that comes with the acceptance of failure. Innovation comes with a lot of mistakes.” [says Tony Champman, CEO of communications firm, Capital C]
“You need a culture that allows failure for success because without it, people become anti-failure,” says Charles Plant [Managing Director of the Market Readiness Program for entrepreneurs at MaRS]. “Trying different things is the act of innovation. If you fail 14 times, hopefully you’re going to succeed on the 15th try. Without failure, we’re not going to be driving and growing the economy.”
“Everybody in theory embraces the concept of failure and risk but if the person at the helm is purely financially driven, there really isn’t a lot of tolerance for risk” says Chapman.
This last comment is an important one to monitor in uncertain times or in companies facing adversity – only looking to minimize expenses and cut costs may not be the right solution (how far has it gotten General Motors?). And in some knowledge-oriented industries, managing through risk minimalization isn’t necessarily an option.
“Anybody who’s in the business of inventing the future has to be more tolerant of risk and failure because the future hasn’t been created yet,” says Chapman. “If you’re in the business of creativity or innovation, software, technology or ideas, you have to be tolerant of experimentation and creativity.
But in these times, any organization needs to minimize the downside of failures:
Is there a permissible way to fail?
Everyone agrees that the key to successful failure is doing it in a sensible manner to protect against the downside. The trick to successful failures is to know when to quit.
“I think you have to quickly acknowledge when something is a failure and have a back up plan of what you’re going to do,” says Plant. “Don’t keep flogging a dead horse.”
Does your workplace appreciate and accept failure? Or do you work in fear of making a mistake?
Other thoughts?
Richard Florida has been invited and will appear on April 4 and 5 at the Nordesteuropa Editore SRL in Schio and Maniago, Italy. The event’s theme is “Innovate to Beat the Crisis: Strategies and Ideas for People, Companies, and Territories” – a brief description:
The Festival focuses on five small and medium size industrial towns, the capitals of districts that became the symbols of industrial change in the past decades and that today can be considered as models of a steadily evolving system. In fact, Northeast Italy is widely known as a primary testing place for change and evolution.
The Innovate to beat the crisis is an excellent opportunity to debate not only on the radical changes that are taking place in this area which is vital for the Italian and European economy, but also on the exemplary characteristics of this new model and on the challenges faced by economics, politics and society in the years to come.
What do you think is the biggest global effect of our economic crisis?
Talent, Tolerance, Technology, Territorial Assets, and Tension
These are the workplace characteristics to seek if you’re wanting a job that will offer exciting challenges and have the best chance to survive the economic downturn and thrive in the next upswing – at least that’s my theory. Challenge it if you like.
Richard Florida has demonstrated how talent, tolerance, and technology can help a city prosper, attracting creative people and the businesses that want to hire them. He has recently added “territorial assets” to the mix (locational amenities) and I’ve long promoted Tension as another T – people need a reason, a challenge – to form community and generate new ideas.
It stands to reason (and Florida may have said this somewhere) that the ideal workplace would also offer:
Status quo is boring; a company just raking in the money without much effort can be a dull place to work after a while (creative people often seek more than a good paycheck).
By contrast, threats, tensions, and new challenges can force all the talented people in an organization to elevate their performance – and the current once-in-a-lifetime economic event is creating many new challenges.
And, I would argue that those companies most open or tolerant to trying new things in the current downturn, to introducing new technologies (such as social media in the workplace), ensuring their location both appeals to workers and helps them be productive – these are the organizations most likely to survive and thrive.
