jenk

Don't shut down existing employee blogs. If they are positive about the company, Rubel suggests turning these evangelists into a voluntary sales force. If they are negative, you might have a larger morale issue that needs to be addressed.

The most important question to ask is whether your company should even blog at all. "There are some corporate cultures where blogging is not going to go over very well," says Sifry. Cultures where blogging thrives, he says, are ones that "have faith in their employees, rather than fear."

This year, make a point of not supporting workaholic martyrs ("I worked all night! I came in on the weekend!" "Really? How lame.") who don't drive productivity but stress everyone around them.

1. Are these actually secrets? Or was I a manager too long?
   
       Gossip can make you look like a traitor.
       Work friendships can be dangerous.
       If you're in the wrong "camp" you could be mistaken for the enemy.
       There's no right to free speech in the workplace.
       Companies have very short memories.
   
   That said, there are ones that sound a bit "new" to me and/or I'm interested in seeing what she has to say, like Expense reports hold a secret test of loyalty. and You CAN have an office romance without breaking your career.
   
   
2. The cover & ToC sound rather confrontational, possibly inflammatory. ( Read more... )
3. The excerpts read pretty reasonably, tho. One example I've had experience with on both sides is Sharing personal information could undo all you've worked for - and her excerpted commentary seems right on target: ( Read more... )
   
   
4. The site also includes an article the author published in the Seattle Times that I liked.

( Two ideas dominated his work. )

The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Mr Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector—partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. He was equally scathing of managers who simply regarded companies as a way of generating short-term profits. In the late 1990s he turned into one of America's leading critics of soaring executive pay, warning that “in the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions.”

The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Mr Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge”—and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine—the idea at the heart of Frederick Taylor's stopwatch management—and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society.

Yet Mr Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans. ( Read more... )

The biggest problem with evaluating Mr Drucker's influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom—in other words, that he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren't banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. ( Read more... )

Most people think of human capital the way economists and policy makers do - as the skills and knowledge people need to get jobs and thrive in a modern economy. [But it's more than that.]

There's cultural capital: the habits, assumptions, emotional dispositions and linguistic capacities we unconsciously pick up from families, neighbors and ethnic groups - usually by age 3. In a classic study, James S. Coleman found that what happens in the family shapes a child's educational achievement more than what happens in school. In more recent research, James Heckman and Pedro Carneiro found that "most of the gaps in college attendance and delay are determined by early family factors."

There's social capital: the knowledge of how to behave in groups and within institutions. This can mean, for example, knowing what to do if your community college loses your transcript. Or it can mean knowing the basic rules of politeness. The University of North Carolina now offers seminars to poorer students so they'll know how to behave in restaurants.

There's moral capital: the ability to be trustworthy. Students who drop out of high school, but take the G.E.D. exam, tend to be smarter than high school dropouts. But their lifetime wages tend to be no higher than they are for those with no high school diplomas. That's because many people who pass the G.E.D. are less organized and less dependable than their less educated peers - as employers soon discover. Brains and skills don't matter if you don't show up on time.

There's cognitive capital. This can mean pure, inherited brainpower. But important cognitive skills are not measured by IQ tests and are not fixed. Some people know how to evaluate themselves and their abilities, while others with higher IQ's are clueless. Some low-IQ people can sense what others are feeling, while brainier peers cannot. Such skills can be improved over a lifetime.

Then there's aspirational capital: the fire-in-the-belly ambition to achieve. In his book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas J. Stanley reports that the average millionaire had a B-minus collegiate G.P.A. - not very good. But millionaires often had this experience: People told them they were too stupid to achieve something, so they set out to prove the naysayers wrong. - David Brooks, writing in the New York Times

The jet engines are produced by nine teams of people -- teams that are given just one basic directive: the day that their next engine must be loaded onto a truck. All other decisions -- who does what work; how to balance training, vacations, overtime against work flow; how to make the manufacturing process more efficient; how to handle teammates who slack off -- all of that stays within the team.
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Clearly, not everyone has the temperament, skills, or intellect needed to work in an environment like that of GE/Durham. So who, in particular, doesn't fit in? "People who expect to take orders". - Source: 1999 Fast company article