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| Volume 7, Issue 3 |
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In This Issue:
 [Google’s] Top ten ways to show appreciation
Myths about millennials
Holiday pay [and PTO]
IBM soap opera
 [Hiring friends] The best of both worlds?
 Excuse me for doing my job
The contingent workforce
 Recruiting the top 1 percent
The nightmare of too little sleep
 Making the move to general manager
The key to managing stars? Think team
Fixing the Marketing-CEO disconnect
 What you can do about [customer] attrition
How online and offline have fused into a single dialog
The five most important words on your web site
 Cracking Google's 'secret sauce' algorithm
 The kid who turned down $1 billion
Think before you hit 'send'
 6 Ways to kill your credit score
7 Net-worth killers
25 Dream vacation homes
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[Google s] Top Ten Ways to Show Appreciation
Attending an ad club event last week, I listened to a Google manager, Grady Burnett, describe his company and their corporate culture.
Sure, you've read about the free food, the fact that developers are enabled to spend twenty percent of their time on projects of their choice - many hallmarks of a
successful company that is making money. But he gave us ideas for simple employee motivation and
team building factors, too...
Read the article. Back to top
Myths About Millennials
The majority of employees in our company are Millennials or Gen Xers. Some of us, like me, feel quite old some days when I look around at our employees.
On the other hand, I don't believe we have ever been guilty of not expecting the most and the best from our young employees because of their age. I actually remember being
twenty something. I was smart, capable, and competent and ready to set the world on fire. So are our employees. They are bright, competent, and capable of setting the
world on fire. Our employees may not have a lot of experience but they make up for it
in their willingness to try new things. They are wired, committed, and thoughtful about our products, our culture, our customers, and our future. They are also marrying and
starting families. We have, at least three babies on the way. Learn more about the myths that are often thought, but rarely true, about
Millennial employees...
Read the article. Back to top
Holiday Pay [and PTO]
Just postponed several team building / training sessions I had scheduled for Friday.
The day before a three day holiday is a time when many people use their PTO bank of time or take vacation days. Interested in benchmarking your PTO or sick leave
program with other companies? AHI's Employment Law Resource Center does an annual survey that determined that PTO program use remained constant for 2005 and 2006 at 56
percent of the companies surveyed. You can purchase their report but this press release summarizes some of the
important PTO survey results. Did you know that there is no federal law in the United States that requires an employer to provide time off, paid or otherwise, to
employees on nationally recognized holidays?
Holiday pay practices are completely up to the employer. If you are paid for Memorial Day, it is a benefit your employer provides...
Read the article. Back to top
IBM Soap Opera
I have no idea where Robert Cringely gets his numbers, and since no one inside IBM seems to be responding with other than the corporate line, I have no idea of the truth
of this column: Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. Layoffs for IBM? The reason I am drawing it to your attention is that I want you to read the
comments that the article generated - all 1051 of them. Reading the comments is like viewing a cross section of opinions of people working in America today. Fear of job
loss; fear of outsourcing jobs; offshoring jobs due to globalization; fear of retirement benefit loss; no pay raises for the many; people rated as "needing
improvement" as an employee, among thousands of others; misleading information about LEAN as a corporate "program" and what its purpose is; having a corporate program with
a "name;" top heavy management unwilling to really change; an internal "ranking" exercise to value or devalue employees; and poor management company-wide. Gads. If even
a portion of these opinions are true, they represent everything I attempt to counter in my writing and recommendations on this Web site. Corporate America as put forth in my
worst nightmare. Reading this string of comments reminds me of the worst of times in corporate America and the pain it can generate in the employees who subsist on rumors,
opinions, and fear of loss. Here's Mr. Cringely's most recent
column following up. And, it brings home for me, one more time, why most of the emails I receive ask how to deal with situations like the ones described in these comments...
Read the article. Back to top
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[Hiring Friends] The Best Of Both Worlds?
When Ginny Pitcher needed to hire a director of business development at her Westborough, Mass., marketing firm, she turned to her closest friend, Kate Massey.
Massey and Pitcher had talked money before, during the years they were roommates. They've also traversed emotional territory--Massey was a bridesmaid in Pitcher's wedding. Still, this is business. It brought up sticky issues like negotiating salary and professional success, things most people want to keep separate from their friendships. Not to mention that Pitcher would be Massey's boss. "I didn't jump on it immediately," says Massey. "I thought about it for a while." It's been a year, and both women say their friendship is as strong as ever. Even better, they're both making money and succeeding professionally. That's likely because they handled it like experts from the beginning...
Read the article. Back to top
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Excuse Me for Doing My Job
When you rise in an organization, the bad vibes can rise off other employees like steam in a Turkish bath. Here's how to deal with it.
The very first time I got promoted, the stakes weren't high. There were four customer service reps (average age: 20) in the department. Two people weren't interested in the newly created supervisor position, and my only rival for the job fell asleep at her
desk on a regular basis. So I got the nod, a fifty-cent-an-hour raise, and the cold shoulder from my sleepy rival, whom I was now supervising. My manager sent me off to a supervisory-training course where I sat like a stone, too shy to ask any questions
until the very last session. I finally murmured, "How do you deal with a co-worker who's resentful because I got promoted?" The instructor didn't have an answer for that one. But it happens—all the time. If you're a person who sets career goals and achieves
them, trust me, it will happen to you. Perhaps you've already been a victim of the "how dare you!" effect. That's the iciness directed your way when you do or get something that others feel you had no right to. As wonderful as it feels to be awarded a
promotion or a plum assignment, there are people who will like you a little less (or even a lot less) as a result. [Here's what to do about it]...
Read the article. Back to top
The Contingent Workforce
Highly skilled professionals are fast joining the temp ranks, so start planning your career as a consultant now, says HotGigs CEO Doug Berg
Doug Berg has a fascinating job. The work he's doing couldn't have even been imagined when I was looking for my first position. As the CEO and co-founder of HotGigs, Doug is a work-force expert and technology entrepreneur providing solutions for the recruiting and staffing industry. The HotGigs.com Staffing Exchange, one of the company's offerings, is a marketplace portal for consultants, staffing firms, and the organizations that hire consultants. It provides an online resource that helps contingent workers—those who are hired on a temporary or contract basis, as employers need them—find employers—and employers find contingent workers. We recently spoke about the changing workforce and how both worker and companies can adapt. Edited excerpts of our chat follow...
Read the article. Back to top
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Recruiting the Top 1 Percent
There's a better way to find and hire the very best employees.
I keep hearing people say that they only hire the top 1 percent of job seekers. At my company, Fog Creek Software, I want to hire the top 1 percent, too. We're doubling in
size each year, and we're always in the market for great software developers. In our field, the top 1 percent of the work force can easily be 10 times as productive as the
average developer. The best developers invent new products, figure out shortcuts that save months of work, and, when there are no shortcuts, plow through coding tasks like a
monster truck at a tea party. From a recruiting perspective, the problem is that the people I consider to be in the top 1 percent in my field barely ever apply for jobs at
all. That's because they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. If these
pros switch jobs, chances are the offer came through networking, not because they submitted a resumé somewhere or trolled a job site like Monster (NASDAQ:MNST). Many of
the best developers I know took a summer internship on a whim and then stayed on. They have applied for only one or two jobs in their lives. A lot of companies think they're
hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They're kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people
you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly
every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. So if the top 1 percent never apply for jobs, how can you recruit
them? My theory is that the best way is to find them before they realize there is a job market--back when they're still in college...
Read the article. Back to top
The Nightmare of Too Little Sleep
Blame the BlackBerry, blame the boss, blame the kids. A look at how busy professionals cope.
What he found instead were strung-out employees taking catnaps at their desks. "You're working way too hard, and it was never expected that you'd be tired, or get sick," says Greenleaf. "Most of the time, you're kind of there, but you're not." Feeling bored and
miserable, he quit after just seven months. Today, at the helm of Greenleaf Books, an Austin, Texas-based independent-press publishing company he launched in 1997, Greenleaf
makes sure all 25 of his employees know they can go home when they're too sleepy -- or come in late, or take the whole day off. "As long as they get the job done, it's fine,"
says Greenleaf, 31. As a result, staffers are generally well-rested and alert most of the time, he says -- though with seven pregnancies among them in less than a year,
including his own baby daughter born just weeks ago, they can expect more than a few sleepless nights ahead. Yet whether it's the result of overwork or a crying baby at
home, sleep deprivation isn't just an employee's problem...
Read the article. Back to top
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Making the Move to General Manager
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Your job is much more about people and less about hands-on doing.
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People achieve success in the early years of their career by specializing and becoming functional experts—in essence, they succeed by knowing more and more about
less and less, says Benjamin C. Esty, chair of the General Management Program at Harvard Business School.
In"But there comes a time when they have to recreate themselves as generalists. In this new generalist role, they end up knowing less and less about more and more. This is an
extremely difficult and potentially very risky transition, and it can easily derail a very successful career. GMP is about smoothing and accelerating this transition into
general management." For new general managers—or just as likely in companies these days, senior functional managers who operate as part of an executive team or who have
important cross-functional or cross-organizational responsibilities—their job has changed from driving excellence in a single functional area to integrating consistency,
cohesion, and alignment across many moving parts in the business unit. "When you're responsible for leading, it's not enough to do what you've done in the past. You need
to fundamentally rethink what you're doing and where you want to go in the future"...
Read the article. Back to top
The Key to Managing Stars? Think Team
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Firms that already have a large stable of high-performing individuals might have built a competitive advantage.
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What contributes to an individual's ability to remain a star? To what extent does past star performance predicate future star performance?
And to what extent does a key organizational factor—colleague quality—help or hinder the ability to sustain star performance?
SThe performance of stars is an important career matter for individuals as well as for managers who want to inspire, nurture, and recruit stars. A new study by Harvard Business School's Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee on star knowledge workers, specifically security analysts, addresses these questions. As they explain in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, it is true that a star's past performance indicates future performance—but the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the ability to maintain the highest quality output...
Read the article. Back to top
Fixing the Marketing-CEO Disconnect
CEOs expect their CMOs to drive marketing decisions, but no one is singularly accountable for the results.
Selecting the wrong metrics can actually cause firms to lose ground with customers.
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In most companies, no one knows and understands your customers and their changing needs better than the marketing department.
Certainly that knowledge should be routinely presented and understood by the chief executive and board of directors, right? But over time, and for a number of reasons,
the marketing function and the C-suite often drift apart, resulting in a disconnect between the overall strategy of the company and what marketing understands to be the
actual needs of customers. One result is that company strategy becomes less attuned to market needs, resulting in eroding profits and susceptibility to competition. How to
repair the rift? Two HBS faculty developed a CD-based program called Measuring Marketing Performance targeted at senior executives—namely CEOs, COOs, and CMOs.
The tutorial helps execs understand how...
Read the article. Back to top
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What You Can Do About [Customer] Attrition
Attrition, arguably, is a somewhat nascent issue. But it is one that should be addressed.
Whether your company has an ongoing customer relationship, such as a bank or magazine publisher does, or your sales effort is based on single-unit sales and repeat
purchasers, attrition affects us all. Any positive impact that can be made on attrition will have an almost geometric impact on profitability. A study done by McKinsey &
Company indicated that repeat customers generate over twice as much gross income as new customers. Also, according to Reichheld and Sasser (1990), a 25% increase in retention
could yield a 125% increase in net present value profits. So, it behooves us to better understand the what and why of attrition and exactly what, if anything, can be done about it...
Read the article. Back to top
How Online and Offline Have Fused into a Single Dialog
The time has come to stop talking about online in isolation of offline.
Any separation between the two is a thing of the past since we, as consumers, already live in a fused world. Take a look:
- When you make a purchase—let's say a TV—do you say you bought it at Best Buy-dot-com, or do you just say Best Buy?
- After you see a GEICO commercial on TV, where do you go to check rates?
- How about when you bought your last car? After the research you did online, did you enter your credit card information to have the car shipped to your house? Probably not.
Last year, a study by comScore Networks found that an average of 63% of online searchers who proceeded to complete a purchase did so offline rather than online. Just as online and offline shopping have fused into a single experience, marketers have the opportunity to follow suit by fusing their isolated marketing efforts into a single initiative...
Read the article. Back to top
The Five Most Important Words on your Web Site
I hesitate to single out a handful of "must-have" words for your Web site.
It brings to mind the overblown promises of "power words" and the like. "Power words" strike me as being about as useful as "power naps" and "power lunches." Heavy on hype and light on content. However, some words really can make a difference on your site. They are not "powerful" in isolation but, in the right context, can make an important difference...
Read the article. Back to top
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Cracking Google's 'Secret Sauce' Algorithm
A clue: 'pretend we're not here'; a reward: tens of millions of dollars.
-- Rand Fishkin knows how valuable it is for a Web site to rank high in a Google search. But even this president of a search engine optimization firm was blown away by
a proposal he received at a search engine optimization conference in London last month, where he was a panelist. The topic -- Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search
using purely white hat tactics -- meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon "black hat" practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added
other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention. The rest of the panel scoffed. "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight," one chided. After all, this is the
cutthroat online gambling sector. But one poker Web site owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. "He said, 'If you can get us a search ranking in the top five
for online poker or gambling [using white hat methods], we'll buy that site from you for $10 million,'" recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued
but skeptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. "They said, 'If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10 million
more.'" Turns out, a single online gambling customer brings in at least $1,000 in revenue. With a recent Google search of "Texas Holdem Poker" yielding 1.64 million
results, it's easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google's PageRank algorithm -- the elusive Holy Grail of online marketing. The stakes
are high for online businesses -- and Google is the formidable gatekeeper between site owners and their customers. Web sites, such as kinderstart.com, have even sued Google
for what they allege are deliberate de-rankings, though none have been successful to date. Site owners are eager to get their hands on the 75% of free Google traffic that
is not affected by AdSense and AdWords, Google's pay-per-click programs. With 47% market share among search engines and 3 billion search inquiries a month, Google is indeed king...
Read the article. Back to top
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Think Before You Hit 'Send'
Careless e-mailing has brought down some high-flyers. Here are a few of the executives who lost their jobs, their careers or their reputations thanks in part to e-mail.
A saucy detail in the scandal surrounding Wal-Mart's firing of Julie Roehm is an e-mail that she sent to her subordinate, Sean Womack. In it the former senior vice president of marketing communications wrote: "I think about us together all of the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.
Steven Heyer stepped down as CEO of Starwood Hotels after the company's board reportedly pressed him to explain allegations of suggestive e-mails between him and a younger female employee...
Read the article. Back to top
6 Ways to Kill Your Credit Score
A low score means higher rates. Here's how you may be doing yourself harm.
Lenders, insurers, landlords and others will charge you more or flat-out reject you if you show up with a low FICO score. Here's how you may be doing yourself harm...
Read the article. Back to top
7 Net-Worth Killers
Saving and spending aren't the only factors affecting your net worth. How you manage (or don't manage) your assets and liabilities can make a big difference, too.
...
Back to top
25 Dream Vacation Homes
Shangri-La really is for sale -- and so are these breathtaking getaways in Anguilla, Tuscany and France
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Read the article. Back to top
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