Perspectives

Every now and then, conversations with multiple people and different times come together. I was sitting in a meeting yesterday when someone said: "When all you are selling is a commodity, data is the new competitive differentiator." We were discussing how to make a...

Ed Veckie of Unified Engineering forwarded a great article about People Analytics. It seems that Google has done it again and has taken a radically different approach to managing people that it has described under the term People Analytics. A blog by John Sullivan at...

Are you a Buttinski? I hope so, as everyone needs a Buttinski in his or her life. At this point, you may be wondering what exactly is a Buttinski. Well here goes. Whether you have employees working for you, friends who call on you for help from time to time, kids who...

If you think having a teacher's pet or the boss's useless son is bad for the office, wait till you see what happens when there is love in the office. I'm not about to get up on some moralistic high horse here but I think I can prove what others really think about...

Great word isn't it? Nepotism. I thought it was from the greek god Nepo but Wikipedia says it's from the Latin word nepos or nepotis for nephew. On the scale of playing favourites at work, it is one step up (or down depending on your point of view) from having a...

I think I blundered accidentally into this issue of bias in the workplace when I wrote yesterday's blog on Teacher's Pet. I was sitting at the computer last night and Googled 'Bias in the Workplace' and got 3 bazillion hits on racial and gender bias. This of course...

An offhand comment by a friend of mine this weekend reminded me about being the teacher's pet in grade 5. I don't know why this teacher bestowed such an honour on me but it was not pleasant and I had little choice in the matter. Unfortunately the errors of the...

I'm now thoroughly confused. After a week of attacking employee engagement, I'm reaching the conclusion that it is just another one of the many factors to consider in workplace success. Hear me out. There are some people who will never be engaged. You should fire...

Sure, the stats from Gallup say that employee engagement causes results but instead: Maybe results cause engagement. Maybe there is only a correlation between the two because the real issue is hiring the right people. Maybe this only works for big corporations. Right...