You see James on the 8th-floor cafeteria. You haven’t seen him in weeks which is fine because while you’ve worked together for years, your paths are currently not intersecting. “Hey, James.” “Hey! Long-time, I was just thinking about you.” “Really, why?” “Randy just called you out in the launch meeting. He said the project was… more
Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because you’ve been raving about it for a year, but would you like to… more
The authors identify two types of simple rules: Those that can help you make decisions and those that can help you do things.
Decision rules set boundaries, prioritize alternatives, and establish stopping points. The disastrous ascent of Mount Everest that resulted in eight deaths in 1996, chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Into Thin Air, was precipitated by the violation of a single rule that had been set by Scott Fischer, an expedition leader: “If you aren’t on the top by 2:00, it’s time to turn around.” (Any later and the risks were exponentially greater because the exhausted climbers would have to make the descent to their camp in the dark.) After unexpected delays, Fischer and most of the party ignored the rule and kept climbing. Fischer himself didn’t summit until 3:45 p.m. Unfortunately, his body is still on the mountain.
(From Theodore Kinni on Quartz)
I enabled Google Analytics on October 21, 2006, roughly a year after I started using Shaun Inman’s real-time (yet infrequently updated) Mint software. Both packages are part of my daily routine to see what is going on with the site, but I’ve rarely used them for more than understanding the basics: How is this article… more
Over a half a million unique visitors stumbled on Rands this year and as the year winds down, I wanted to take a look back at the year in articles. These are articles that turned out to be popular or just pieces I loved to write: Bored People Quit. From a traffic perspective, the clear… more
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who… more
With a painfully lame name such as Friendster, you’d probably never visit this domain unless someone threatened you, yet, this social networking site has gone viral with my group of friends in the past week. The competitive differentiator for Friendster is that you can’t see anyone on the network until you add an actual ‘real’… more
