Category Archives: Work Methods

Managing talent

This spring, John Elway did the amazing. Even with a good quarterback, he played and won the Manning sweepstakes. And he did it with class and style. He treated all the players with respect. He conducted one on ones with them. He gave them feedback about their performance. And most importantly, he didn’t go negative on anyone. Expect great things from John in the future!

Being laid off

Read a great article a couple months ago about being laid off. If you’ve prepared properly, this is worth doing.


I was laid off a fair number of years ago. I couldn’t afford lots of down time. However, I did make time to enjoy myself during my search. Since then, I’ve made sure to follow some of this advice even while on the job. You should do the same!


Is your life “stacked”?

I read an article today about Business Architecture. After reading it, I realized they were talking more about small businesses and the concepts they need to keep in mind for their business to succeed.


Then I remembered that we are all independent contractors of a sort. We just hire our skills out to various companies and get paid for that work. We generally call that a job.


If we are independent contractors to ourselves, we have our own personal small business. Why shouldn’t we have these concepts for ourselves? What is your mission? Values statement? 
I’m not 100% sure of mine. I have some ideas, but have never written them down. I think I’ll do that this week. Watch this space for more info!


Temp vs Perm workers

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/05/the-rise-of-the-permanently-temporary-worker/


I’ve found this to be very true over the last 15 years, not just since the latest downturn in the economy. I’ve also been on both sides of that fence. Thankfully, my current employment was converted to full time status, which made sense to everyone at the time. I relish my health coverage and my “free” retirement additions by my company.


At the same time, I’m one of two full time employees out of about 15-20 on my current and extended team. And there are almost 50 contract workers working in our larger team from that same company. And I only see the pattern increasing, not decreasing. Everyone we add to our team is a contractor, not a full time employee.


There are some jobs that have to be done by FTEs so those will always be “protected”. In my opinion, anytime someone sees that the job can be centralized and off shored, the company is going to do it. It only makes good business sense. It allows them to keep costs lower so they don’t have to pass those costs on to the consumer.


As a stockholder, I want that from my company. As an employee, it makes me fear my job will be outsourced on a daily basis. I know many others who are in that same boat. Most people I know and work with also work with people in Brazil, China, and India. It’s a given in this day and age. You have to accept that and realize that it only makes sense for the companies to move in that direction.


At the same time, as an employee, you need to make sure that you’re ready for that shift. Unless your job is *truly* exempt from moving overseas, I expect many more jobs to continue to move to other countries where labor is less expensive than in the US. If that’s you, make sure to protect yourself. I highly recommend Manager Tools as a great place to learn about being a professional and how to keep yourself always ready for whatever might happen to your employment status.


Good luck to you in the future!!!

Data priorities

Is data the thing that the business cares about, or is it processes and decisions that the business is trying to enable that is important? If you start with the processes and decisions that are most critical to your organization, and then identify the data that is feeding those processes, you’re going to do a lot better job of scoping, prioritizing and building a value-driven business case for your data management investment.

Mark Brunelli


From an article on SearchDataManagement.com