Inc.com | Crispin Porter and Scott Prindle | 4/1/2010
These days, its more crucial than ever to make a good first impression online. If your website is hard to navigate or just boring to look at, you’re probably not going to get many repeat visitors. Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s partner managing director of interactive Winston Binch, and Scott Prindle, the advertising and design agency’s VP executive creative technology director, share their ideas for getting the most out of websites. [Read more…]
Basic Steps Toward Work-Life Balance
Forbes.com | by Helen Coster and Tara Weiss | 3/31/2010
For most people, juggling the demands of a career and a personal life is an ongoing challenge, especially at a time when many companies have slashed their ranks —and expect more from the survivors.
Achieving the elusive “work-life balance” can often feel like an impossible goal, especially for people who strive to give everything 100%. In today’s “do more with less” competitive reality, how can we manage careers and families, and feel satisfied with both? [Read more…]
Some Americans Getting 99 Weeks of Unemployment Payments
With the national unemployment rate at 9.7%, there are now 14.9 million jobless American workers. This is the highest number ever recorded since the 1950s. Some American workers have been collecting unemployment payments for as long as 99 weeks.
This situation was made possible by the multiple extensions of the unemployment insurance program passed by the federal government in attempting to deal with the continuing recession. This is the longest period that American workers have ever collected unemployment payments since the program began. [Read more…]
Profit Over Principles
Townhall.com | by Cal Thomas | 3/2/2010
When Toyota President Akio Toyoda testified last week before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, an attitude was exposed that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) correctly characterized as fostering a “cutthroat corporate” environment that placed costs ahead of quality and safety. Such a priority would have been anathema to Toyoda’s grandfather, Kiichiro Toyoda, who founded the company and turned it into an automotive juggernaut thanks to a business philosophy created by an American named W. Edwards Deming.
Deming believed in a business model that puts product quality and company relationships between workers and management first, favoring continual and systematic improvements of staff and of work processes. His philosophy dominated Toyota for more than 50 years. Quality products followed. Profit was the inevitable result. [Read more…]
Lessons From a Blue-Collar Millionaire
Inc.com | by Bo Burlingham | 2/1/2010
When Nick Sarillo launched his pizza business, he had one goal in mind: to create a corporate culture unlike any he had seen.
It’s Takeout Tuesday at Nick’s Pizza & Pub, and the air is thick with the smells of hot pizza crust, peppers, onions, and cheese. Eighteen young men and women — most of them high school age — form an assembly line between a row of worktables and a long bank of pizza ovens. The kids laugh and shout, even as they focus intently on their tasks.
Nick Sarillo, 47, stands halfway down the assembly line, holding a giant wooden pizza board. As the company’s founder and CEO, he doesn’t usually work the pizza line anymore. [Read more…]
Why B-Schools Set Up Entrepreneurs To Fail
Forbes.com | by Sramana Mitra | 2/26/2009
Business schools need to focus on bootstrapping, not only raising money from VCs.
I know I am entering highly contentious territory. Academia generally looks down upon entrepreneurs even as they teach entrepreneurship in business schools and other university programs around the world.
Meanwhile, I have come to observe that most business school programs have an extensive emphasis on fundraising, especially from venture capitalists, and very little pragmatic understanding of what it really takes to get a venture off the ground. As a result, business schools launch students into the real world with completely unrealistic expectations, set up to fail. [Read more…]
A Little Less Conversation
Inc.com | by Joel Spolsky | 2/1/2010
Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn’t feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator.
When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn’t want anyone to feel left out?
When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, “Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!” even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she’s your co-founder)? [Read more…]