Category: Corporate life
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Very true. No wants to give bad news, so they tell you their project is on time and everything’s going fine.
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Interesting article in Vanity Fair about Microsoft’s problems. What I hadn’t previously realized was that they use the stupid “stack ranking” system. Maybe it worked well at GE in Jack Welch’s days - it’s possible that firing 10% of employees every year was a smart strategy for them – but whoever thought that was the…
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John Naughton in The Observer on an old favourite: ‘You can’, my mother used to say, ‘have too much of a good thing’. Since she was generally not in favour of good things (which she equated with self-indulgence), I habitually disregarded this advice. But I am now beginning to wonder if she may have been…
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What is the point of an HR department? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please. I think I have been incredibly fortunate in my career (if you can call it that). Only once have I been employed by a company that actually had an HR department, and as luck would have it they…
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Email is bad for you. A new UK study, reported in Friday’s Guardian, comes to this unsurprising conclusion: Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying…
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There has been a lot written about the book “Bonjour Paresse” (Hello Laziness – The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible at the Workplace) that has recently been published in France. It follows in the fine tradition set by Scott Adams and others in satirising life in the workplace, and has tips…
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Hey look, I can do dull as well as the next man (see story below) Since Simon is away in China and not posting this type of stuff, I think I need to fill the gap. So, can anyone explain this phenomenon? Quite often, by around 5 o’clock I have nearly finished the things I…
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Too busy to post anything much as I am planning a project, which is a horrible, tedious, job, especially with Microsoft Project (or at least the version I am using). However, I did enjoy these two recent Dilbert cartoons that you can find here and here. Is it worth upgrading to the latest version of…
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Interesting piece in the Gweilo Diaries, referring to an article in the FT. Hemlock says that he “hates excellence” and that “good enough is perfect”. I’m afraid that the phrase “good enough” is one that I tend to use about a piece of work (done by someone else) when I have given up hope of…
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Following on from my mention of Powerpoint, I found this: In his book and DVD compilation, “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” David Byrne twists PowerPoint from a marketing tool into a multimedia canvas, pontificating that the software’s charts, graphs, bullet points and arrows have changed communication styles. The 96-page compilation, which debuted in September for $80,…
Ordinary Gweilo 