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Oh goddamn, Whole Paycheck — er, Whole Foods — is in trouble and may be lowering prices

I had this MBA Strategy class last fall. It was supposed to meet 12-14 times; the professor was sick three times and one time, I’m pretty sure he didn’t show up. So we met about 10 times, and I swear… Continue Reading

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What if one weekly meeting took up 300,000 hours of manpower in a year? That’s the entire year of 34 people’s lives. But this stuff happens.

Take a deep breath and say it with me: not everything needs to be a meeting. Pause, and now say it loud and say it proud: some things can be an e-mail, a quick talk in the hallway, or a trip to… Continue Reading

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People will tell you “the last jobs report was good!” Show ’em these two charts re: unemployment rate and labor force participation.

Chart 1: Chart 2: Both charts are via here. The easy headline for the jobs report is “288K new jobs created!” or “Unemployment rate drops to 6.3 percent, lowest in years!” An even more robust header for it might be “The U.S. is… Continue Reading

Brief thought exercise: while the answer varies for every person, is an organization better if the jobs offer a different experience every day, or a similar experience?

A common refrain you’ll hear in networking/job interviews is someone telling you that one of the best parts of their job — “and of course, also one of the worst (laughter)” — is that every day is something different. I heard… Continue Reading

The two “next big things” for tech are the mobile space and data. As such, is Facebook about to overtake Google?

You can certainly make a case that the Internet/tech world is shifting a bit. Mobile is “the next big thing,” and that space hurts Google — phrased simply, there’s less space for ads; phrased in a more complicated way, Google does know what… Continue Reading

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Brief thought exercise: when you really think about it, isn’t the hiring process set up in a way that completely disregards the idea of learning?

I’m finishing grad school right now and have been on a series of different interviews over the past few months, so this is just something I’ve observed that’s a little curious. By no means am I an expert on any… Continue Reading

Could something called TINYPulse save the idea of performance management/evaluations?

Fact that’s hard to argue: performance evaluations/management are often a train wreck. They typically happen once per year — if that — and they’re often not even based on what the employee necessarily did that year, but rather what the company’s more abstract… Continue Reading

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The last time Amazon didn’t post at least 14 percent sales growth in a quarter was the fall of 2001. Whoa.

Check out the chart above; essentially, the last time that Amazon had quarter-over-quarter sales growth of less than 14 percent was, ahem, 2001. This is a completely new model in the business world in some ways, because while their sales growth — and the… Continue Reading