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Could Smart Simplicity be the business model wave of the future?

Follow the bouncing ball here: 1. The Fortune 500 was created in 1955; since then, you can argue that the business environment is six times more competitive + complex than it was. 2. As the complexity of a business has increased, most management… Continue Reading →

Maybe something called Slack could revolutionize the workplace

So many people you meet will spend time pursuing/chasing “Inbox Zero,” denoting it as a badge of accomplishment. But then, er, IBM has done studies indicating that a clean, organized inbox holds no essential benefit. Maybe it’s better to not organize… Continue Reading →

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Machiavelli predicted business silos in 1513, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to them

Check this out, via Harvard Business Review. Here’s a quote. Read it and then let’s talk context: It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success nor dangerous to handle, than to initiate… Continue Reading →

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Say it with me now: your products and processes are great, but your people do matter

Here’s a new academic working paper, summarized here, that basically says if you hire a “star” — a great performer,then — your department will be 26 percent more productive. Now, there’s a huge caveat to this study: it focused on… Continue Reading →

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You spend probably 1/3 of your day at work, if not more. But there’s no science around how to make work great. Can Google change that?

The Framingham Heart Study, detailed a bit in the video above and also here, began monitoring 5,000 people in the late 1940s and continues to this day; the super-longitudinal nature of the study allows for broader observations about health, heart… Continue Reading →

Perhaps the idea of “brainstorming” doesn’t make any sense at all

It would seem logical that better ideas could be generated in a group as opposed to simply by individuals — more perspectives and viewpoints, and an inherent vetting process in real-time. But then again, maybe that’s not true: But no study has… Continue Reading →

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If you want to start and nurture a creative company (like Pinterest!), you should drive across the American Southwest for a bit first

Remember that crazy-arse story about how eBay reinvented itself based on a secret, six-person trip to Australia? Here’s another blow for the “let employees do crazy road-trip based stuff, even if it’s not directly tied to revenue immediately” contingent: Pinterest employees… Continue Reading →

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Could hierarchy die out as millennials dominate the workforce? Not so fast, my friend…

I wrote back on New Year’s Eve (because my life is enthralling) about Zappos’ corporate culture and the idea of “holacracy,” or a “distributed authority system” that basically gets rid of the traditional manager/”boss” idea. A lot of people over 35 right… Continue Reading →