Everyone’s talking about ‘big data’. There’s no doubt that there is more data than ever before. As George Dyson writes ‘when the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size’. Today, by some estimates, the total amount of data in the world is 2.7 zettabytes. But what about insight, analysis, outcomes?
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10 career-threatening management myths
Every manager has one goal: to foster a healthy, prospering work environment that brings employees together to get work done. Unfortunately, so many managers who have just been promoted or are looking to impress fall short. Why? Because they fall for the many damaging management myths.
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The A-Z of Small Business Outsourcing
It used to be a question for the biggest businesses: what do we outsource? It’s still being asked around board tables, but now the size of company is immaterial. There’s very little in business that can’t be handed off to an outside expert – even outsourcing itself.
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Don’t call your customers ‘users’
I had a revelation. Calling our customers ‘users’ dehumanises them. It’s the linguistic equivalent of that office scene from The Apartment, reducing individuals to interchangeable units of interaction. It’s very common in IT to talk about ‘users’ and it’s understandable but I think it’s not helpful. From now on, you’re friends, customers, readers, managers, employees, staff – and above all – people.
The two enemies: absenteeism and presenteeism
Buddhism talks about near enemies and far enemies. Typically, the far enemy is the opposite of some good quality while the near enemy is a kind of counterfeit of the real thing. For example, the far enemy of compassion is cruelty but its near enemy is pity.
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Effective managers say the same thing twice
Effective managers combine different types of communication, such as email, IM and phone calls, to repeat and reinforce key messages.
Listen very carefully, I shall say this only twice…
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