Yves Morieux: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify

Why do people feel so miserable and disengaged at work? Because today's businesses are increasingly and dizzyingly complex — and traditional pillars of management are obsolete, says Yves Morieux. So, he says, it falls to individual employees to navigate the rabbit's warren of interdependencies. In this energetic talk, Morieux offers six rules for "smart simplicity." (Rule One: Understand what your colleagues actually do.)

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_morieux_as_work_gets_more_complex_6_rules_to_simplify

3 Surprising Skills All Leaders Should Have

Question: When is a bird in the hand worth less than two in the bush?

Answer: When a company is more interested in hiring the best person who applies, not the best person available.

I've been on a kick of late — about 30 years or so — making the contention that most company leaders inadvertently set up their hiring practices to weed out the weak rather than attract the best. For an entrepreneurial company that wants to grow, this strategy limits how big the company can become.

To overcome the natural tendency to hire for the short term rather than the long term, I suggest company leaders learn how to drive buses, figure out how to put square pegs into round holes, and then find out how to train fleas. These are key leadership traits every company leader should master.

1. Learn to drive buses.

Most of us recall Jim Collins' theme from his bestseller "Good to Great": "In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with "where" but with "who." They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats."

Which brings me to my rather superficial Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting. The quick summary goes something like this: Imagine your bus is a big job posting with compelling titles, flashy neon lights, a cool horn, etc. It's a big bus with enough space for all types of people, although some routes would just be for sales folks, or engineers, or accountants, or whomever. The recruiting idea is to have top people who want to get on the bus and drive it around the city. This is what sourcing passive candidates is all about. Good recruiting is about putting the person in the passenger seat as soon as the person gets on board, with a clever phrase like, "Would you be open to go for a drive if this job represented a true career move?" This is inviting enough for just about everyone to go for the drive.

Once on board you need to conduct a quick screen to see if the person qualifies to be on the bus and possesses the "Achiever Pattern." This means the person has accomplished something significant in comparison to his or her peers. If so, describe the job in broad terms, highlighting the employee value proposition and why the job has the potential to represent a significant career move for the right person. Then ask the person to describe a major accomplishment most comparable to your needs. If your job offers some stretch and growth, the person will then begin to sell you as to why he or she is qualified. This is how you put the person in the back seat.

Now you have to find the right seat for the person, but don't let them off until you get them to the right stop. Unfortunately, most companies have predesigned bus routes and too many filters to even get the right people on the bus in the first place. Worse, it takes an act of God (in this case, the compensation and legal departments) to change bus routes. That's why we need another leadership lesson.

2. Learn to change the shape of round holes.

To get great people onto the bus to begin with, you can't use job descriptions. That's why these must be banished as boarding passes. To take this idea one step further, I'm going to suggest that once you have the right person on the bus, create a job that offers the person a true career move, not a lateral transfer. In HR speak — don't be afraid to modify the job description after you've found the person, not before. Rather than try to fit a square peg (the person) into a round hole, modify the shape of the hole (the job requisition).

Now comes the hard part, since you're already thinking this is not possible. That's why you first need to understand the nature of fleas.

3. Learn to train fleas.

Zig Ziglar used to tell a story about how fleas can be trained to jump lower (not a typo). Before any training, fleas can naturally jump 20 inches or so unless you put them in a 5-inch mason jar with a lid on top. After 20 minutes or so, the fleas get tired of bumping their heads on the top and "learn" to jump only 4.9 inches. When you take the top off of the jar, none can get out since they've mentally put a limit on their jumping ability. The point of this is to suggest that too many leaders sometimes act like trained fleas seeing only the restraints preventing them from implementing change, rather than the opportunity in doing so.

Of course, banishing skills-based job descriptions and writing the job spec after you've chosen the person raises legal compliance excuses ( a top labor attorney indicates there are none), impacts the ATS and workflow design, affects recruitment advertising, requires better workforce planning, changes the role of the hiring manager, requires flexible budgeting, and even requires figuring out who should be driving the bus. I call this the hiring Catch-22 which as the video shows is an easy trap to fall into, but not that hard to climb out.

Despite these challenges, the benefits are enormous compared to the issues to be overcome. At a minimum, you'll hire more talented people, and increase on-the-job performance, job satisfaction and retention. Your new found job design flexibility will allow you to structure work to better meet the needs of a demographically changing workforce, and your hiring productivity will soar by eliminating all of the self-imposed bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Of course, to pull this off you'll first need to recognize there's no lid on the jar.

Read more: http://www.inc.com/lou-adler/3-unlikely-skills-that-great-hiring-managers-need-to-possess.html#ixzz3ElIMoIhH

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity — and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work

Google Reboots Its Business Software Operation as ‘Google for Work’

Google is best known for the online services and software it offers to everyday consumers—things like Google Search, Gmail, and the Android mobile operating system that runs so many smartphones and tablets—but for more than a decade, the tech giant has also offered services, software, and even hardware to the world’s businesses, including everything from online applications such as Google Docs to sweeping cloud computing services such as Google Compute Engine. Today, the company unveiled a new identity for this growing part of its operation. It will now be known as Google for Work.

This group—which operates across Google’s larger organization, essentially turning existing consumer products into business tools—was previously known as Google Enterprise. Meant to provide a shot in the arm for Google’s efforts in the workplace, the new name reflects a larger change across the world of business software and hardware, where so many tools are finding their way into businesses through individual employees rather than dedicated IT workers. It’s known as the “consumerization of IT.”

“In many ways, work itself has changed in the last five years,” Amit Singh, the president of the re-christened group, said this morning during a briefing with reporters at Google’s San Francisco offices. “Mobile has come into play, and users are making choices, not just enterprise IT.”

The name may take a while to stick, even inside Google. Rajen Sheth, the “father of Google Apps,” who has worked with the group for a good ten years, mistakenly used the group’s old name during the press briefing in San Francisco. But the ultimate aim is to make it easier for the average person to understand Google’s efforts in this area.

All of the group’s products will be tagged with the “for Work” moniker. Earlier this year, the company introduced Google Drive for Work, a version of its online file storage service that’s intended for businesses, and now, all other Google business tools will follow suit. Google Apps, for instance, will become Google Apps for Work.

According to Singh, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 now paying for what are now called Google for Work services, and more than 1,800 customers are signing up for its latest product, Google drive for Work, each week. But the company believes its business tools provide a much larger opportunity for growth, and that’s one of the reasons it’s rolling out this new moniker. “We are in a very important phase of growth,” Singh said of Google as a whole.

Sheth says that this move isn’t just a change in brand. “What we’re looking at here is more than just a name change,” he said. “It’s a mindset shift.” In short, the company realizes this is quickly becoming a “user-first market,” and it wants to make an even great effort to appeal to those end users. The word “enterprise,” you see, doesn’t mean that much to the average user. But “work” means a great deal.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/google-reboots-its-business-software-operation-as-google-for-work/

Six Must-Have Cloud Management Features

From technology startups to multinationals, cloud computing has arrived, and the change is evident. According to Gartner, nearly 20% of companies are using cloud computing for most of their production applications.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is already a $6 billion market and it’s growing nearly 50% per year. The popularity of IaaS means that more applications and services are being delivered via the cloud by an ever­expanding group of business units, teams, developers, and systems administrators.

IaaS consumers are now looking to cloud management platforms to help manage their growing portfolio of cloud applications. A cloud management platform enables organizations to deploy, manage, monitor, and control applications across public and private clouds ­ ensuring that companies can achieve both agility and cost savings.

Here are six key capabilities you should look for in a cloud management platform:

1. Simplify Complexity

One of the main reasons that IaaS has been such a huge hit is flexibility. IaaS consumers can choose instance sizes, operating systems, databases, application frameworks, and a laundry list of other attributes. They can modify specific instances by altering configurations, boot sequences, and cron jobs. With all this customization comes the very complexity that many are trying to escape by moving away from traditional datacenters. Effective cloud management gives you the customization required for IaaS to be successful along with management tools versioning, source control, and configuration management ­ to keep it all under control.

2. Manage Multiple Clouds

What cloud users want is true interoperability: Applications built for one environment can be run on another without changing the underlying code or configuration. True interoperability goes beyond simple cloud API compatibility to handle different behaviors across different cloud providers. Virtual networks don’t behave the same across clouds. And neither do storage volumes. Or snapshots. A simple API translation tool doesn’t cut it. Your cloud management platform should enable this multi­cloud future, by enabling application interoperability across multiple IaaS cloud providers.

3. Build for the Future

Innovation in the IaaS market is moving fast: Witness the weekly drumroll of updates from Amazon, Rackspace, OpenStack, and CloudStack. And then there are the ever­increasing new entrants on the IaaS playing field such as Windows Azure and Google. The menu of services and the strength of vendors’ offerings will look quite different in a year. A cloud management platform should enable you to harness this innovation by supporting a wide variety of IaaS cloud providers vendors and cloud services offerings ­ both public and private.

4. Support the Application Lifecycle

Managing applications involves much more than simply getting them launched. A typical application has a lot of life events: updating code, patching security vulnerabilities, capacity management, performance optimization, backups, failover. There are many tools to help with each of these tasks. Comprehensive cloud management includes the monitoring, alerting, configuration management, auto-scaling, and disaster recovery tools necessary to take an application from source code repository through predictable updates and unpredictable service interruptions.

5. Automation: Set It and Forget It

Managing applications can involve a lot of repetitive tasks, especially for large environments. Rather than having manual processes to provision each server or push code, the cloud is built to be programmatically managed. After all, the infrastructure is managed with code via APIs. A cloud management platform delivers greatest value when it provides capacity management, support for continuous integration, and resource orchestration that reduces operational burdens and enables your team to support ever­growing computing requirements.

6. Manage and Control Costs

IaaS makes it easy to consume infrastructure — so easy that you may be concerned that your organization is consuming a lot more than you anticipated. Plus IaaS is priced by the hour, which is not something that most organizations have ever measured accurately before. And cloud pricing is often complex, a la carte, and constantly changing. This does not sit well with most IT departments and their long-­range budgets. Look for a cloud management platform that provides cost forecasting, reporting, and showback so that you can sit tight when your cloud bills come due.

Companies of all sizes are embracing cloud management platforms as a critical component of their cloud strategy. With these six capabilities at your disposal, you’ll be ready to manage cloud applications across a multi­-cloud portfolio to fully realize the cost savings and agility benefits of cloud computing.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/six-must-have-cloud-management-features/

Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines

As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson — it’s simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers as our teammates. Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/erik_brynjolfsson_the_key_to_growth_race_em_with_em_the_machines

5 Signs You’re The Type Of Boss Everyone Loves

Highways Agency/Flickr

You can be the bearer of bad news and still be loved by your staff.

Most bosses want to be liked. But as a manager, you sometimes have to deliver bad news, enforce the rules, assign dreadful projects, and give critical feedback. However, if you're a truly great leader, your employees will like and respect you despite those occasions.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Bernard Marr, an enterprise performance expert and author of "25 Need-To-Know Key Performance Indicators," shares 10 signs you're a great boss. Here are some of our favorites:

1. You have a clear vision and effectively make decisions.

"The captain must steer the ship," Marr says. The best managers have a clear vision of the department or company's future that he or she can communicate to their employees.

Effective bosses are also effective decision makers, Marr adds. They don't overthink every tiny thing. "Being able to make decisions quickly and decisively — and then take responsibility for the outcome (see No. 2) — is an important business skill, especially when managing others," he says.

2. You hold yourself and others accountable.

Most bosses hold their staff accountable, but the best ones hold themselves accountable, too. "This means adhering to the same guidelines [you] set for [your] employees and taking responsibility for both team successes and failures," Marr says.

3. You don't micromanage.

"The best bosses understand the art of delegation," Marr explains. "They don't interfere in the day-to-day and minute-to-minute workflow or processes. In essence, learning to delegate instead of micromanage is about trust."

4. You put your employees first, and show appreciation for them.

Great managers understand that there must be a balance between the company or client's needs, and the needs of their employees, Marr says. "The best bosses are willing to listen and talk about any issues an employee may be having because they understand that a happy employee is a more productive employee."

They also give deserving employees a pat on the back, and "understand the importance of recognizing and appreciating employee contributions," he explains. "This doesn't have to mean bonuses or fancy corporate awards, but regular and meaningful expressions of appreciation."

5. You're dedicated, but have good work-life balance.

You can't be a truly effective and respected manager unless you're passionate about your work. Marr says the best bosses "live and breathe their jobs and strive to do the best work possible," yet they have lives outside of the office, and understand the need to balance work and family, and work and play. "And they set a good example of how to do that for their employees." 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/signs-youre-the-type-of-boss-everyone-loves-2014-9#ixzz3ElIjkJL5