Agility

06/07/2019

Ditch the "employer brand" to build one brand:

10/10/2018

Well that was fast. Sears prepares for bankruptcy as early as this week. An example of an organization not having the agility to respond to changes in the market. Over leveraged with debt, no digital strategy, no fresh infusion of talent.

Sears Holdings is readying a bankruptcy filing that could come as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

10/06/2018

The retail carnage continues. They should have bought Casper when they had a chance. Large retailers who do not identify and react to disruptive technologies and alternative distribution methods will continue to fail. Digital native brands like Casper will continue to take advantage of The Innovator's Dilemma. The decision-making and resource allocation processes key to the incumbent's success are the same processes preventing them to react to the new business threats. Next up: Sears?

Mattress Firm says filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection so it can take steps to strengthen its balance sheet and reshape its store footprint. 

10/05/2018

Unemployment drops to 3.7% making it difficult to find the best candidates. Using an experienced and dedicated recruiter is more important than ever to identify and place top talent.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. unemployment rate fell in September to 3.7 percent, the lowest since 1969, when young men were being drafted to fight in Vietnam and the American auto i

10/03/2018

Words from the wise on psychometric assessments. Ray Dalio founded and grew Bridgewater Associates into the largest hedge fund in the world. In his book 'Principles', he points to psychometric assessments as one key tool to create a high functioning organization.

Because of the biases with which we are wired, our self-assessments (and our assessments of others) tend to be highly inaccurate. Psychometric assessments are much more reliable. They are important in helping explore how people think during the hiring process and throughout employment. Though psychometric assessments cannot fully replace speaking with people and looking at their backgrounds and histories, they are far more powerful than traditional interviewing and screening methods. If I had to choose between just the assessments or just traditional job interviews to get at what people are like, I would choose the assessments. Fortunately, we don’t have to make that choice.

The four main assessments we use are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Workplace Personality Inventory, the Team Dimensions Profile, and Stratified Systems Theory. But we are constantly experimenting (for example, with the Big Five) so our mix will certainly change. Whatever the mix, they all convey people’s preferences for thinking and action. They also provide us with new attributes and terminologies that clarify and amplify those we had identified on our own. I will describe a few of them below. These descriptions are based on my own experiences and learnings, which are in many ways different from the official descriptions used by the assessment companies.

10/23/2014

Great Harvard Business Review article on Emotional Intelligence. E.I. is one of many assessments we use to create more effective leadership.

A new debate on a classic concept.

05/25/2014

Happy Memorial Day Weekend to all who have served in the past and present! Thank you!

05/09/2014

If hired for a new job, which would you rather have? An extra week of vacation or an additional $2k in salary?

05/08/2014

Alibaba could become the biggest Initial Public Offering in US history. The story of its Founder Jack Ma is fantastic. Read about his vision, drive, leadership and persistence:

How on earth, you might ask, did a one-time English teacher become the most mammothly successful entrepreneur in the world's biggest country, about to have a multibillion-dollar initial public offering for a business, Alibaba, that has disrupted numerous industries. An English teacher became, in the…

05/05/2014

We have seen most of these 7 Career Trends For 2014 in the job market. Employers are more cautious to hire, yet having a hard time finding talent.

The U.S. economy experienced its share of ups...

05/02/2014

How do you measure team performance? MIT's Professor Pentland came up with a very unique way to measure team productivity and performance through patterns of communication.

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, discusses the sociometric badge, a wearable electronic sensor that uses patterns of communication to measure a team's productivity.