ArchiveJanuary 2009

Managing Human Capital During An Economic Crisis

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Revenue is down, costs are increasing and your operating income is being squeezed.  When you look at your Profit & Loss Statement, one of the largest line-items (maybe THE largest line-item) is labor.  What do you do? In the past, the conventional wisdom, especially in the United States, has always been to reduce the workforce.  In fact, the U.S. economy has been widely praised for its flexible labor markets.  U.S. companies are thought to have a competitive advantage over European and...

Black Swans

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Three hundred years ago, it was a well-known and widely held belief (thought to be indisputable truth) that all swans were white.  With the discovery of Australia and the subsequent sighting of black swans, a “truth” that was confirmed by millennia of observation by humans was completely invalidated.   Interesting trivia, but what does this story have to do with leadership?   It turns out, quite a bit. A Black Swan is a low-probability event that is very difficult, if not impossible to predict...

Blogging and Leadership

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By 2006, one could find a few early-adopter (and very brave) CEOs using blogs to communicate with their employees, customers and shareholders.  Although these were high-profile and often successful examples of leaders using this new media to communicate, it left many rank-and-file employees scratching their heads, thinking to themselves “well, that is interesting for a CEO, but I don’t ever see myself blogging at work.”  Think again. As it turns out, blogging is a very effective management tool...

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