Talent Alley

Joel Splosky, founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software, writes about a transparent payscale in his article Why I Never Let Employees Negotiate a Raise.  At first glance, Splosky seems to be suggesting one of those crazy, radical, workplace ideas that only software companies can handle.  Like free cappuccinos or air hockey: I wanted Fog Creek to have [...]

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The dynamic is supposed to be that you’re pushing upper management to embrace social media and those ludites won’t budge. The reality is that your boss has probably read about Twitter and thinks that your company should start tweeting. About what, nobody knows. Now it’s fallen to you to tweet and finding pithy 127 character [...]

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The website Technorati claims that there are more than 100 millions blogs crowding the web. The types of blog vary enormously ranging from personal diaries, fiction, hobbies, experiences, opinions (professional and personal), and reviews. Many professionals have created blogs as a way to stay active and involved in their professions when between jobs, to keep their [...]

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The IT guy in your office might be a perfectly likable member of the team.  But in many offices, he or she is an odd, introverted person that pops up every once in a while to tell you what you’ve done wrong with your computer. The gap between IT and the rest of us has [...]

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The idea behind Prezi is simple: let’s build an alternative to PPT that isn’t difficult to use, looks great, and is sharable.  Prezi has definitely accomplished a lot and you should give it serious consideration for your next presentation for the ‘Wow’ factor alone.  You can zoom in and out of pictures and words and [...]

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In this TED video, Tom Wujec explains the Marshmallow Challenge and why kindergartners perform better at it than CEOs or business school grads.  Wujec focuses on it as a design process, but it really applies to any business situation. Basically, The Marshmallow Challenge gives teams some sticks of spagetti, string, tape and a marshmallow that [...]

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There’s nothing more contentious than meetings. Internal meetings. We’ve all been in the gatherings where blackberry typing, pastry eating, and PowerPoints both seem to suck our time away, but in such a passive, friendly way that we don’t mind. How do we make this workplace institution better. Turns out there’s no way to address it [...]

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Here’s the thing about internal PowerPoints: they’re just like PowerPoints you give to your customers only worse. And let’s face it, those are pretty bad. Bullet points? Bad clip art? Lots and lots of words? Chances are your presentation skills overall could use an overhaul. And it turns out that there is plenty of advice out there.

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So let’s ban email.  But before we do, let’s talk about something else: auditing emails.  I know, the phrase has a terrifying ring.  No one likes anything audited and email can be highly personal, but Michael Schrage thinks that it’s a good mechanism to improve productivity.  No, we’re not talking about policing someone’s email looking [...]

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We all know people that make decisions in extreme ways: the guy who snaps up a real estate deal in a matter of minutes or the person who takes 10 minutes to decide between fries and coleslaw.  Most of us fall somewhere in between, but there are philosophies of decision making that can sway most [...]

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