Blog round up, the slightly bigger edition

Because it's been a little while since my last blog round up, this will be a little longer. I've also found some good posts from the project management blogs I've recently added to my reader.

Marc Andreessen, The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 1: Opportunity, blog.pmarca.com
"Career planning = career limiting. ... The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities." See also part 2 and part 3.

Penelope Trunk, Business schools shift to accommodate the biological clock, Brazen Careerist
"People have been talking in hushed voices of creating faster ways to get through school in order to attract women. And people have been talking off the record about how top schools accept women at an earlier age than they accept men. But Harvard has made it official. In order to attract women into business school they are allowing women in after just two years of work."

Alexander Kjerulf, How NOT to lead geeks, Chief Happiness Officer
"Geeks hate management-speak and see it as superficial and dishonest. Managers shouldn't learn to speak tech, but they should drop the biz-buzzwords. A manager can say "We need to proactively impact our time-to-market" or simply use english and stick to "We gotta be on time with this project"."

Fast Company Now, Madonna's Moves Herald the Future of Music Distribution
"The bottom line: having to abandon DRM will force record labels to think more innovatively, and more comprehensively, about how to market their music. LiveNation's deal with Madonna is a prime case in point."

Steven D. Levitt, Paul Krugman Hits the Blogosphere Running, Freakonomics
"While economists are well aware of the patterns in inequality, there is less agreement concerning the reasons for its ups and downs. Krugman believes that the primary factor driving inequality is politics. I suspect that most economists would disagree."

Martha Lagace, Management Education's Unanswered Questions Q&A with: Rakesh Khurana, HBS Working Knowledge
"Given the rapidity by which our business context is changing, the graduates of business schools should be able to access continuing education. If we really do believe that knowledge is important for effective practice, then it would seem that having some mechanism for connecting graduates to what is relevant would be very important."

Garry Emmons, Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making, HBS Working Knowledge
"Edmondson says this reluctance to speak up stems variously from fears that superiors will not like the idea or that it may appear to criticize the status quo, which most people find reassuringly familiar or dangerous to challenge."

Mike Griffiths, Right-Brain Project Management, Leading Answers
"This conscious search for sense before making plans accepts the vagueness in early projects and embraces the futility of detailed plans made too soon. Rather than moving to planning too early, a focus on motivation and meaning is a great use for early project time."

Lisa Haneberg, When We're Wrong - Recovering from Bad Decisions, Management Craft
"Great managers make more bad decisions than do mediocre managers. Why? Because great managers approach and get active in more situations. Mediocre managers are more likely to sit back and let others make decisions or let situations linger."

Johanna Rothman, "But It’s Just a Small Change", Managing Product Development
"Murphy is one of your team members. Finish this project. Hold a retrospective. Work differently on the next one. But don’t make that one small change."

Gavin Heaton, The Future Isn't What You Think, Servant of Chaos
"This is why we use the term "disruptive" technology for those innovations that change the status quo. It is also why it is essential for us, as marketers, to continue to investigate and play with the technologies that become available"

Seth Godin, Radiohead and the mediocre middle, Seth's Blog
"Most industries innovate from both ends:
* The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
* The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
* It's the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches."

Weekly blog round up

Ok, it's been a little more than a week, but these ones were worth waiting for :)

Practically irrelevant?, Economist.com, 28 August 2007
Whether academic research actually produces anything that is useful to the practice of business, or even whether it is its job to do so, are questions that can provoke vigorous arguments on campus.

Lynda M. Applegate, Jumpstarting Innovation: Using Disruption to Your Advantage, HBS Working Knowledge, 4 September 2007
Disruptions in the business environment cause economic shifts that destabilize industries, companies, and even countries. They allow new entrants or forward-thinking established players to introduce innovations—in products, markets, or processes—that transform the way companies do business and consumers behave.

Seth Godin, The Scarcity Shortage, Seth's Blog
Scarcity, after all, is the cornerstone of our economy. The best way to make a profit is by trading in something that's scarce. ... So how do you deal with the shortage of scarcity?

Andrea Coombes, It's Time to Stand Up to Your Email, Wall Street Journal, 26 August 2007
Another strategy to take control of your in-box: Turn off "you have mail" alerts that interrupt you as you work. Instead, decide on a regular schedule to check your in-box, whether it's once every 30 minutes or three times a day.

Weekly blog round up (with a nod to Career's Week)

With next week being Career’s Week, I decided that a few of these links would be on this general topic.

Dustin Wax, Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research, lifehack.org
There’s some great advice here from someone who isn't a librarian. From when it’s appropriate to use Wikipedia, to allowing time for the research process, and the importance of taking a moment to familiarize yourself with the resources you have, particularly the library resources. He says some nice things about librarians too :)

Jim Heskett, How Will Millennials Manage?, HBS Working Knowledge
"There seems to a fixation these days on millennials as employees. But what kind of managers will they make?" Make sure you read the comments.

Ryan Paugh, Marketing Yourself Outside the Box, Employee Evolution
"Linked-In, Facebook and MySpace are all great ways to network online, but if you want to take things a step further, create your own Website [or blog]"

Penelope Trunk, To find your best next job, focus on the company not the job, Brazen Careerist
"... the best companies don’t use money as a recruiting tool. It’s not that they think you don’t care about money. But they know they cannot differentiate themselves with money."

Clarke Ching, When Trust Goes AWOL, StickyMinds.com
"The best way to build—or rebuild—trust is to act in a trustworthy way. I only needed to see my mobile’s alarm clock work properly once before I trusted it and thereafter I slept soundly, but it takes longer to build trust in people."

Seamus McCauley, Paying for the luxury of ignorance, Virtual Economics
The author disagrees with Google's Chief Economist's statement that it is easy to switch search engines. Although it is not difficult to go to a different search engine, people tend to stick with information sources that they trust. Putting on my librarian hat, I make a distinction between just "looking something up" and in-depth research. When doing the former, it's ok to do what's easiest and most comfortable, but the latter is work, and requires exploring all appropriate sources even-handedly.

Weekly blog round up

• Leigh Householder, The Worst Focus Group is You, Advergirl
  "You may simply be too close to the brand. After years of being a marketer / customer / advertiser, you hold certain core beliefs about the brand(s) you represent. If there is a change in the marketplace – or, even in your core customer – you may be too close to see it without an outside perspective."
• Tiffany Monhollon, Multitasking vs. Time Management, Employee Evolution
  "It turns out, multitasking may help us do more things at once, but it doesn’t help us do them well – or even quickly for that matter. In fact, it slows us down."
• Sean Silverthorne, HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t), Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
  "From the outside, Wikipedia may look like chaos barely contained. 'When people look at these sorts of phenomenon at Wikipedia, they misread the anarchy,' Lakhani says. 'All these people, thousands of people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation.'"
• Todd Rogers and Katy Milkman, Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ‘Should’ Decision, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
  "We predicted that online grocery shoppers would order healthier groceries when ordering for delivery in the distant future (i.e., 5 days from now) than when ordering for delivery in the more immediate future (i.e., tomorrow). This is exactly what we found. ... people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are rented before want DVDs (e.g., action films)."
• Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson, The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media, Robin Good's Latest News
  "This research reached out to the 'marketing teams' (i.e., the admission departments) of over 2,000 accredited four-year colleges and universities nationwide [USA] to learn how they were using these exciting new technologies. ... Interestingly, admissions departments feel that social media is 'very important' to their future strategy in almost a 2:1 ratio to Inc. 500 businesses that feel the same way (51% compared to 26%)."
  

Weekly blog round up

• Gary Becker, The International Market for Talent-Becker, The Becker-Posner blog
  “Although outsourcing has certainly accelerated as well as reflected the international hunt for talent, outsourcing is not the only factor that has invigorated the talent market. Migration of skilled workers also is part of the competition across nations for talent.”
• Penelope Trunk, How to start a quality conversation with someone you don’t know, Brazen Careerist
  “You don’t need to be extroverted to be a great conversationalist; you need to care about other people. You need to trust that you will find other people interesting because you are a curious, engaged person.”
• Joshua Gans, Growth at a distance, CoreEcon
  Does the tyranny of distance still exist? If so, could Australia be doing anything differently to ameliorate its effect?
• Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire, Ten years on: How Asia shrugged off its economic crisis, Economist.com
  “The financial crisis can be described as having been a “perfect storm”: a confluence of various conditions that not only created financial and economic turbulence but also greatly magnified its impact.”
• Pamela Slim, Presentation tips for budding entrepreneurs, Escape from Cubicle Nation
  This is a good all-round post on giving presentations, from fundamentals such as planning and having the right attitude, to practical matters such as not having too many PowerPoint slides.
• Thomas Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne, Platform Envelopment, HBS Working Knowledge
  Looks at this issue in depth using the Apple iPhone, Windows Media Player and Blockbuster video as some of the examples.
• Gina Trapani, The art of the doable to-do list, lifehacker
  "Break it down. The best way to make yourself avoid a task like the plague is to make it a vague monstrosity."

Weekly blog round up

• Dani Rodrik, Clive Crook’s very astute observation, Dani Rodrik's weblog
• David Jacobson, About Australia: 2006 census data released, David Jacobson's External Insights
• Steve Rubel, The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching, Micro Persuasion
• Becky McCray, The Dip, The Purple Cow, The Blue Ocean Strategy, and The Long Tail, Small Biz Survival

Thursday blog round up

• Richard Posner, Intelligence and Leadership—Posner, The Becker-Posner blog
• Gary Becker, Intelligence and Leadership-BECKER, The Becker-Posner blog
• Marc Andreessen, The truth about venture capitalists, Part 1, blog.pmarca.com
• David Jacobson, What if you googled a job applicant and found out something?, David Jacobson's External Insights
• Lessons from Apple, Economist.com
• Pamela Slim, Book to read for generations from any letter of the alphabet: Brazen Careerist, Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Martha Lagace, Becoming an Ethical Negotiator: Q&A with Michael Wheeler, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
  

Thursday blog roundup

I'm thinking of a different name to call this Thursday link dump. I don't have anything else shortlisted so suggestions are welcome.

• Marc Andreessen, Bubbles on the brain, blog.pmarca.com
• Heather M. Caruso, Todd Rogers, and Max Bazerman, Leading and Creating Collaboration in Decentralized Organizations, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
• Joshua Gans, Free books with ads?, CoreEcon
• Joshua Gans, Innovation Index in The Age, CoreEcon, linking to this article published by the Age newspaper
• Jim Heskett, How Should Pay Be Linked to Performance?, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
• Hugh MacLeod, the cult of the brand r.i.p., gapingvoid
• Robert May, Everything I Know About Management, I Learned From Pirates, Businesspundit

Thursday linkdump

I'm not sure if this if going to be a regular feature in this blog, but I thought I'd share some interesting posts gathered from my readings of business-related blogs.

• Attracting the twentysomething worker
• Money and Ethics: How you stack up (quiz)
• The Ignorance of Crowds
• Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded
• Lessons from Seth Godin's talk about "The Dip" in Phoenix today
• Ambidexterity as a Dynamic Capability: Resolving the Innovator's Dilemma
• Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets
• Who should you hire?

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