Entrepreneurs: The Real “Peace Prize” Winners

Mises Daily: Monday, November 02, 2009 by Chris Brown

We live in ludicrous times of rewarding good appearance for evil action. President Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while his war efforts intensify. But those who are true promoters of peace need attention, for they will never likely receive such ostentatious recognition for their noble efforts. Such individuals are those who take risks in a world of uncertainty, and who save or borrow capital to start a business. Such entrepreneurs promote peace by serving the customer better than the next entrepreneur through voluntary transactions in the market, rather than commanding bureaucracy in government.

A Man in a Hot Air Balloon

A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don’t know where I am.” 

The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.” 

“You must be in Information Technology,” said the balloonist.

A tough search for talent

   Date: 03-11-2009
 Source: The Economist

In many rich countries, grooming young bureaucrats for a changing world is a struggle for their would-be bosses

AGED 25 and armed with a master’s degree in water management, Andrew Reeves has the very mix of youth and green-mindedness that many governments claim to need. Yet when he attended a Canadian government job fair in Toronto this autumn, he left after 20 minutes without handing out a single résumé.

What Really Kills Great Companies: Inertia

September 29, 2009, Gary Hamel, WSJ

In most  organizations, change comes in only two flavors:  trivial and traumatic.  Review the history of the average organization and you’ll discover long periods of incremental fiddling  punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.  The dynamic is not unlike that of  arteriosclerosis:  after years of  relative inactivity, the slow accretion of arterial plaque is suddenly  revealed by the business equivalent of a myocardial infarction. The only  option at that juncture is a quadruple bypass:  excise the leadership team, slash head  count, dump “non-core” assets and overhaul the balance sheet.

Why does  change have to happen this way?   Why does a company have to frustrate its shareholders, infuriate its  customers and squander much of its legacy before it can reinvent itself?   It’s easy to blame leaders  who’ve fallen prey to denial and nostalgia, but the problem goes deeper than  that.  Organizations by their very  nature are inertial.  Like a  fast-spinning gyroscope that can’t be easily unbalanced, successful  organizations spin around the axis of unshakeable beliefs and well-rehearsed  routines—and it typically takes a dramatic outside force to destabilize the  self-reinforcing system of policies and practices.

Outsourcing Progress

Date: 29-10-2009 Source: Businessworld

If you thought outsourcing would take a hit from the financial crisis, think again. While certain sectors have seen double digit declines, other end markets are growing. What the final tally for the year might be is unknown, but the results thus far are somewhat counter-intuitive. Outsourcing’s resilience in the face of such financial and political strain – lawmakers across the globe have often required firms to hire or source materials domestically – has implications for globalization. For one, it suggests that globalization as a trend remains in place despite fluctuations. Second, given that many firms plan to expand their outsourcing footprint, one would conclude that the trend should continue. Indeed, that many small and mid-sized companies seek sources of innovation offshore, suggests the trend has considerable strength.

Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution

siehe den ausgezeichenten YouTube Beitrag auf dem Blog “Digital Government 2.0″ der Donau-Uni, Zentrum e-government.

Factoid of the Day: Revenge of the Non-Specialist

from Daniel Pink’s Weblog:

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:

“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

Five Boo-boos

aus Tom Peters’ Weblog:  

1. Jobs are not coming back. People are hurting!!!! “Some people” (me!) cheered the return of the DJ average to 10,000 last week. Yup, we’re pulling out of the recession! Try telling that to the 15 million out of work in the U.S. And those still working are scoring but 33 hours per week—the least in 60 years. In a horrifying (careful word choice) article by gazillionaire Mort Zuckerman in yesterday’s Financial Times (“The Free Market Is Not Up to the Job of Creating Work“), Mr. Z adds a raft of other appalling facts about the astonishing mismatch between areas where job growth might take place and the skillsets of the recently booted. Message: The recession is a long way from “waning” for a bloody lot of people! Keep your cheering to yourself! (You may have to keep it to yourself for, say, the next 10 years.) 

Die 50 wichtigsten Business Thinkers

Na ja, mit 70% der Namen bin ich einverstanden. Ohne Zweifel hat sich C.K. Prahahlad die #1 Position verdient! Siehe das Ranking.

Forwarding Is the New Networking

Mittwoch, 30. September 2009, 16:57:51 | Tom Davenport

Michael Schrage recently wrote a post on this site about the importance of forwarding information as a way to enhance network relationships. He’s right about this, although the title — “The Disadvantage of Twitter and Facebook” — is misleading (and inaccurate, since people retweet things all the time — but sadly, editors know that anything with Facebook and Twitter in the title gets a lot of page views and retweets). Forwarding is the new networking. The fact that you can’t do it easily on Facebook is about as relevant as the inability to do it over the telephone or the Dictaphone.

OK, it’s not really the new networking, since it’s been going on for more than a decade now. Smart networkers saw early on that forwarded email content was a way to nurture network relationships.

In 2005, Rob Cross, Sue Cantrell, and I found evidence of it in some research we did on knowledge workers in four companies. The highest performers in those companies (as identified by their performance ratings) were disproportionately good networkers. They had more people in their networks, were more likely to be sought out by others, and were more likely to exchange valued information with their network members — all compared to average performance workers. They consciously cultivated their networks — and not by handing out business cards at “networking events” or by issuing LinkedIn invitations. They offered information and other items of value to their networks.