Advice for Outsourcing

clipped from www.forbes.com Corporations are only beginning to understand how to bridge cultural nuances, manage time zones, provide context and effectively communicate without the benefit of face-to-face interaction. Glossing over these challenges does a disservice to anyone who wants to work with a global team. Global collaboration is hard work. The management of a global team requires long-term dedication and the development of a unique skill-set--one that most project managers have never been taught. The 24-hour work day is a more difficult challenge. You need to master the daily cycle: You work. They sleep. Reverse and repeat. Theoretically, this should be more efficient than a one-time-zone workday; it should be like a relay race in which the baton is passed at the appearance of the sun on each side of the globe. Unfortunately, the baton is rarely handed off in a way that enables people to work efficiently--or get enough sleep. It just took some experience and hard work to get it right.

Perspective on Outsourcing

clipped from www.forbes.com Yes, The World's Still Round I had taken a red eye from San Francisco. I was late--very late--for a meeting with Phoenix Systems, and Phoenix Systems was a brand new client I was totally lost. In New Jersey. The week before my trip, I had asked my Bangalore, India-based virtual assistant to book plane tickets and shuttles, make my rental car and hotel reservations and send me directions from the Newark Airport to the Phoenix Systems office. While everything started out well (there were no complications with my shuttle, flight or rental car), my driving directions seemed kind of long: 45 hours. It would take me an entire day plus 21 more hours to get to my destination. My new assistant had, in fact, sent me directions from the Newark Airport in New Jersey to Phoenix, Arizona. We do work of which I am deeply proud. Yet, after all those years in business, we struggle to overcome communication challenges every day.

e-Harmony for cats & owners?

clipped from news.yahoo.com A personality test for your cat By LINDA LOMBARDI, For The Associated Press That's why the shelter is now using the Feline-ality program, developed by behaviorist Dr. Emily Weiss of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Part of the ASPCA's Meet Your Match program, which also includes Canine-ality for dogs, the program assesses a variety of behaviors in individual cats. It rates the animals on confidence and sociability, which Weiss' research has shown are independent of each other. The program then tallies those assessments to place the cat into nine personality categories, which can be matched with a family's situation and desires. The program is used at 45 shelters, with additional facilities preparing to use it.

Using Virtual Worlds

clipped from blogs.forrester.com Virtual Offices For All: Return Of The Serendipitous Interaction The beauty of virtual world technology like this: distributed workers get new capabilities (like building relationships with, and randomly sharing ideas with, remote colleagues because you happen to be in the same place at the same time — thereby potentially driving up creativity and innovation). And all information workers get improved ways of doing things they can do today (like talking, instant messaging, and interacting with shared presentation materials over the Web), thereby driving up their productivity. My prediction: forward-thinking organizations will put virtual environments like this in place during the next few years. Their employees will develop relationships that strengthen their feeling of belonging to a larger organization and sharing an important mission. Employees’ loyalty to the company will increase, and this will lead to easier employee recruiting and longer retention.

Observing the power of social media

clipped from blogs.forrester.com Brands Punk'd By Social Media Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked in Anti-Genocide Campaign Artist creates and sells T-shirt demonstrating how the media turns a deaf ear to real world tragedies such as genocide in Dafur, infringing on LV logo.  LV fires back, with lawsuit, a groundswell begins. Submitted by Søren Storm Hansen Burger King exec trash talks using daughter's email Not sure why he didn't just create a new email address, that would have been a lot safer. Submitted by Hilker. Johnson and Johnson to bloggers: Hurry up and get dis-invited Sounds like a mis-coordination, bad timing, and not a well thought through process that ended up getting scobleized, and Maryamized.  Anonymous Unmasks Church of Scientology The church of Scientology has been criticized by an anonymous group, a faceless mass that has created videos, staged marches and protests, and is subvert the Church from around the internet.

Etiquette of the Thank You

clipped from blog.looseends.net The execution of thank you notes: questions from readers Question: Can I have someone send out thank you notes on my behalf? ktcosmos’ reply: Now, I am presuming the asker is a business person who intends to delegate the task of writing thank you notes to someone else. (If I am incorrect and the asker is a bride who wants to have her mom or someone else handle this, shame on you!) I may take a beating on this, but here’s what I think. Writing thank yous is a DIY job. If you believe you are so busy that you do not have time to write your own thank you notes, I would admonish you that you are way out of line. Thank you notes, whether in business or personal life, are intimate expressions of gratitude for kindnesses extended to you by others, who found time in THEIR busy lives. No one is too busy to be able to execute that gesture on their own. If you are writing a thank you (or having your designée do that for you) just as a way to suck up and get ahead, that’s equally lame.

Explanation of Web 2.0

clipped from www.bnet.com What Is Web 2.0? by Mike Wolcott Buzz phrase coined: 2004, by Tim O'Reilly of tech publisher O'Reilly Media Thumbnail definition: Web 2.0 is a set of Web-based software services that encourage users to become more involved in the creation and manipulation of data. Enabling technologies: AJAX, blogs, RSS, wikis, XML, Atom Prominent Web 2.0 brands: digg, Flickr, Google Apps, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, Socialtext, YouTube, Wikipedia Investment: Web 2.0 startups attracted $844 million in venture capital investment during 2006, more than twice as much as in 2005. (Source: VentureOne)

Explanation of Carbon Credit

clipped from www.bnet.com What Is Carbon Credit? by Jessica Stillman Emissions limits and trading rules vary country by country, so each emissions-trading market operates differently. For nations that have signed the Kyoto Protocol, which holds each country to its own C02 limit, greenhouse gas-emissions trading is mandatory. In the United States, which did not sign the environmental agreement, corporate participation is voluntary for emissions schemes such as the Chicago Climate Exchange. Yet a few general principles apply to each type of market. The commitment a company makes to curb its pollutant output is an increasingly public aspect of strategy. Let’s say a company can’t afford to modify its operations to reduce C02. Purchasing carbon credits or offsets buys it time to figure out how to operate within C02 limits. Each credit a company buys on the Chicago Climate Exchange — usually for about $2 — means another company will remove the equivalent of one metric ton of carbon.