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Articles posted by Bruce Benson (Page 12)
The other fly in the petroleum jelly is the risk of a financial crackup such as Russia’s 1998 default. “You will always have financial risks associated with fast, unexpected changes,” says Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Oil’s Price...
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March 10, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
It seems to be an axiom of modern projects that for every project team member, every minute of every day should be filled with assigned tasks. I know project managers who boast of loading themselves and their subordinates with way more than 100% of available...
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March 4, 2015 Bruce Benson
Team Management
Innovation has been happening in pockets of excellence for just about, forever.
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February 26, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
IT used to be sold to CIOs. Now an employee adopts a piece of software and pushes his company to do the same. An Expense App to Hook Road Warriors, Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec 15, 2014. I had found a program called “Packrat” which was a...
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February 24, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
The key was that I knew what was normal, what a typical project looked like, how the typical project would play out. This included all the typical problems that would go wrong. Most importantly I knew that given just enough time in the overall schedule, we would have the time to fix any issues.
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February 19, 2015 Bruce Benson
Metrics
At Jet, there will be no annual performance reviews, because [Marc] Lore thinks feedback should be immediate and civil. … And Lore isn’t making any of his employees sign noncompetes; he says that … without such stipulations “there’s more loyalty and trust that is built.”...
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February 17, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
It is indeed ironic that Hadoop is picking up support in the general community about five years after Google moved on to better things. Hence, the rest of the world followed Google into Hadoop with a delay of most of a decade. Google has long...
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February 12, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
For advanced economies, innovation requires pushing on the frontiers of science and technology. That can’t happen without heavy government funding for basic research … The Internet and the Global Positioning System (GPS) are only two of the crucial technologies that originated as projects of the...
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February 10, 2015 Bruce Benson
Change Management
According to neuroscientist Tali Sharot of University College, London, the group of people who turn out to be more accurate about predicting how long it will take to complete tasks — and how likely they are to succeed — are the clinically depressed. Optimists underestimate...
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February 5, 2015 Bruce Benson
Metrics
Activity was what was important, it seemed, not productivity nor effectiveness. We can always tell the COO, CQO and CEO what a great focus we had on quality!
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February 3, 2015 Bruce Benson
Process Improvement
How much trickery is legal?
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January 29, 2015 Bruce Benson
Leadership
In my case, in 1999 I arrived in Japan and had to face the turnaround of Nissan. The fact that I wasn’t Japanese and was a newcomer to the industry helped me. People knew I wasn’t involved in the industry’s past. I dismantled keiretsu [interlinked...
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January 27, 2015 Bruce Benson
Communication
[Doctors Without Borders] is able to move so swiftly, in large part, because of its decentralized structure, which is more akin to a guerilla network than a top-down corporation. How To Manage A Plague, Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov 17, 2014. Contrary to such notable initiatives such...
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January 22, 2015 Bruce Benson
Management
“I was very worried when an insider was chosen as the new CEO. I was especially worried when suboptimal execution continued: missed delivery dates, buggy products, weak marketing.” The Rise And Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History. Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec 9, 2013. The product looks...
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January 20, 2015 Bruce Benson
Tracking
Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population [Westerners] from which to draw broad generalizations.
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January 15, 2015 Bruce Benson
Honesty
