You often leave with a rosy glow, a sense of resolve, and a commitment to do more, for other women and for yourself. But then you return to your desk, probably next to a higher-paid male co-worker, and the old, familiar malaise sets in. There...
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March 2, 2016 Bruce Benson
Change Management
During a college job at an Air Force weapons lab in New Mexico, [Robert Mercer, co-CEO Renaissance Technologies] says, he found a life’s calling. “I loved everything about computers,” he said. “I Loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night. I loved the...
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February 10, 2016 Bruce Benson
Change Management
When BAE learns that an employee with deep institutional knowledge plans to retire, whether in a few months or a couple years, a knowledge transfer group of about a half-dozen people of varying ages working in the same area is formed. The teams meet regularly...
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February 3, 2016 Bruce Benson
Staffing
They assumed that, if a project was intensely and minutely planned, everything would naturally and inevitably proceed in an orderly and deterministic way. … And when projects did go off the rails, their response was to stop everything and replan. Sometimes that works, but sometimes...
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January 28, 2016 Bruce Benson
Change Management
The stakes are high for this program. As any physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are real. Programs designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that people who build these...
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January 20, 2016 Bruce Benson
Change Management
He thinks it’s pretty obvious why any engineers who may have been involved have not come forward to date. For one thing, anyone who does stand up will most likely be swept aside … Confronted with questionable orders or restrictions, they find themselves in the...
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January 13, 2016 Bruce Benson
Leadership
Yet the media telling of the story makes it sound as if ideation—the creation of ideas—is 90% of the work of innovation. Ideation has produced many inventions that never became innovations because no one adopted them. Many people are misled by stories that inaccurately equate...
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January 6, 2016 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Innovation
It pays double the average retail wage—and believes it gets more than three times the value because of the quality of people it attracts.
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December 17, 2015 Bruce Benson
Leadership
I guarantee if you get a diverse group of people aligned around a common objective with a process to work together, they will out engineer, out-solution a homogeneous team 90 percent of the time.
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December 10, 2015 Bruce Benson
Staffing
GM has been talking about self-driving cars since its Futurama display at the 1939 New York World’s fair.
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December 2, 2015 Bruce Benson
Leadership
China wasn't even the first country to experiment with forcible population control. In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.
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November 18, 2015 Bruce Benson
Requirements Management
I thought that people wanted lots of autonomy, which meant that I only needed to be there when they needed help. But that doesn’t create a very motivated team because you’re not actually helping people play—find new ideas, experiment, learn, develop and grow.
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November 11, 2015 Bruce Benson
Management
Although Pompeii is frozen in time, the workers are in a hurry — to spend money. In the next 11 weeks they have to burn through almost $100 million — about five times what they’ve spent in the past three years — or risk losing...
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November 4, 2015 Bruce Benson
Cost
Two top Volkswagen engineers who found they couldn’t deliver as promised a clean diesel engine for the U.S. market are at the center of a company probe into the installation of engine software designed to fool regulators …. The two men, Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief...
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October 28, 2015 Bruce Benson
Honesty
Looking at Volkswagen’s practices, one could argue that it didn’t hurt anybody.
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October 21, 2015 Bruce Benson
Leadership