Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be underskilled Knowledge Workers

Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be underskilled knowledge workers. Make sure they have tools that will be valued in the coming world of work. According to me, these tools include advanced literacy and numeracy, the ability to write and speak clearly and persuasively, and comfort with statistical reasoning. So if your kid wants to do a degree in Media Studies, great, but make sure that they’re also throwing in an Applied Math major and taking a few good old-fashioned English Composition classes along the way

via andrewmcafee.org

good advice…

Why Women Rule The Internet – they build more relationships than men?

Dunbar’s Number, proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.  The number is the theoretical limit of how many people with whom one can maintain stable relationships (thought to be 150).  But Dunbar’s most recent research shows there are different numbers for women than men—that women are able to maintain quantitatively more relationships within every ring of closeness than men.  Knowing that is an important factor if you want to build and stoke social network effects.  More female users will likely help your company grow faster.

via techcrunch.com

… and also are responsible for more spend than men. Have you got enough women in your team?

Who’s to Blame: Management or Labor? | Quality Digest

W. Edwards Deming warned us about profit and the five deadly diseases of management that destroy it. They embody most of today’s troubles for managing businesses and government. Let’s walk through them and take inventory:
Lack of constancy of purpose. All systems must have an aim (purpose) toward improvement and to stay in business. The lack of purpose leads to short-term thinking. 
Emphasis on short-term profit. Management’s focus on dividends leads to creative accounting rather than improvement, which suboptimizes the system. 
Annual rating or evaluation of performance. Statistical knowledge helped Deming discover that the system, not the individual, drives the performance of the organization and that focusing on the individual was working on the wrong problem.
Mobility of management. Deming understood that management requires knowledge of the system. Getting knowledge requires time to learn and study the problems to understand the system. As he remarked, “People in management today know nothing about the problems of anybody else… they don’t even know their own.”
Management by use of visible figures alone. A happy or unhappy customer is usually unknown and unknowable. Managing by using visible figures alone creates suboptimization in systems that are driven by unit costs and maximizing company stock.

via qualitydigest.com

Just a quick Deming reminder… I’d highlight ” the system, not the individual, drives the performance of the organization and that focusing on the individual was working on the wrong problem”

Whitehall Pay Pushed Up By Increasing Numbers Of Middle Managers, Watchdog Says

The NAO said half of the increase in costs was accounted for by a two-thirds rise in the numbers of Civil Service middle management grades 6 and 7 – an additional 14,000 posts.

The average civil servant’s pay is still well below the private sector and we need to ensure that we protect the lowest paid and that is why we are doing all we can to cut costs at the centre and curbing senior pay.

Cabinet Office Minister France Maude

This unplanned growth in the number of managers came as junior administrative staff were being cut, with overall staff numbers falling from 497,000 to 493,000 over the 10 years to 2009-2010.

The result is that work previously done by junior officials is increasingly taken on by more highly paid senior staff – a process known in the Civil Service as “grade creep”.

via news.sky.com

See http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/jobs/salaries.htm

Grade7 Minimum UK £46,983
Minimum London £52,669
Grade 6 Minimum UK £57,573 Minimum London £63,46

Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity (Do you have tools & Culture for it?) #btot

Along with sharing information about work tasks, blogging at work pulls employees closer to one another, builds relationships, and over time, increases productivity.

via intranetlounge.com

/ht to @markmorrell for pointing me to this article quoted in the Intranet Lounge. My concerns would be:
i) does your company use good blogging tools? There are mixed views on using SP2010 out of the box as a blogging tool
ii) is your company the sort that will encourage blogging, or one in which the chilling effect of management oversight will curtail openess and a collaborative culture?

Community Management Fundamentals – Where Do I Start? /by @elsua

one other rather inspiring and amazing resource available out there for online community facilitators / managers / leaders / community builders is the Twitter hash tag #cmgr

via elsua.net

Excellent an informative post on Communities, their building, development and curation by @elsua – well worth a read

danah boyd | apophenia » Tweeting teens can handle public life

Teens regularly post in-jokes and use song lyrics or cryptic references to speak to a narrower audience than might be accessing their tweets. Some tweets are clearly difficult to decode, making the reader aware that a message is being hidden; others can be understood as “social steganography” where the message is hidden in “plain sight”. While their classmates, parents or potential employers may be able to see these tweets, they don’t necessarily understand them. Although there’s nothing fundamentally new about these practices, their application to Twitter makes it clear that teens are aware of speaking in public and using strategies to manage it.

via zephoria.org

So. Maybe don’t worry too much….

ECJ gender ruling hits insurance costs | Money | guardian.co.uk

It is particularly alarming given that the head of the Association of Police Officers in the UK in 2005 noted that the biggest killer of young women in Britain is their boyfriend’s and male friends’ driving.

via guardian.co.uk

I try and avoid anti European knee-jerk reactions, but this really is a very odd decision