XING - The professional network | XING How to run a problem-solving meeting This is a special sort of get together, similar to the meeting where you organize people to figure out the best way to take advantage of an opportunity. In both cases, amateurs usually run the meetings, and the group often fails to do their best work. Ignore these rules at your peril: Only the minimum number of people should participate. Don't invite anyone for political reasons.
Digitas NewFront 2012 An Economist Explains How Fear Drives Productivity Here’s a depressing thought: America’s productivity is rising on the backs of scared office workers. That’s essentially the explanation offered by Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan (JPM), for the 1.6 percent second-quarter gain reported Aug. 8 by the Labor Department. I asked him if there was anything in the data to suggest worker output was being spurred by improvements in technology or other investments—you know, encouraging stuff. He used a process of elimination to bring me back to earth. Finally, there’s “human capital”—knowledge, skills, etc. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates work hours from its Current Employment Statistics survey. The productivity number is calculated by dividing output by hours worked.
Marketer & Publisher Technology Services | Acceleration What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too. The first hour of the workday goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference. Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Tumblr founder David Karp will "try hard" not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. Gain Awareness, Be Grateful Choose Your Frog
Why is Christianity the only way? By Michael L. Brown Isn’t it the height of arrogance to claim that the only way people can come into right relationship with God is through Jesus? At first blush, the answer would seem to be yes. Actually, it’s no more arrogant for Christians to say that Jesus is the only way to God than it is for others to say that Jesus is just one way among many — thereby declaring the belief of more than one billion Christians to be wrong. The real question is: On what basis can we claim that Christianity alone brings people into right relationship with God? Generally speaking, all religions recognize that human beings have somehow fallen short and become alienated from the godhead (singular or plural). We must therefore ask on what basis the deity offers forgiveness. What separates Christianity from every other religion is not so much the moral teaching of Jesus, or even the moral example of Jesus, but rather the fact that Jesus, the divine Son, took our place. Michael L.
Why Too Much Data Disables Your Decision Making Quick, think back to a major decision. You know, the kind that compelled you to read everything on a topic and lead you to spend hours devouring every last scrap of data. How'd that work out for you? We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. Knowledge, we're told, is power. That's the question raised by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists in a fascinating study titled On the Pursuit and Misuse of Useless Information. Their experiment was simple. Imagine that you are a loan officer at a bank reviewing the mortgage application of a recent college graduate with a stable, well-paying job and a solid credit history. Group 2 saw the same paragraph with one crucial difference. Here's where the study gets clever. The result? To say the findings are surprising is to state the obvious. The answer underscores a troubling blind spot in the way we make decisions. Remember Seinfeld and Friends?
To Believe : Fulfilled Prophecy: Evidence for the Reliability of the Bible (The remaining 500 or so reach into the future and may be seen unfolding as days go by.) Since the probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 10 2000 (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)! God is not the only one, however, who uses forecasts of future events to get people's attention. Satan does, too. The acid test for identifying a prophet of God is recorded by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. As economy does not permit an explanation of all the Biblical prophecies that have been fulfilled, what follows in a discussion of a few that exemplify the high degree of specificity, the range of projection, and/or the "supernature" of the predicted events. (Probability of chance fulfillment = 1 in 10 5 Hugh's testimony
Task & Errand Service By Awesome, Trustworthy People | TaskRabbit Mind Mapping - Create Mind Maps online Working From Home? You're a Better Worker | Wired Enterprise More Americans are working from home than ever, but doubts remain about worker productivity. Photo: njaminjami/Flickr If you’re a U.S. worker, there’s a 10 percent chance that you work from home at least once a week, and a 4.3 percent chance that you work from home most of the time. And if you’re one of those working from home, you’re likely a more productive worker, at least according to a study recently published by Stanford. More employees working from home than ever before, and yet widespread skepticism about the practice remains. To study whether employees are more or less productive at home or in the office, the researchers created perhaps the first randomized study of remote work at Ctrip, a travel agency in Shanghai, China with 13,000 employees. Ctrip was concerned about the rising costs of office space, and a 50 percent annual attrition rate. During the 9-month study they found: A 12 percent increase in productivity for the at-home workers.
Marqueed - Simple image collaboration and markup tool. Share, annotate and discuss images. Working From Home Makes You More Productive There are plenty of legitimate reasons to work from home: it saves gasoline (if you drive or take the bus), eliminates commuting time, and on the company side, it means that less office space is needed to accomodate employees. Now there’s another reason, backed by a study (PDF) from Stanford: People who work from home are more productive than those that don’t. The latest telecommuting talking point comes from a study that randomized 250 call center employees at a Chinese company, designating some as telecommuters for four days a week and asking others to come into the office every workday for a nine-month period. The reasoning: the company, CTrip (China’s biggest travel agency), was considering a company-wide work from home policy to decrease high attrition rates and cut down on office costs. As a result of the experiment, CTrip decided to roll out a company-wide work from home program.