When a small business grows and adds new employees to the team, inevitably there can be some friction. For entrepreneurs who may have worked on their own for a while, staff conflicts are new and not necessarily welcome developments.The incidence and implications of workplace conflict have troubled leaders for a while. Back at the end of the last decade, Myers-Briggs publisher CPP Inc. commissioned a major study that found U...

I've observed an interesting phenomenon. Condo sales in the town where my in laws live, West Palm Beach, were picking up. As someone who studies workforce trends, this is the opposite of what I expected to happen. The baby boomer generation, I thought, does not want to retire to Florida and play golf and mahjong all day. They want to stick around and keep contributing.It turns out I had only part of that right. Boomers want...

Last summer, I wrote about a Rackspace/University of London study that assessed productivity levels in 120 employees outfitted with wearable monitoring technology. The participants were equipped with one of the three devices – the GENEActiv high-velocity accelerometer wristband, which measures movement and activity; the NeuroSky Mindwave portable biosensor EEG, which monitors brain activity; and the LUMOback posture and act...

At a time when business productivity should logically be speeding up, why is the opposite is happening?While skimming the paper of my youth, the Washington Post, I came across the intriguing headline:Productivity mysteriously goes bustWriter Robert Samuelson goes on to say this about the apparent worldwide productivity slowdown:What’s especially baffling is that, superficially, outside forces seem to favor faster productivi...

A study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation reported that the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity over the last few years is not Gen-Y upstarts, but Baby Boomers in the 55-64 year age group. In fact, Boomers are actually driving a new entrepreneurship boom as they retire from their traditional corporate jobs and seek more meaningful sources of work.According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60 percent of the...

There is a formula for leadership success, and it’s spelled FAST.Too often, policies, procedures, and bureaucracy can slow necessary changes to a crawl, and negatively affect a company’s bottom line.Leadership expert and Fast Track friend Gordon Tredgold has written a new book in which he shares his four essential principals of leadership. Using the acronym of FAST (for Focus, Accountability, Simplicity, and Transparency),...

Innovative companies, it turns out, are mostly built by one type of employee.Google exec Eric Schmidt is famous for pioneering a very particular hiring process at the tech behemoth. In his book, How Google Works, Schmidt lays out his vision of the ideal Google employee. Called the “smart creative,” this employee represents the future of high performing knowledge workers.Loads of organizations are trying to emulate Google, a...

The world of the CIO has changed drastically in the last 5 years. How are they coping?At Intuit QuickBase’s recent #EMPOWER 15 conference, product marketing manager John Carione convened a panel of customer CIOs to discuss how cloud-based low-code platforms and citizen development are transforming the way IT is executed. We heard from Isaac Sacolick, CIO of financial consulting firm Greenwich Associates; Francois Tricot, CI...

From paper archives to mobile capture – where are you on the continuum?The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) put forth an ideal scenario.Your invoices are scanned at the door, the document type is automatically recognized and routed, the data is captured, it is verified against transactional content in the system, and the invoice is passed for payment in a hands-free or light-touch way.Ah, but one can...

Github.Gore & Associates.Treehouse.Valve.What do these companies have in common? Well, besides the fact that they are forward-thinking, pioneering firms, they all practice a leadership style called open allocation. In open allocation, employees select how to spend their time and the projects on which they’ll work. There is no such thing as hierarchy. In an open allocation culture, employees are accountable to the business a...