Economics « Mumblr

Nov 18 2010

Blogging, Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Passing Thoughts

Read Up!

Here are a few interesting reads I came across in the last few weeks:

At Harvard Business Review, Adam Richardson writes about using Customer Journey Maps to improve Customer Experiences. I highly recommend this approach which allows you to understand and optimize your customer touch-points.
The SystematicHR blog urges HR professionals to develop their own linkage analyses to show the impact of HR activities / initiatives on business outcomes. What is the point of running initiatives after initiatives if we cannot articulate its impact on the business!
Mary Lorenz touches upon How NOT to Motivate People!
From the Bersin & Associates blog, here is an interesting piece on why is it hard to hire during a economic recovery.
How about rejuvenating capitalism? Is it dead in the wake of one of the biggest crises that hit us over the last couple of years? Gary Hamel shares his thought on “Capitalism is Dead. Long Live Capitalism.”
Julian Birkinshaw takes a closer view of management. What happened to it, how it lost credibility and what is the future?
If you are an Enterprise 2.0 advocate working in a traditional organization and you want to implement “social tools”, what would be your argument? Gautam Ghosh shares his thoughts.

Tagged Bersin & Associates, Business, Capitalism, Customer Engagement, Economics, Employee Engagement, Gary Hamel, HR, Human Resources, Ideas, Management, Motivation, Trends, Workplace

Feb 25 2010

It’s been a long time since I shared interesting stuff that I have been reading. That’s not exactly true though, because I do share a lot on my Twitter account. Meanwhile, here is some very interesting stuff that I stumbled upon:

So, what is the purpose of business? To make money, right? And where did that “mission” take us in the last couple of years! Michael Skapinker, a columnist in Financial Times, has a different perspective. He says the purpose of business is to earn respect. Must read!

For those of you don’t know, Marketing is another subject that is close to my heart. I did spend some time in that area. Here’s a piece from the McKinsey Quarterly titled “A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics.” Now, behavioral economics is such an interesting subject and this piece talks about its basic applications in marketing. The possibilities of this field are endless.

David Zinger contemplates about the future of Employee Engagement. He puts down his predictions about Employee Engagement in 2020.

Finally, on the HBR blog, I found some really cool stuff. If you are a data visualization fan, you are going to love how Twitter data can be visualized. See here and here.

Tagged Business, Economics, Employee Engagement, Enterprise 2.0, HR, Human Resources, Ideas, Management, Social Media, Technology, Trends, Trendspotting, Workplace

Aug 29 2009

11 Comments

Business, Economics, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

Myth-busting Motivation: Daniel Pink @ TED

Dan Pink, a best-selling author on books with ideas to change the way we work, recently spoke at TED. And, he spoke about the world of work, specifically about the science of motivation. Now, this is such a well-researched topic and volumes have been written about it. And, that’s exactly Dan’s point that despite what science knows about motivation, businesses do not follow the science. The findings he shares on incentives and performance are fascinating. So, allow me to stop mumbling for a while and enjoy the show!

Tagged Business, Economics, Employee Engagement, HR, Human Resources, Management, Performance Management, Trends, Workplace

Jun 02 2009

6 Comments

Business, Mobiles, Technology

Innovation Matters!

Innovation matters. Big time. And, it makes a great difference to organization performance. I spotted this interesting blog post on Techcrunch, showing some interesting analysis of the mobile handset industry. An analyst from Deutsche Bank, Brian Modoff, pulled off this interesting analysis, showing that despite a small share of handset units and handset revenues, Apple and RIM have done a stellar job of garnering industry operating profits share. Its a disproportionate share!

Here are the charts:

handsets-profits

handsets-revs

Fascinating stuff!

UPDATE: From the GigaOM blog, here’s a fresh post that “exposes Nokia’s Achilles heel”.

Tagged Apple, Business, Economics, iPhone, Mobile, Technology, Trends, Trendspotting

Apr 14 2009

Shai Agassi: A Bold Plan for Mass Adoption of Electric Cars

Shai Agassi, earlier a senior executive with SAP, is the founder-CEO of Better Place. In this TED talk, he blows us away with his thoughts about how we could make countries “oil-free” by 2020. He shares his passionate vision for an electric cars and a network infrastructure to enable the migration to and operation of emission-free vehicles.

Let me stop here and let’s hear from the man himself.