Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
Little things count; they frequently count very big.
A recent post spoke to the smarts behind picking the right time zones for multiple locations that optimize work.
This post extends that thought to how workplace shapes individual and organizational performance.
While the Yahoo (and to degree, HP) move to eliminate telecommuting by remote workers was an interesting step, it misses the bigger point.… Read the rest
It happens.
The new senior hire (formerly called a senior suit in the days when the males who mostly occupied those roles actually wore matching jackets and pants) is keen to make their mark at the new place so they make changes. Often big ones.
Sometimes those changes work, and sometimes they bomb.
New CEO Marissa Meyer has clearly put her mark on a number of shifts at Yahoo in the five weeks she’s been on board changing some obvious practices: free food (a la Google, where she formerly worked) at many of Yahoo’s locations, instituting weekly check-in meetings (called FYI in Yahoo-speak), a reinvigorated and more rigorous hiring process, and engaging in greater dialogue and access with programmers than her predecessors. … Read the rest
Interim roles frequently have hair on them. They are imperfect jobs where you toil in a state of “pretend” for those who hope temporary will become the “real” job.
Last week’s post Career Quandry: Should You Take the “Interim” Job surveyed the landscape of people taking interim roles when their boss vacates his/her role. Inspiration for the piece came from Yahoo’s appointment of Marissa Mayer as their new CEO coming on the heels of the expectation that interim CEO Ross Levinsohn would be tapped for the permanent role.… Read the rest
Your boss has been hired to take another job and will be leaving the company. Or perhaps your boss has been whacked and that’s the reason the job is now vacant.
Either way that box in the organization chart that used have a name is empty.
Do you raise your hand and volunteer to take the job on an interim basis, or do you wait to see if you get tapped – and decide then if you want “interim” next to your name?… Read the rest
You’ve been promoted to a job on an interim basis and perhaps promised a strong shot at that role on a permanent basis.
Your company has just hired a search firm to handle the “permanent” placement.
Are you at risk?
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
That’s the situation that Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinshohn finds himself in with the news reported by Kara Swisher that blue chip executive search firm Spencer Stuart has been hired by the board to handle the firm’s CEO search.… Read the rest
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson – he of the phantom computer science degree that found its way on his official resume filed with
the SEC – was either fired or resigned.
The question remains; whose fault was it that the resume mistake wasn’t caught earlier?
The now-departed Thompson said that exec search firm Heidrick & Struggles was to blame; somebody on the search firm interviewed him for a role with eBay years ago when the error originally occurred, took incorrect information, and that’s how it got in the system and on to his Yahoo resume.… Read the rest