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As a source of the fledgling nation's financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.
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Matthew Desmond (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
“
Social tools leave a digital audit trail, documenting our learning journey—often an unfolding story—and leaving a path for others to follow.
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Marcia Conner (The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media)
“
A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.
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Raven Leilani (Luster)
“
Peace is not the norm; peace is rare, and where we do manage to institutionalize it in a human society, it's usually because we've been intelligently pessimistic about human proclivities, and found a way to work with the grain of them in a system of intense mutual suspicion like the U.S. Constitution, a document which assumes that absolutely everybody will be corrupt and power-hungry given half a chance.
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Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense)
“
The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
In The Price of Admission, journalist Daniel Golden documents the ways in which elite schools manage to find room for the children of alums, big donors, celebrities, athletes, the elite college’s own faculty, and wealthy parents whose estates might eventually make their heirs into big donors.20
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Charles Murray (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010)
“
Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches—allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it's like to do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it.
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David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
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Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities, too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, had done the choosing. But the constellation of individuals, and their immaculate alignment with Russian interests, formed a discernible pattern, like stars against a clear night sky. A pattern of collusion.
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Luke Harding (Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win)
“
Sort of like the pilot saying, "We're gonna make Chicago on time, but only if we jettison all our baggage!" I've seen product managers sacrifice not only design, but testing, function, features, integration, documentation, and reality. Most product managers that I have worked with would rather ship a failure on time than risk going late.
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Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity)
“
Deng explained to his hosts that he had come to Japan for three reasons: to exchange documents ratifying the Treaty of Peace and Friendship; to express China's appreciation to Japanese friends who in recent decades had dedicated themselves to improving Sino-Japanese relations; and like Xu Fu, to find a “secret magic drug.” Japanese listeners laughed, for they were familiar with the story of Xu Fu, who, 2,200 years earlier, on behalf of Emperor Qin, had been dispatched to Japan to find a drug that would bring eternal life. Deng went on to explain that what he really meant by the “magic drug” was the secret of how to modernize. He said he wanted to learn about modern technology and management.
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Ezra F. Vogel (Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China)
“
way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.
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Raven Leilani (Luster)
“
The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it.
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
“
a movement that manages to gloss over the well-documented wishes of both the founding fathers and Jesus in equal measure.
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John Fugelsang (Separation of Church and Hate)
“
I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment.....the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done)
“
I clearly had a few daddy issues myself, but you didn’t see me pulling the wings off of flies. On the other hand, I did have a slight anger-management problem, and a related history of physical violence, both well documented by the public school system. And, oh yeah, that whole “hallucinating alien spacecraft from my favorite videogame” thing. So perhaps I wasn’t in the best position to judge the sanity of others.
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Ernest Cline (Armada)
“
If we don’t have all of the facts at hand, we still need to let the interested parties know that we’re on top of the research but that it will take time. When that information is gathered, inform them in an expedient manner. If employing the solution falls within our authority, implement it as soon as possible. If approval is required, document a request swiftly so any lag time won’t be attributed to our inattention.
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Ronald Harris (Concepts of Managing: A Road Map for Avoiding Career Hazards)
“
In the midst of this imagining, I heard, out from nowhere, the distant sound of sleigh bells. I was going crazy.
But there, right in front of me, across the street, was a horse – chestnut, with white spots – trotting down the street. It trotted long purposefully, cheerfully, unhurried, down Broadway. Holding my breath, I managed to find my phone and snap a photo before it disappeared from sight…. I uploaded the photo I just took. I added a caption: If a horse rides through Times Square and no one is there to see it, did it actually happen? If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening?
I clicked Publish.
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Ling Ma (Severance)
“
The single most important thing we can do to write better documents and give better speeches is to write them first, and then reread them from the audience’s perspective. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, but doesn’t happen enough in practice.
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Sarah Drasner (Engineering Management for the Rest of Us)
“
Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.
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Jim Highsmith (Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products)
“
Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.
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David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
“
A project life cycle represents the highest-level project management approach, depicted as a series of periods and phases, each with a defined output. A project life cycle can be documented with a methodology, which is a system of practices, techniques, procedures, and rules used by those who work in a discipline.
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Kathleen B. Hass (Professionalizing Business Analysis: Breaking the Cycle of Challenged Projects (Business Analysis Essential Library))
“
corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?
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Charles Stross (The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8))
“
Those who value a quiet, reflective life will feel a burden lifting from their shoulders as they read Susan Cain’s eloquent and well documented paean to introversion—and will no longer feel guilty or inferior for having made the better choice!” —MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, author of Flow and distinguished professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
PIPs are of course expensive. If you put someone on a four-month PIP, that’s four months you have to pay an underperformer and countless hours spent by the line manager and HR enforcing and documenting the process. Instead of pouring that capital into a prolonged PIP, give it to the employee in a nice, big, up-front severance package, tell him you’re sorry it didn’t work out, and wish him well in his next adventure.
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Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
“
In many companies in the US, when a manager decides to let go of someone, he is required to put in place a process called a performance improvement plan (PIP). This means that the manager documents weekly discussions with the employee over a period of months, demonstrating in writing that the employee has not managed to succeed despite feedback. PIPs rarely help employees improve and they delay the firing by many weeks.
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Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
“
The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it. Commit to refreshing the policy in a month, and batch all exceptions requests until then. Merge the escalations and your current policy into a new revision. This will save your time, build teams’ trust in the system, and move you from working the exceptions to working the policy.
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
“
High-quality and transparent data, clearly documented, timely rendered, and publicly available are the sine qua non of competent public health management. During a pandemic, reliable and comprehensive data are critical for determining the behavior of the pathogen, identifying vulnerable populations, rapidly measuring the effectiveness of interventions, mobilizing the medical community around cutting-edge disease management, and inspiring cooperation from the public. The shockingly low quality of virtually all relevant data pertinent to COVID-19, and the quackery, the obfuscation, the cherrypicking and blatant perversion would have scandalized, offended, and humiliated every prior generation of American public health officials. Too often, Dr. Fauci was at the center of these systemic deceptions. The “mistakes” were always in the same direction—inflating the risks of coronavirus and the safety and efficacy of vaccines in
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
The Lucas Plan was an extraordinarily ambitious document that challenged the foundations of capitalism. In place of an institution designed to generate profits via the domination of labor by capital, the workers at Lucas Aerospace had developed an entirely new model for the firm -one based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities. It was almost as if the workers had never needed managing at all, as though they were creative architects rather than obedient bees.
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Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
“
A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don't. So I've tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I've made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I'm gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.
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Raven Leilani (Luster)
“
Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it “collecting” or “being nostalgic.” I don’t hoard, exactly, but I get it. It’s a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It’s a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment.
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Marc Maron (Attempting Normal)
“
By bundling the authorization of war funds with a declaration of war attributed to Mexico, Democrats ensured that any opponent of the measure could be accused of betraying the troops. Polk’s supporters skillfully managed to stifle dissent in the House by limiting debate to two hours, an hour and a half of which was devoted to reading the documents that accompanied the message. The flabbergasted opposition was caught completely off guard and struggled to amend the bill. Powerless and voiceless, they watched helplessly as Polk’s supporters ruthlessly stifled debate and foisted war on Congress and the country.
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Amy S. Greenberg (A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico)
“
Noticing the disturbing similarity between the rhetoric surrounding "open government" and new public management, government expert Just Longo speculates that the former might be just a Trojan horse for the latter; in our excitement about the immense potential of new technologies to promote openness and transparency, we may have lost sight of the deeply political nature of the uses to which these technologies are put...
In India, recent digitization of land records and their subsequent publication online, while nominally an effort to empower the weak, may have actually empowered the rich and powerful. Once the digitized records were available for the whole world to see, some enterprising businessmen discovered that many poor families had no documents to prove ownership of land. In most cases, this was not the result of some nefarious land grab; local culture, with its predominantly oral ways of doing business, pervasive corruption, and poor literacy, partly explains why no such records exist...
The point here, as with most open-government schemes, is not that information shouldn't be collected or distributed; rather, it needs to be collected and distributed in full awareness of the social and cultural complexity of the institutional environment in which it is gathered.
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Evgeny Morozov
“
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
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Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration “from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law.”3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilization is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality, and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day European Union, celebrating twenty-five hundred years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilization for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilization? In truth, European civilization is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make out of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
As test documentation goes, test plans have the briefest actual lifespan of any test artifact. Early in a project, there is a push to write a test plan [...]. Indeed, there is often an insistence among project managers that a test plan must exist and that writing it is a milestone of some importance. But, once such a plan is written, it is often hard to get any of those same managers to take reviewing and updating it seriously. The test plan becomes a beloved stuffed animal in the hands of a distracted child. We want it to be there at all times. We drag it around from place to place without ever giving it any real attention. We only scream when it gets taken away.
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James A. Whittaker (How Google Tests Software)
“
Getting Started
Setting up your Kindle Oasis
Kindle controls
Status indicators
Keyboard
Network connectivity
VoiceView screen reader
Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers
Chapter 2
Navigating Your Kindle
The Kindle Home screen
Toolbars
Tap zones
Chapter 3
Acquiring & Managing Kindle Content
Shop for Kindle and Audible content anytime, anywhere
Recommended content
Managing your Kindle Library
Device and Cloud storage
Removing items from your Kindle
Chapter 4
Reading Kindle Documents
Understanding Kindle display technology
Customizing your text display
Comic books
Children's books
Images
Tables
Interacting with your content
Navigating a book
Chapter 5
Playing Audible Books
Pairing a Bluetooth audio device
Using the Audible Player
Audiobook bookmarks
Downloading Audible books
Audiobook Library Management
Chapter 6
Features
X-Ray
Word Wise
Vocabulary Builder
Amazon FreeTime (Amazon Fire for Kids in the UK)
Managing your Amazon Household
Goodreads on Kindle
Time to Read
Chapter 7
Getting More from Your Kindle Oasis
Carrying and reading personal documents
Reading Kindle content on other devices
Sharing
Using your Kindle with your computer
Using the Experimental Web Browser
Chapter 8
Settings
Customizing your Kindle settings
The Settings contextual menu
Chapter 9
Finding Additional Assistance
Appendix A
Product Information
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Amazon (Kindle Oasis User's Guide)
“
Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth)
“
Rauter, some German bigwig, recently gave a speech. “All Jews must be out of the German-occupied territories before July 1. The province of Utrecht will be cleansed of Jews [as if they were cockroaches] between April 1 and May 1, and the provinces of North and South Holland between May 1 and June 1.” These poor people are being shipped off to filthy slaughterhouses like a herd of sick and neglected cattle. But I’ll say no more on the subject. My own thoughts give me nightmares! One good piece of news is that the Labor Exchange was set on fire in an act of sabotage. A few days later the County Clerk’s Office also went up in flames. Men posing as German police bound and gagged the guards and managed to destroy some important documents.
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Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
“
According to Petroski, real knowledge from real failure is the most powerful source of progress we have, provided we have the courage to carefully examine what happened. Perhaps this is why The Boeing Company, one of the largest airplane design and engineering firms in the world, keeps a black book of lessons it has learned from design and engineering failures.[4] Boeing has kept this document since the company was formed, and it uses it to help modern designers learn from past attempts. Any organization that manages to do this not only increases its chances for successful projects, but also helps create an environment that can discuss and confront failure openly, instead of denying and hiding from it. It seems that software developers need to keep black books of their own.
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Scott Berkun (Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management)
“
Characteristics of the Council 1. The council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing the organization. 2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people. 3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from the egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest. 4. Each Council member retains the respect of every other Council member, without exception. 5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates. 6. The Council includes key members of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, nor is every executive automatically a member. 7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project. 8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter. 9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive. 10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or in any formal documents. 11. The Council can have a range of possible names, usually quite innocuous. In the good-to-great companies, they had benign names like Long-Range Profit Improvement Committee, Corporate Products Committee, Strategic Thinking Group, and Executive Council.
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Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't)
“
HOPKINS’S VISIT TO ENGLAND was supposed to last two weeks; it expanded to over four, most of which he spent with Churchill against a backdrop of mounting suspense with regard to the Lend-Lease Bill, whose passage by Congress was anything but certain. In that time, Hopkins managed to endear himself to nearly everyone he met, including the valets at Claridge’s, who took an extra effort to make him look presentable. “Oh yes,” Hopkins told one valet. “I’ve got to remember I’m in London now—I’ve got to look dignified.” From time to time, the valets would find secret documents tucked into his clothing or discover that he had left his wallet in a pants pocket. A hotel waiter said Hopkins was “very genial—considerate—if I may say so, lovable—quite different from other Ambassadors we’ve had here.
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Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
“
One other thing. And this really matters for readers of this book. According to official Myers–Briggs documents, the test can ‘give you an insight into what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing’. So if you are, like me, classified as ‘INTJ’ (your dominant traits are being introverted, intuitive and having a preference for thinking and judging), the best-fit occupations include management consultant, IT professional and engineer.30 Would a change to one of these careers make me more fulfilled? Unlikely, according to respected US psychologist David Pittenger, because there is ‘no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types’. Then why is the MBTI so popular? Its success, he argues, is primarily due to ‘the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing’.31 Personality tests have their uses, even if they do not reveal any scientific ‘truth’ about us. If we are in a state of confusion they can be a great emotional comfort, offering a clear diagnosis of why our current job may not be right, and suggesting others that might suit us better. They also raise interesting hypotheses that aid self-reflection: until I took the MBTI, I had certainly never considered that IT could offer me a bright future (by the way, I apparently have the wrong personality type to be a writer). Yet we should be wary about relying on them as a magic pill that enables us suddenly to hit upon a dream career. That is why wise career counsellors treat such tests with caution, using them as only one of many ways of exploring who you are. Human personality does not neatly reduce into sixteen or any other definitive number of categories: we are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal. And as we will shortly learn, there is compelling evidence that we are much more likely to find fulfilling work by conducting career experiments in the real world than by filling out any number of questionnaires.32
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Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
“
Residents' Survival Guide Who Work 110 Hours per Week
• When there is a question between a resident and a nurse, the nurse always wins.
• Residents can be replaced. Nurses cannot.
• When in doubt about a patient, call your senior staff to keep them informed.
• Always ask for help if you don’t know how to do something surgically.
• When called by the nurse, see the patient and the nurse to assess a problem.
• Answer your pages promptly.
• Learn to prioritize the many tasks that you have.
• Tell it like it is! Don’t lie! Get the correct information.
• Engage in damage control when making a mistake. Accept liability for actions.
• Be courteous to others. Remember that respect breeds respect.
• Be a team player. What goes around comes around.
• Own your education. Invest time and effort in surgical practice.
• Be punctual; others depend on you. Respect their time.
• Document for the record often, wholly and accurately.
• Be helpful to fellow residents who become your colleagues and friends for life.
• Develop the skills to be efficient, dependable, and trustworthy.
• Sign in and sign out to avoid errors in management.
• Write a summary note to ensure continuity of patient care upon leaving the service.
”
”
Dr Michael M.Meguid
“
2006 interview by Jim Gray, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recalled another watershed moment: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.3 That’s a lot to unpack for non–software engineers, but the basic idea is this: If multiple teams have direct access to a shared block of software code or some part of a database, they slow each other down. Whether they’re allowed to change the way the code works, change how the data are organized, or merely build something that uses the shared code or data, everybody is at risk if anybody makes a change. Managing that risk requires a lot of time spent in coordination. The solution is to encapsulate, that is, assign ownership of a given block of code or part of a database to one team. Anyone else who wants something from that walled-off area must make a well-documented service request via an API.
”
”
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
“
The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
”
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Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
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What If I Need to Change the Name on My Reservation Due to a Medical Emergency? Contact Assistance
If you need to change the name on your Delta Airlines reservation due to a medical emergency, it's important to act quickly and get in touch with customer service at +1(844)634-0511 as soon as possible. Delta Airlines may make exceptions for medical emergencies, particularly if the name change is needed urgently.
To proceed with a name change under such circumstances, you will likely need to provide medical documentation or a doctor's note verifying the emergency situation. Delta Airlines may consider this a special case and make the necessary changes to your reservation. In some instances, you may need to cancel your original flight and rebook under the new name, which could involve additional charges or changes in fare.
Getting in touch with Delta Airlines customer service immediately at +1(844)634-0511 will help you understand the available options. If you have a refundable ticket, you may be able to cancel and rebook without additional fees, while non-refundable tickets may require you to pay a fee or forfeit part of your ticket value.
Additionally, Delta Airlines might offer you flexible options, such as allowing you to switch to another flight with the updated reservation details. If a full name change is required, the airline will provide guidance on how to proceed, taking into account your medical situation.
In conclusion, if you need to change the name on your reservation due to a medical emergency, contact Delta Airlines customer service immediately at +1(844)634-0511. Provide the necessary documentation, and their team will assist in processing your request, ensuring you can manage the change as quickly and smoothly as possible.
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Alexandre Dumas
“
Sonja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with. “All people want to live dignified lives; dignity just means something different to different people,” Sonja had said. To men like Ove and Rune dignity was simply that they’d had to manage on their own when they grew up, and therefore saw it as their right not to become reliant on others when they were adults. There was a sense of pride in having control. In being right. In knowing what road to take and how to screw in a screw, or not. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about. She knew, of course, that Ove didn’t know how to bear his nameless anger. He needed labels to put on it. Ways of categorizing. So when men in white shirts at the council, whose names no normal person could keep track of, tried to do everything Sonja did not want—make her stop working, move her out of her house, imply that she was worth less than a healthy person who was able to walk, and assert that she was dying—Ove fought them. With documents and letters to newspapers and appeals, right down to something as unremarkable as an access ramp at a school. He fought so doggedly for her against men in white shirts that in the end he began to hold them personally responsible for all that happened to her—and to the child. And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.
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”
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
“
John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon.
Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.
”
”
Martin E.P. Seligman (What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement)
“
How to Change Name on Delta Flight Ticket -Customer Careline
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By contacting customer service immediately at +1(844)634-0511, you’ll ensure that your name change request is handled as quickly and smoothly as possible.
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Alexandre Dumas
“
Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.
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Dale Carnegie (Make Yourself Unforgettable: How to Become the Person Everyone Remembers and No One Can Resist (Dale Carnegie Books))
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Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Managers handle parallel projects all the time. They juggle with people, work tasks, and goals to ensure the success of every project process. However, managing projects, by design, is not an easy task. Since there are plenty of moving parts, it can easily become disorganized and chaotic.
It is vital to use an efficient project management system to stay organized at work while designing and executing projects. Project Management Online Master's Programs From XLRI offers unique insights into project management software tools and make teams more efficient in meeting deadlines.
How can project management software help you?
Project management tools are equipped with core features that streamline different processes including managing available resources, responding to problems, and keeping all the stakeholders involved. Having the best project management software can make a significant influence on the operational and strategic aspects of the company.
Here is a list of 5 key benefits to project professionals and organizations in using project management software:
1. Enhanced planning and scheduling
Project planning and scheduling is an important component of project management. With project management systems, the previous performance of the team relevant to the present project can be accessed easily.
Project managers can enroll in an online project management course to develop a consistent management plan and prioritize tasks. Critical tasks like resource allocation, identification of dependencies, and project deliverables can be completed comfortably using project management software.
2. Better collaboration
Project teams sometimes have to handle cross-functional projects along with their day to day responsibilities. Communication between different team members is critical to avoid expensive delays and precludes the waste of precious resources.
A key upside of project management software is that it makes effectual collaboration extremely simple. All project communication is stored in a universally accessible place. The project management online master's program offers unique insights to project managers on timeline and status updates which leads to a synergy between the team’s functions and project outcomes.
3. Effective task delegation
Assigning tasks to team members in a fair way is a challenging proposition for most project managers. With a project management program, the delegation of project tasks can be easily done. In most instances, these programs send out automatic reminders when deadlines are approaching to ensure a smooth and efficient project workflow.
4. Easier File access and sharing
Important documents should be safely accessed and shared among team members. Project management tools provide cloud-based storage which enables users to make changes, leave feedback and annotate easily. PM software logs any user changes to ensure project transparency within the team.
5. Easier integration of new members
Project managers are responsible to get new members up to speed on the important project parameters within a short time. Project management online master's programs from XLRI Jamshedpuroffer vital learning to management professionals in maintaining a project log and in simplistically visualizing the complete project.
Takeaway
Choosing the perfect PM software for your organization helps you to effectively collaborate to achieve project success. Simple and intuitive PM tools are useful to enhance productivity in remote-working employees.
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Talentedge
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IA initiatives have to be sponsored by the highest level of management in the company (i.e., its C-levels). Management is supported by a documented vision (strategic objectives of the transformation), business case (estimating the benefits and costs of the project), and a high-level roadmap (key milestones of the implementation for the coming 1 to 3 years). The design of the program is a top-down exercise, while the implementation is a bottom-up one (e.g., it starts with the deployment of a pilot).
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Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
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Documenting project results in lessons learned through Documenting successes and mistakes to be transferred to other projects and teams
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Strategic Planning for Project Management Using a Project Management Maturity Model
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If you can’t resist the urge to include your most brilliant ideas in the process, then you can include them in your prework. Write all of your best ideas in a giant document, delete it, and never mention any of them again. Now that those ideas are out of your head, your head is cleared for the work ahead.
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Will Larson (Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track)
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Costs in employee time. To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics—not to speak of the time required to actually read them. That is exacerbated by the “reporting imperative”—the perceived need to constantly generate information, even when nothing significant is going on. Sometimes the metric of success is the number and size of the reports generated, as if nothing is accomplished unless it is extensively documented. Those within the organization end up spending more and more time compiling data, writing reports, and attending meetings at which the data and reports are coordinated. So, as the heterodox management consultants Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman note, employees work longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organization, while sapping their enthusiasm.
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Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
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One day our General Counsel went to Leslie and said: “You didn’t sign this huge contract with Disney! Why is Camille’s name on it?” Leslie responded: The person who is living and breathing the contract needs to be the person who owns and signs the contract, not a head of a function or a VP. That takes responsibility of the project away from the person who should be responsible. Obviously, I look at those contracts too. But Camille is proud of what she accomplished. This is her thing, not mine. She is psychologically invested, and I want to keep her that way. I’m not going to take ownership away from her by putting my name on the deal. Leslie was right, and we follow her example across Netflix today. At Netflix you don’t need management to sign off for anything. If you’re the informed captain, take ownership—sign the document yourself.
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Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
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Finally, in the same tone of voice that someone might use when announcing that they had at last managed to post a set of documents that they had forgotten to send out, Nowatari said: “My wife has germinated.
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Maru Ayase (The Forest Brims Over)
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Cosgrove advocates treating all plans, milestones, and schedules as tentative, so as to facilitate change. This goes much too far—the common failing of programming groups today is too little management control, not too much. Nevertheless, he offers a great insight. He observes that the reluctance to document designs is not due merely to laziness or time pressure. Instead it comes from the designer's reluctance to commit himself to the defense of decisions which he knows to be tentative. "By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, nothing is going to be documented until it is completely defensible." Structuring an organization for change is much harder than designing a system for change. Each man must be assigned to jobs that broaden him, so that the whole force is technically flexible. On a large project the manager needs to keep two or three top programmers as a technical cavalry that can gallop to the rescue wherever the battle is thickest. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes. This means that the boss must give a great deal of attention to keeping his managers and his technical people as interchangeable as their talents allow.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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In fulfilling my duty to my father, I managed to keep my family coherent in an environment that is conducive for homeschooling. While I could have left my mother and sisters to fend for themselves in the Eastern Cape, it seemed more logical to take them with me, and work towards a house to accommodate everyone. The vulnerability of the female headed household, especially in rural South Africa is a well-documented phenomenon, leaving them could have sealed their fate.
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Salatiso Lonwabo Mdeni (The Homeschooling Father, How and Why I got started.: Traditional Schooling to Online Learning until Homeschooling)
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For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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Ironically, GAAP rules have a requirement that governs the reporting of non-GAAP numbers. Companies usually show how they got, mathematically, from the GAAP number to the non-GAAP number. This is often called a bridge statement. We aren’t going to get into that here—too many details!—but feel free to look into companies’ financial statement notes or supplemental documents if you’re interested.
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Karen Berman (Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean)
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All too often these walls proved minor impediments. Court records in Tuscany describe how men secretly entered convents to satisfy what one document called their “libidinous desires.” Included among them was a man who in 1419 managed to live for five months in a Dominican convent in Pisa, and a priest who, two years later, entered a convent of Poor Clares thirty miles west of Florence “and stayed many days, knowing carnally day and night one of the recluses who wore the nun’s habit.”17 The most notorious convent in Florentine territories was undoubtedly Santa Margherita in Prato, scene in the 1450s of the love affair between an Augustinian novice and a Carmelite friar: Sister Lucrezia Buti and the amorous painter Fra Filippo Lippi (the painter Filippino Lippi would be the result of the liaison).
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Ross King (The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance)
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Charlotte Brontë was a genius, whose work has resonated for centuries as an example of female intellect and expressive power. Her letters to Constantin Heger are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, a masterful, two-year-long demonstration of one woman’s inability to absorb the fact that the guy she liked did not like her. Mary Wollstonecraft was over a century ahead of her time on women’s education, and twice as far ahead on women’s sexual freedom. She still thought she’d rather drown than not have a boyfriend. Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. She survived unspeakable atrocity, thanks only to her own daring, ingenuity, and resilience, and published one of the most important political documents of her age. And she was afraid that “educated people” would make fun of her grammar. She was scared, but she did it. That’s all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.
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Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why)
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What if somebody challenges your self-concept and breaks a little hole in it? What if somebody manages to shake one of those foundational thoughts that the house of your psyche is built upon? Imagine if someone told you when you were twenty years old, “Wait a minute. Those are not your parents. You were adopted. Didn’t they ever tell you?” You would adamantly deny it until they showed you the documents.
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Michael A. Singer (The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself)
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You can see how far we are from cash in and cash out. Tracking the flow of cash in and out the door is the job of another financial document, namely the cash flow statement (part 4). You can also see how far we are from simple objective reality. Accountants can’t just tote up the flow of dollars; they have to decide which costs are associated with the sales. They have to make assumptions and come up with estimates. In the process, they may introduce bias into the numbers.
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Karen Berman (Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean)
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If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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Much to Israel’s concern, in Vienna migrants could quite easily redirect their journey, and there is evidence that some had already tried to do so in the late 1950s.19 Some of those who sought to change their final destination in Vienna contacted the West German embassy with the goal of traveling on to the FRG. However, at that point, the embassy refused to assist them, because the Federal Republic wanted to avoid trouble with Israel, especially given that Israeli representatives tried to prevent such contact.20 Although the available documentation does not reveal how the migrants to Germany who followed this path managed to enter the country, it is clear that some did. Some migrants even asked the expellee authorities to refund their travel expenses, though mostly without success.21
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Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
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By 1982, it had concluded that even the company’s earlier dire estimates were probably too low. That year, in a corporate document marked “not to be distributed externally” but given “wide circulation to Exxon management,” the company’s scientists concluded that heading off global warming would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Otherwise, it concluded, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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The 6 Biggest Mistakes of Business Planning 1. Not having a plan 2. Not examining last year’s plan 3. Not having an enemy that acts like rocket fuel 4. Failing to integrate logic and emotion in the current plan 5. Not making it a living document—don’t use it to manage 6. Not sharing it (so no one could hold you accountable)
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Patrick Bet-David (Choose Your Enemies Wisely: Business Planning for the Audacious Few)
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Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and actions that will be taken to address a specific challenge. Visions are aspirational documents that enable individuals who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly.
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
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Finally, the one thing that I’ve found at companies with very few interruptions and have observed almost nowhere else: really great, consistently available documentation. It’s probably even harder to bootstrap documentation into a non-documenting company than it is to bootstrap unit tests into a non-testing company, but the best solution to frequent interruptions I’ve seen is a culture of documentation, documentation reading, and a documentation search that actually works.
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
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The organizations used to embed their knowledge in documentation, culture and structure. Then they shifted to cloud and Artificial Intelligence.
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Harjeet Khanduja (HR Mastermind)
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People have lost sight of the original intention of COBOL’s designers. To quote one of them, Jean Sammet: The users for whom COBOL was designed were actually two subclasses of those people concerned with business data processing problems. One is the relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anybody who had not written the program initially. In other words, the readability of COBOL programs would provide documentation to all who might wish to examine the programs, including the supervisory or management personnel. Little attempt was made to cater to professional programmers…
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Gerald M. Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming)
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Introduction to eAccords
In today's fast-paced business environment, the need for efficient and secure document management systems is paramount. eAccords emerges as a robust solution, offering an array of features designed to streamline the document signing process. Much like DocuSign, eAccords provides electronic signature capabilities, ensuring that businesses can handle their agreements swiftly and securely.
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eAccords
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Most landlords require that a tenant’s (documentable) income equal at least three times the monthly rent.
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Brandon Turner (The Book on Managing Rental Properties: Find, Screen, and Manage Tenants With Fewer Headaches and Maximum Profits)
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Product: •What is the product? •Who is it for? •What does it do? •How does it work? •How do people buy and use it? Benefits: •How does the product help people? •What are its most important benefits? Reader: •Who are you writing for? •How do they live? •What do they want? •What do they feel? •What do they know about the product, or this type of product? •Are they using a similar product already? Aim: •What do you want the reader to do, think or feel as a result of reading this copy? •What situation will they be in when they read it? Format: •Where will the copy be used? (Sales letter, web page, YouTube video, etc) •How long does it need to be? (500 words, 10 pages, 30 seconds, etc) •How should it be structured? (Main title, subtitles, sidebars, pullout quotes, calls to action, etc) •What other types of content might be involved? (Images, diagrams, video, music, etc) Tone: •Should the copy be serious, light-hearted, emotional, energetic, laid-back, etc? Constraints: •Maximum or minimum length •Anything that must be included or left out •Legal issues (regulations on scientific or health claims, prohibited words, trademarks, etc) •How this copy needs to fit in with other copy that’s already been written, or that will be written in the future •Whether the copy will form part of a campaign, so that different ideas along the same lines will be needed in future (see ‘Take it further’ in chapter 9) •Which countries the copy will appear in (whether in English, or translated) •SEO issues (for example, popular search terms that should feature in headings) •Brand or tone of voice guidelines (see ‘Tone of voice guidelines’ in chapter 15) Other background information about: •The product (development history, use cases, technical specifications, distribution, retail, buying processes, buying channels, marketing strategy) •The product’s market position (price point, offers and discounts, customer perceptions, competitors) •The target market (size, history, typical customer profile, marketing personas) •The client (history, current setup, culture, people, values) •The brand (history, positioning, values) Project management points: •Timescales (dates for copy plan, drafts, feedback, final copy, approval) •Who will provide feedback, and how •Who will approve the final copy, and how •How the copy will be delivered (usually a Word document, but not always) These are only suggestions.
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Tom Albrighton (Copywriting Made Simple: How to write powerful and persuasive copy that sells (The Freelance Writer's Starter Kit))
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Roadmap Companies generally collect their product plans into a roadmap. A roadmap is a document that shows what the company/product is doing now, what the company/product plans to do over the next N months, what the company/product plans to do later, roughly how much effort each high-level task will take, what products the company will create, and what features they will have, etc.
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Product School (The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager)
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Cloud Service
Any service made available to users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider's servers rather than from a company's own on-premises servers is referred to as a cloud service. Cloud services are managed by a cloud services provider and are designed to enable easy, scalable access to applications, resources, and services.
CLOUD SERVICES ARE SCALABLE AND DYNAMIC.
A cloud service may dynamically scale to meet the needs of its customers, and because the service provider provides all of the necessary hardware and software, a corporation does not need to provision or deploy its own resources or dedicate IT people to operate the service. Online data storage and backup solutions, Web-based e-mail services, hosted office suites and document collaboration services, database processing, managed technical support services, and more are all examples of cloud services.
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Crafsol Technology
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If you want to avoid fines and possible jail time, don’t discriminate against any of the protected classes (race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, disability, and other locally protected classes). Be careful in the language you use in your advertising, on the phone, in person, in your documents, and anywhere else in your business. And maintain good records in case someone ever wants to bring a case against you for violating the Fair Housing Laws.
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Brandon Turner (The Book on Managing Rental Properties: Find, Screen, and Manage Tenants With Fewer Headaches and Maximum Profits)
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If I had known that I could be a programmer and a teacher at the same time, I think I would have aimed for this career much sooner because this is my sweet spot: being able to do something that's creative and logical like programming, but also focusing on the documentation, the teaching, and the speaking - Trisha Gee
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Geertjan Wielenga (Developer, Advocate!)
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What is an Achievement Story?
As noted in the Hiring Manager’s Secrets chapter, hiring managers want to know:
How you made money for your employer,
How you saved money for your employer,
How you made yourself, your department, your division, or your company more productive.
They want to know how you made a positive difference.
This is your time to answer the above questions with real-life examples from your experience.
According to “Ask A Manager” blogger, Alison Green, resumes that stand out tell the reader what you accomplished that someone else wouldn’t have in the same position.
For example, if you’re like me you may have:
— trained managers to sell products through a new ordering system by documenting the process and conducting training sessions,
— took on the work of two laid off employees, or
— developed a budgeting system enabling managers to customize their budgets based on their unique needs.
Alison also says that the hiring manager wants to know,
“Were you solely interested in producing acceptable work, or did you do an impressive job?
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
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Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0
One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder.
You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book.
The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do.
Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used.
“You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.”
In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors.
I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line.
“You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.”
At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M.
“Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.”
In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue.
“You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.”
A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go.
“You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.”
About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class.
“Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.”
I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.
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Clark Finnical
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Will Spelling Keep You Out Of Interviews?
Whether we like it or not, hiring managers judge job seekers based on how our resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles are written.
That’s why it is essential that you turn on Microsoft Word’s spell-check so it catches every error in your resume and cover letter.
But don’t stop there, after turning on Microsoft Word’s spell check, copy all of the verbiage in your LinkedIn profile and paste it into a Word document.
Here are some of the reasons I say this…
• 5,908 LinkedIn Profiles contained “Universiry” where they meant to write “University”.
• 34,254 profiles contain “Graduat” where they meant to write “Graduate”.
• 25 English teacher’s profiles contain “Colege” where they meant to write “College”.
If you’re not getting interviews, take a second look at your resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profiles.
Hiring managers get to choose who they want to hire. Don’t let your spelling be the reason they don’t hire you.
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
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Utilizing two rounds of review is quite typical. The first round is for you to sign off on what the copywriter or owner of the material has written and the second round is so that you can see how the copy looks after it has been placed within the document’s design.
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Lucas Weber (The Product Marketing Manager: Responsibilities and Best Practices in a Technology Company)
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Succession planning is thinking through how the organization would function without you, documenting those gaps, and starting to fill them in. It’s awkward enough to talk about that it doesn’t get much discussion, but it’s a foundational skill for building an enduring organization.
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
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During onboarding, a company may hand out a “Sales Playbook” to all new hires. This type of playbook can be a simple PDF document that is stored in the LMS and used to explain the basics of the company and industry, the different buyer personas, and the main competitors.
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Lucas Weber (The Product Marketing Manager: Responsibilities and Best Practices in a Technology Company)
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The Importance of Accounting Services for Businesses
In today’s competitive business environment, maintaining accurate financial records and ensuring compliance with tax regulations is essential for long-term success. Accounting services provide businesses with the necessary tools and expertise to manage their finances efficiently. Whether for small businesses or large corporations, professional accounting services help streamline financial processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and offer strategic insights for growth.
What Are Accounting Services?
Accounting services encompass a wide range of tasks, including bookkeeping, financial reporting, tax preparation, payroll management, and auditing. These services are designed to help businesses track their income, expenses, and overall financial health. By outsourcing accounting tasks to professionals, businesses can focus on their core activities while ensuring that their financial operations run smoothly. Additionally, accurate and timely accounting services help businesses avoid costly errors and penalties.
Benefits of Professional Accounting Services
One of the main advantages of hiring professional accounting services is the accuracy they bring to financial management. Skilled accountants have a deep understanding of financial regulations and tax laws, ensuring that businesses remain compliant. Moreover, accountants can identify tax-saving opportunities, helping businesses reduce their tax liabilities. This level of expertise allows businesses to save time and money, as they no longer need to navigate complex financial tasks on their own.
Strategic Financial Planning
In addition to managing day-to-day financial tasks, accounting services play a crucial role in strategic financial planning. Accountants analyze a company’s financial data to provide valuable insights into cash flow, profitability, and potential areas for improvement. This data-driven approach enables business owners to make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and plan for future growth.
Compliance and Risk Management
Compliance with financial regulations is vital for businesses to avoid legal and financial risks. Accounting services ensure that all financial documents are in order, tax filings are accurate, and deadlines are met. By maintaining accurate records and staying up to date with tax laws, businesses can reduce the risk of audits and penalties.
In conclusion, accounting services are an essential component of successful financial management for businesses of all sizes. By providing accurate financial reporting, strategic insights, and ensuring compliance, professional accountants enable businesses to focus on growth and sustainability.
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sddm
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Canadian Permanent Residency, Australia Permanent Residency, and Germany Permanent Residency: Your Path to a Better Future
At ESSE India, we understand that securing Permanent Residency (PR) in countries like Canada, Australia, and Germany can open doors to unparalleled opportunities. Whether you are a skilled professional, student, or family looking for a brighter future, these countries offer exceptional immigration programs tailored to various needs. With pathways like Canada’s Express Entry, Australia’s Global Talent Stream, and Germany’s EU Blue Card, understanding the right PR process is key to your success.
1. Canadian Permanent Residency (PR)
Why Choose Canada for Permanent Residency?
Canada’s welcoming policies and strong support for skilled workers and international students make it a top destination for those seeking PR. The Express Entry system is the most sought-after route, ensuring faster processing and a smooth transition to Canadian life.
How the Express Entry System Works
Canada’s Express Entry system manages three main immigration programs:
• Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP)
• Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP)
• Canadian Experience Class (CEC)
Applicants are assessed using the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), where points are assigned for factors like age, education, work experience, and language skills. If you want to increase your chances of getting an Invitation to Apply (ITA), you can apply through Provincial Nominee Programs (PNP) like BCPNP, MPNP, or NBPNP. These programs can boost your CRS score by an additional 600 points.
Latest Express Entry Updates
Recent draws show the competitive nature of Express Entry:
• September 19, 2024: 4,000 ITAs were issued for CEC candidates with a minimum CRS of 509.
• August 27, 2024: 3,300 ITAs were issued for CEC candidates with a minimum CRS of 507.
Canada Immigration Consultants in India
Our Canada immigration consultants in India provide expert guidance on navigating the complex Canada PR process. With our personalized approach, we ensure that your documents meet the stringent requirements, paving the way for a successful PR application.
2. Australia Permanent Residency (PR)
Why Choose Australia for Permanent Residency?
Australia’s booming economy and need for skilled professionals make it an attractive option for PR. Through the General Skilled Migration (GSM) program, Australia offers several visa categories, ensuring that you find the perfect pathway to PR.
General Skilled Migration (GSM) Pathways
Australia’s PR process offers various visa options, including:
• Skilled Independent Visa (Subclass 189)
• Skilled Nominated Visa (Subclass 190)
• Skilled Work Regional Visa (Subclass 491)
The GSM system is points-based, with applicants scoring higher points in areas such as qualifications and work experience having better chances. Australia’s Global Talent Stream is also available for fast-tracking PR in high-demand sectors such as IT, engineering, and healthcare.
Australia Immigration Consultants in India
At ESSE India, our Australia immigration consultants provide comprehensive support to Indian applicants throughout the Australia PR process. Whether it’s improving your points score or handling your visa application, we ensure a seamless process.
3. Germany Permanent Residency (PR)
Why Choose Germany for Permanent Residency?
Germany, with its strong economy and demand for skilled workers, is an excellent option for PR. The EU Blue Card offers an efficient route for qualified professionals to live and work in Germany. After 21-33 months, Blue Card holders are eligible for permanent residency.
Global Talent Stream in Germany
Germany’s Global Talent Stream attracts highly skilled professionals, especially in fields like technology and engineering, helping you achieve PR faster.
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esse india
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A book written by PLA Chinese military scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015, titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, was obtained by the US State Department as it conducted an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. The 263-page volume was published in 2015 by the Chinese Military Medical Science Press, a government-owned publishing house managed by the General Logistics Department of the PLA. It describes SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and says they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”. Some of China’s senior public health and military figures are listed among the 18 authors of the document, including the former Deputy Director of China’s Bureau of Epidemic Prevention, Li Feng. Ten of the authors are scientists and weapons experts affiliated with the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, which the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Defence Universities Tracker ranks as “very high-risk” for its level of defence research, including its work on medical and psychological sciences.
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Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
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PROMPTS FOR WRITING RESUMES AND BIOS Generate a compelling professional summary for a marketing manager with 5 years of experience. Create a list of 10 action verbs to effectively describe accomplishments in a resume. Draft a LinkedIn bio for a recent college graduate with a degree in computer science. Suggest 5 resume formatting tips to create a visually appealing and easy-to-read document. Write an engaging personal bio for a freelance graphic designer’s website. How can transferable skills be effectively showcased in a career change resume? Create a list of 5 questions to ask a client before writing their resume or bio. Develop a powerful resume objective statement for a sales professional targeting a managerial role. Provide tips for optimizing a LinkedIn profile to increase visibility and attract recruiters. Write an attention-grabbing personal
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Mark Silver (ChatGPT For Cash Flow: 10 Easy Ways To Unlock The Power Of AI To Build A Side Hustle Empire & Make Money Online Fast (Make Money With AI Book 1))
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Being able to predict next year’s prices is enormously important to management. Being able to predict prices in five and ten years hence is a major strategic advantage. The managements of certain aggressive companies have realized that well-documented cost behavior could be factored into their pricing strategies. They set pricing and investment strategies as a function of volume-driven costs. At times, they reduced prices below current costs in anticipation of the decline in costs that they knew would result from expansion of volume. Capacity was added ahead of demand. The earliest companies to adopt experience-based strategies ran roughshod over their slower-adapting competitors. They often preempted their competitors by claiming enough of a growing demand so that when their competitors attempted a response, little volume remained, and the leaders’ costs could not be matched.
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George Stalk Jr. (Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar)
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The organizations of fast innovators are structured for ease of coordination and speed of execution. Slow innovators are structured for functional control, cost efficiency, and risk avoidance, a structure that results in a slow and cumbersome development process. With the functional organization come multiple hand-offs that consume time, cause errors to occur and diminish overall accountability. Coordination and control can only be accomplished through elaborate review processes and documentation requirements. Quality seems to decline, not improve. Functions have their firm budgets and manage themselves to their budgets even at the expense of time. To help ensure that budgets are met, performance targets are conservative. Senior management actively participates in program decisions, and, because of their very full schedules, further slow the decision-making processes of the company.
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George Stalk Jr. (Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar)
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When employees are at odds over commission allocation, as a leader, an optimal /highly effective strategy entails meticulously assessing the quandary, proposing a transparent and collaborative resolution, securing consensus, meticulously documenting both the agreement and its implementation, and then enacting the solution with precision. Conflict resolution transcends being merely an art; it is equally a science. It aims at circling things out and putting the matters into perspective for the next move and it's purpose is to bring clarity to the situation and lay the groundwork for the next stage of the task or a new assignment.
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Henrietta Newton Martin- Author Strategic Human Resource Management - A Primer
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There are certain tips and tricks that apply at all levels of software development, ideas that are almost axiomatic, and processes that are virtually universal. However, these approaches are rarely documented as such; you'll mostly find them written down as odd sentences in discussions of design, project management, or coding.
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Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
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Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks.
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Anonymous
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Success is the delivery of a product that meets expectation
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James Leal (Write a Strong Project Initiation Document : A Practical Guide to Writing a PRINCE2 PID (ProjectTemplates® Book 1))
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keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that IT is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
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Registering your Kindle Kindle controls Onscreen actions Status indicators Setting up your Kindle Paperwhite Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers Recommended content Chapter 2 Acquiring & Managing Kindle Content Shop the Kindle Store anytime, anywhere Device and Cloud storage Removing items from your Kindle Managing your Kindle Library Chapter 3 Reading Kindle Documents
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Amazon (Kindle User's Guide)
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financial markets and financial products carry risks which are invisible and which cannot be logically worked out by humans intuitively. Unlike a road or moving cars, financial products are not visible to the human eye – they must be documented or created electronically. You cannot see an 'option' or a 'future', you can only see them in documentation or electronic terminals evidencing their existence. In the same way you cannot physically see what risks an option or a future carries with the human eye.
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Rodrigo Zepeda (The ISDA Master Agreement: The Derivatives Risk Management Tool of the 21st Century?)