Posted by: Jena McGregor on March 23
About 3:00 on Friday afternoon, a colleague in our office sent around an email with the subject line "I can't BELIEVE you took my mac and cheese." Inside: "Hope you enjoyed it. !!#$!!#??*#&!" Three emails later, we get notified that another BW colleague, the author of the blog "passiveaggressivenotes," sent everyone a note to let us know it was her last day. It highlights those gems of office culture--cubicle and refrigerator notes telling colleagues to return their stapler or to step away from their stock of diet coke--in a funny, entertaining way.
Maybe it was a crazy coincidence. Maybe I'm not in on the inside joke--the first note may have been sent out as a send-off to Kerry--but either way her blog, which won the honor of "blog of the year" at SXSW, is definitely worth a visit.
Posted by: Jena McGregor on March 23
It's Sunday afternoon. Easter Sunday afternoon. And since I'm not terribly religious and don't have children to send on egg hunts, I'm not really celebrating. Thumbing through the Sunday paper, it was almost like the New York Times was reading my mind: "You are savoring the last of a leisurely Sunday lunch or a long walk in the park when you abruptly realize that your weekend will be over in a matter of hours. In an instant, you are deep in what John Updike called the 'chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon.' "
That starts off an interesting story about how workplaces are trying to help employees deal better with stress. Fellow blogette Michelle Conlin has written about the issue here for BusinessWeek. One of the most interesting stress-reducing concepts in the Times story involved PriceWaterhouseCoopers: "Until recently, if employees sent e-mails on weekends or after hours, an automatic message would appear asking the sender to wait, if possible, and let others enjoy their down time. The message was discontinued after the company determined that workers had taken this stress-reducing sentiment to heart."
Or until the email started stressing them out even more. I've got to think many people weren't too fond of the message. I don't know about you, but I spend most of my day in meetings and interviewing people, and I almost always catch up on email in the evenings. In fact, I find it makes me more productive than if I stop every 5 or 10 minutes to respond to incoming mail. Has anyone else encountered an email like PWC's? Are other workplaces starting these?
Posted by: Diane Brady on March 20
As the turmoil in Tibet rages on, calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics have mounted. Beijing, of course, says it's business as usual. The question is what other governments will do and, equally important, what the wide range of sponsors and hangers on will do.
On a personal level, I'm against a boycott of the Olympics. To me, the event is a celebration of individual achievement and the global village -- a chance for young athletes to come together and compete against the best that the world has to offer. For many, it's the only chance they've got. Politics is the ever-shifting backdrop. Jesse Owens' gold medal in the 1936 Olympics is all the more memorable because he won it in Nazi Germany.
For business, a boycott would be destructive and hypocritical. Many companies are already tripping over each other to woo China's 1.3 billion consumers. They are engaged in joint ventures that have them manufacturing equipment, selling services and otherwise actively doing business within the country. They rely on imports from China or may be exporting to there, too.
Many also point to signs of growing liberalization within China as the Communist regime seeks more affluence for its people and a larger role in the world economy. Are there still egregious affronts to individual liberty and other serious concerns about doing business there? Sure. I wasn't exactly singing China's praises as I packed up several Thomas trains this year for yet another lead paint recall. But engagement is a stronger catalyst for change than boycotts.
Posted by: Jena McGregor on March 19
“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” President Bush was quoted as saying in the New York Times today to Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chief Hank Paulson. I promise this won’t become a political blog post, but that quote got me thinking. Don’t our political leaders always work on weekends? Since when is running the world’s supposed superpower (though it certainly hasn’t been looking like one lately) a five-day-a-week, 9-to-5 job? And how many peoples’ bosses actually thank them for working on the weekend?
In a lot of corporate cultures, it’s just part of the workweek. Life spills over into work, and work spills over into life. Who can get a quiet moment during the week to put two thoughts together, anyways? The Sunday evening prep session has become as de rigeur for many professionals as the ever-tethered Blackberry.
I’m interested in the latest thinking on time management—the best gurus, the best tips, the secrets you’ve learned trying to keep Monday morning away from Sunday night. Anyone have any fresh ideas?
Posted by: Jena McGregor on March 19
I couldn't help but chuckle at the "Columbia Ideas@Work" newsletter that crossed my desk this week. The newsletter, put out by Columbia Business School and featuring its professors' research, includes a snapshot of a study by Nachum Sicherman, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. The headline, "Why do Dancers Smoke?" was followed by a tagline: "Using smoking as a proxy for time preference may help explain why some workers invest more in career development than others."
Nachum, a labor economist, was curious to see dancers standing around smoking after a performance he attended. He wondered if smoking "could serve as a proxy for time preference, the degree to which a person is oriented to the present or the future," the article reports. Because dancers have short careers, he thought, this suggested the dancers "were perhaps more present-oriented than future-oriented."
The article goes on to a discussion about the implications for behavioral economics, why nonsmokers' wages increase dramatically more than smokers during their first decade of employment, and the concept of "time preference," which is "not a trait you can observe in a direct way, so we hypothesized that an indirect way to observe it is to assume that, on average, people who smoke place less value on teh future than people who do not smoke."
Hmmm. Maybe there's some truth to the whole time preference issue. But as a former ballet dancer myself, I had to laugh at how business school researchers can become so theoretical about the simplest things. Dancers smoke to keep from eating during long breaks. Quite simply, they don't want to gain weight.
