CRA Inc

U R Fired

In what may represent the continuation of a trend, South Korea’s third-largest credit card issuer fired a quarter of its workforce via mobile phone text messages on Friday. Read the Reuters article here.

Wikis

We’ve talked about weblogs. But what’s a wiki? In the current issue of Darwin, Stowe Boyd provides a brief introduction and explains why wikis may emerge as an important vehicle for organizational communication.

Faster than a speeding blog, more collaborative than a powerful intranet — they can’t quite leap tall buildings in a single bound, but Wikis can enable bottom-up socialization.

…

Wikis are based on emergent intelligence and knowledge: the belief that the best results come from allowing decisions to emerge bottom-up, in a relatively free-form interchange between the participants of a group, with only a light-handed editorial or managerial top-down control being applied.

Michael Porter On Strategy (Again)

If you haven’t read this Fast Company interview with Harvard Professor and business strategy guru Michael Porter, you should … if not for your own business acumen, then for the fact that the senior leaders of your organization (and likely your internal clients), probably will.

The error that some managers make is that they see all of the change and all of the new technology out there, and they say, “God, I’ve just got to get out there and implement like hell.” They forget that if you don’t have a direction, if you don’t have something distinctive at the end of the day, it’s going to be very hard to win. They don’t understand that you need to balance the internal juxtaposition of change and continuity.

Survey Monkey

There are many online survey applications from which to choose, but all of us at CRA have a special place in our hearts for one in particular (and regularly recommend it to our clients): Survey Monkey. Why? The great service we’ve received and the great functionality it affords (and the price can’t be beat). Go check it out for yourself…

Keep Online Surveys Short

User-interface guru Jakob Nielson’s latest Alertbox column pleads with marketing managers to Keep Online Surveys Short. It’s also good advice for internal communicators:

One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they’re likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey).

[…]

How can you get average users to respond? The highest response rates come when surveys are quick and painless. And the best way to reduce users’ time and suffering is to reduce the number of questions.

[…]

Survey bloat is a natural consequence of having a diverse group of marketing managers, all of whom want customer feedback on their special issues. Please resist the temptation to collect all the information that anybody could ever want. You will end up with no information (or misleading information) instead.

Who Is Reading Your Internal Memos?

The Boston Globe has a story on the dubious but unignorable internalmemos.com–a site we regularly monitor on behalf of our clients.

Called InternalMemos.com, the website posts company memos for public view. The documents are sent by anonymous employees who, as of Jan. 30, had e-mailed more than 2,000 memos to the site, according to founder Philip Kaplan.

Kaplan said InternalMemos.com receives 500,000 visitors a day and netted about $1 million in sales revenue in 2003.

…

‘’It would seem to me that these sites could very well be subject to pranksters and they should be viewed with some caution,'’ [said Joseph Daniel McCool, editor in chief of Executive Recruiter News]. When asked about the accuracy of the memos he receives, Kaplan said that he doesn’t check the memos for accuracy.

‘’We get about 10 memos daily,'’ said Kaplan, 28. ‘’It’s like reality TV. People like to read and know what is really going on. You can read IBM’s press releases all day long, but the memos tell the real story.'’

Do Coffee Breaks Undermine Teamwork?

From New Scientist:

Many people take coffee breaks at work believing this will reduce their feelings of stress. But theories about the effects of caffeine are conflicting. Some studies suggest caffeine can worsen anxiety and trigger stress, while others show it boosts confidence, alertness and sociability, making certain tasks easier.

But this latest report, released by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council on Friday, backs the view that coffee exacerbates stress, especially in men, and makes people less co-operative when working in teams.

Click here to read the whole thing.

People Lie More on the Phone than by Email

According to recent research people lie more on the phone than by email:

Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.

Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.

People seem to realize that email leaves a written record that might come back to haunt them.

The Nub

We’ve been linked by another business blog resource, The Nub. From the site:

The Nub is unique. It is the only daily-updated webzine that is dedicated to people-orientated business news. Our irreverently serious mix is designed to inform, generate ideas and entertain. In this world of information overload, we cut through the clutter and bring time-pressed readers the choice nuggets.

It seems to be all that, and a bit more, and benefits from a distinctly British flair to boot. Read The Nub here.

Blog And Forum … What’s The Diff?

We are often asked by clients looking to forums for on-line information sharing, “Isn’t a blog the same thing as a discussion board?” The answer is “no,” but without lots of exposure to blogs, it can be difficult appreciate those differences at first. How are they different? Tech intellectuals who think deeply about such things have been carrying on this conversation for the past year or so, and the bottom line is that it’s still hard to define (although this blogger gives it a shot).
Read the rest of this entry »