To jumpstart US job market, turn workers into owners / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com
business success
Read a Book a Week – 2009 Results
1.0 per week in 2009.
Experience matters. Now I know why from the following NYT article.
Better pattern recognition, significance recognition, and faster solutions.
I hope you kept some of your older underwriters on the payroll.
Adult Learning – Neuroscience – How to Train the Aging Brain – NYTimes.com
Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.
What Matters? A Thought For The Decade
A Life That Matters
Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end. It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave. What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence, but your character. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters. It really matters!
Michael Josephson
How to Be Happy
How Adults Achieve Happiness – BusinessWeek
Our findings were in many cases unexpected but clear-cut. There is an incredibly high correlation between people’s happiness and meaning at work and at home. In other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.
The implication is unmistakable. Since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are. Rather than blaming our jobs, our managers, and our customers—or our friends, family members, and communities—for our negative worklife experience, we might be better served by looking in the mirror.
Turkeys – Talent Shortage Looming
The Coming Fight for Executive Talent – BusinessWeek
I’ve shortened the title of my occasional posts on management issues to Turkeys. Any negative connotations are purely coincidental. This series of posts started while underwriting at my brother’s house and his gaggle of wild turkeys walked by. So say bye-bye to “Remote Underwriting With Turkeys”. Now we’re just talkin’ turkey.
And management issues.
Contingent Workers – Some Metrics
WORKFORCE METRICS
CONTINGENT COUNTS
- Temporary workers needed for the 2010 U.S. Census: 2,200
- Penetration rate of temporary workers in the United States: 1.3%
- Percentage of CIOs who find trying an employee on a contract/temporary basis:
Valuable: 73%
Not valuable: 25%
- Places candidates can search for work: 400,000
- Employer job-candidate spending: $60 billion
- Percentage of surveyed workers who chose temporary work because:
Couldn’t find permanent/regular job: 39%
To learn new skills: 3%
- Percentage of people who plan to use staffing firms in third quarter of 2009 to:
Seek a job: 24%
Hire staff: 13%
- Planned headcount changes for 2009:
Increase: 62%
Decrease: 27%
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics via Workforce Recruiting Management e-newsletter
Big is Bad Again
Tonight On Bill Moyers Journal, This Morning On NPR, And Louis Brandeis « The Baseline Scenario
Read this wonderful post and join the discussion. The brief history lesson is priceless and necessary knowledge for executives and managers. We have been here before.
Outsourcing is Not a Four Letter Word
I read this online Business Week article and I thought I was reading about myself. If I were to add my thoughts, I’d add:
- Live where you want to live (provided you have a decent Internet connection)
- Enjoy flexibility of schedule
- No corporate politics or non-productive meetings
- Meet and work with interesting intelligent humans
- Enjoy a different kind of stress.
Outsourcing Benefits U.S. Workers, Too – BusinessWeek
For the project workers who log in to oDesk every day to create their own job with decent pay, outsourcing is a wonderful thing—be it in Wyoming or New Delhi. Some have been forced from full-time jobs but many simply prefer to go it alone or to work with small groups. Scarred by a barrage of layoffs in recent years, these workers like the control over their lives and diversity in the source of paychecks.
Choose Success
You have to get people to make good decisions. Wherever you are in life, good or bad, it’s because of the choices you make. Choose to succeed rather than fail. Choose to work hard rather than to loaf your way through it. We had a plan, a vision and we wouldn’t compromise our core values.
Lou Holtz at his induction ceremony into the College Football Hall of Fame
5th Annual Cow Appreciation Day – July 10, 2009
Chick-fil-A Cow Appreciation Day
Dress like a cow. Get free food.
lifeunderwriter.net 
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