Communication is a major emphasis of many MBA programs, at least as a matter of rhetoric. Business leaders should be skillful, effective communicators. It’s not a hard case to make, and I agree that a leader who can’t communicate his vision will not be very effective. What I can’t understand is the almost singular focus many universities have on “writing styles”, such as APA, MLA, etc. Benefit of Standardized Communication Standardized communication approaches can bring benefit. For example, when reviewing hundreds of papers to see if they may contain details related to some research, it’s helpful to have abstracts. In the process of diving deeper into published research it’s helpful to know that sources are located in the bibliography. It’s even helpful to have the same font, spacing and formatting so that transitioning from one paper to another is easier on the eyes. From a grading perspective, I can also see how a standardized format can make life easier for a professor. But that’s not really the point of a graduate degree, at least not as I see it. Leadership is about Creation Leadership should be about creation, not emulation. When my university sends me out into the world as a newly minted, card carrying business leader, capable of tackling any problem, what will the world expect of me? I’m pretty sure when I present a solution to a pressing business problem, no one will complain that it’s not in APA format. In fact, I’ve found professionally that when I publish solutions in a standard format, such as IEEE for electrical engineering, it actually works against me. I’ve observed that my peers were turned off by the format, since it reminded them of school and being forced to dig through hundreds of papers full of dry commentary on research all to often void of novelty. What worked then? I have found that creating a website for internal or group communication among peers is more accessible, shared more frequently, more easily found by my team and benefits more people outside my immediate organization as search engines direct traffic there. Google and Bing are the New Standard Above I mentioned some of the perceived benefits of standardized communication. Before search and...

The reading this week in Organizational Dynamics focused on interpersonal dynamics and leadership. I find the text laborious and meandering as he attempts to distill the lessons of leadership from his professional experience and draw conclusions from past consulting projects. I am increasingly inclined to agree with Dilbert, that the only thing most leaders have in common is that they haven’t read all the books on leadership and that all the books on leadership are different. Going one step further, even if similar characteristics, environmental, personal or otherwise, could be found, there’s still the question of whether it’s a causal relationship. In other words, if I emulate all the qualities that are common among great leaders, will I be a great leader? Leadership Failures Among notable cases of leadership failures in recent news is the poor handling of sexual misconduct reports in the military. This affects the entire military culture, including a recently published article about poor handling of a sexual misconduct case at West Point. Each officer involved in the case wanted a different outcome, and almost none of them demonstrated objectivity and a willingness to use common sense. Another case that increasingly shows poor leadership is the state of China’s environment. China’s continued pursuit of economic gain at the expense of environmental responsibility is translating into real social problems for its people and its government. Domestically, we see cases every day, in congress, in the white house, in our communities and major corporations of leaders failing to accomplish the aims which they were chosen to solve. They’re falling short in execution, but that’s not the biggest gap. Vision Among all the virtues attributed to great leaders, vision is often overlooked. Even when vision is mentioned, it’s typically in the sense of having a mission statement or a long range goal. The type of vision that changes the world is singular, focused, passionate and probably psychotic. In order to drive people to question and even abandon their individual mission statements in favor of yours, you have to present a gap in reality wide enough that they question their own perception of reality. Passion and conviction need to be at a fever pitch in order to displace disbelief. True vision acknowledges that...

For nearly four years I’ve done a good deal of outsourcing for my software company. In the process I have employed people from a half a dozen countries, on both an hourly and project basis. For the last year and a half I have almost exclusively used oDesk to source and manage workers for my business. There are both economic and communication drivers that led me to prefer oDesk to its alternatives and to hiring directly. That being the case, I still heavily supplement the communication tools provided by oDesk to hire, train and manage my outsourced workers. Mechanics of Communication In this ethnographic study I’ll first explore the mechanisms provided by oDesk to facilitate the hire, train and manage process. I’ll then review the ancillary systems I developed to supplement oDesk and improve worker productivity. oDesk Worker Profiles oDesk worker profiles include a combination of several different types of information including worker provided details, oDesk test results, timing, duration and payments from past jobs and employer provided reviews. The amount of attention a worker gives to all of these information types directly impacts his prospects for getting hired. oDesk Interview Process Employers may post as many jobs as they want. Workers are then free to place bids on those jobs. When an employer is creating his job he can give guidance about the type of worker he wants, including the selection of thresholds related to the information on the worker profile. If an employer is interested in a proposal, he advances to the interview stage by sending a message to the worker. The interview then proceeds by way of messages through the oDesk site. Occasionally the interview communication process will expand to include the use of Skype or other chat or calling software. oDesk Messaging After hiring a worker, oDesk provides a messaging facility to enable communication. This functions very similar to email, but has the added advantage of retaining communications, including attachments, on the oDesk site. Changes to email or disputes about what was communicated can be proven through oDesk without relying on external tools. oDesk Work Diary oDesk provides a work diary tool that monitors the worker and tracks hours worked. It is installed on the workers...

In Reframing Organizations by Bolman and Deal, they present four frames through which a business can be viewed. One of those is the Human Resources frame, and its focus is primarily on the human needs of workers and how those needs impact the workplace. They propose two opposing viewpoints with respect to human resources, one arguing that workers are expendable resources and have a right to nothing more than a paycheck. The other viewpoint is that the human needs of workers must factor prominently into the decisions of the business. This includes a sense of meaning and purpose, comfort and well being. National Labor Relations Board The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established in 1933 to serve as a mediator between labor and business. Its focus was on enforcing the laws that enabled workers to unionize. Its charter was later expanded to include corporate aspects such as protecting employers against strikes when those strikes were not in the best interest of all parties. As might be expected, there are strong political divisions, roughly along party lines, with respect to the role of the NLRB and the scope of its authority. During the highly partisan years of President Obama’s first term and carrying in to his second, NLRB appointments have been a hot issue on capital hill. President Obama attempted to circumvent the standard process of senate approval of nominees, but this was later ruled unconstitutional. In recent weeks, the topic has come up again as a bargaining chip in senate negotiations related to the handling of filibusters. Social Impact With so much partisan posturing, it’s easy to lose sight of the social impact of these appointments and the NLRB. On the one hand, there’s a direct impact on the lives of the workers that belong to unions. With a weak economy, there are also real risks to fiscal well being if aggressive union policy makes it difficult for American businesses to function. The landscape of American employment is much different today than it was in 1933 when the NLRB was initially formed. Many businesses today are intensely focused on the needs and wants of employees in a market that increasingly requires highly skilled thought workers. With socialized retirement, increasingly...

I’ve found that most of my course projects are best completed in segments. I publish most of those segments individually here on my site. This allows me to interlink between segments and to provide for a detailed and focused approach to each segment individually. By the end of a course, I have all the content ready to compile into a final report of some sort. The question comes up, how do I build that report. I could transfer everything into LaTeX and render an APA style report. I could probably copy and paste it into Microsoft Word too. Before I went to that much trouble, I instead went looking and found a WordPress plugin that would create a high quality PDF report comprised of a set a posts that I choose. I found Anthologize for WordPress. Creating Reports from Website Posts First I needed to identify the posts that should be part of the report. Anthologize made this easy. I can create as many Parts as I like. A Part is like a Chapter. I can then add to each Part as many Posts as I like. I can also sort the posts and even edit the content to better accommodate the printed output. The original post is left unchanged.   I then click Export and am able to choose items such as copyright attribution, authors, dedication and acknowledgements. I can also choose physical aspects of the output, such as page size (letter and A4), font face and size and where to put line breaks.  Once complete, it is possible to export the posts in the following formats: PDF RTF ePub HTML Anthologize TEI The HTML output doesn’t seem very useful, since the original content is more or less HTML, and almost certainly online and available already. However, some programs, like Word, can open HTML for editing, so there may be a use case. The one I spent the most time with was PDF. PDF Output The PDF renders nicely, including images and tables. There was a quirk with the table plugin I use that rendered poorly when any cell was empty, so I had to make sure there was filler content in every cell that didn’t have data....