About a year ago, I bought a red telephone with a really loud ringer for the office. Whenever a customer calls the help number on our website, that phone rings. The engineers initially complained about it. They said, "That's so friggin' annoying!" And I'd say, "There's a really simple solution: Answer the friggin' phone and do whatever it takes to make that customer happy. Then hang up, unplug the phone, walk it down to the other end of the office, and plug it in down there."

Please contact us with questions or comments about Arborland Center or businesses within the Center.

True Change: How Outsiders on the Inside Get Things Done in Organizations

Janice A. Klein, 1st ed, ISBN 0-7879-7473-0

… changes in organizational strategies usually create micro challenges at the working level. These become opportunities for outsider-insiders throughout the organization to identify gaps between current work practices and changes needed to address the new strategic objectives. … Here is an opportunity for outsider-insiders within each functional group to identify gaps and introduce new ways of working collaboratively to achieve the company's strategic objectives. (p53)

nice gamer perspective on management, collaboration, learning, coordination, flexibility. compare with the corn farmer perspective (measure ratio of inputs to outputs, and then get back to your tractor)

Francois Delepine
Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Francois is responsible for financial business partnerships with Google's engineering, operations, products, marketing and G&A organizations, and he also manages the corporate FP&A activities and the financial systems group. He joined Google from Hyperion, where he was in charge of emerging businesses; including three fast-growing product lines the company had acquired through its M&A activities.

Earlier, Francois was Vice President of Corporate Finance, overseeing Hyperion's financial planning and analysis worldwide, as well as treasury, procurement, real estate, and the enterprise performance management group. Prior to joining Hyperion, Francois was CFO at Kadiri, a human capital management software company and CFO of Xtime, a service CRM software company.

"For all of those who work under managers who they perceive behave strangely, or in any way they don't understand and they feel stressed, the study confirms this might actually be a health risk," said Anna Nyberg, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study appearing in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. "And they should take it seriously."

Seracon was founded in 1996 by its principal, Jan Gensheimer.

Seracon provides top-notch consulting and planning services that facilitate the growth of small market companies, along with great customer relations - a combination that can't be beat!

Through our commitment, experience, and expertise Seracon has established business relationships with our customers that will last a lifetime!

An active participant in the Washtenaw County entrepreneurial community, she is a a member of the New Enterprise Forum Board of Directors, and donates time to assisting high tech start-ups with business planning and investor presentations. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Washtenaw Technical Middle College, the only charter high school in the country that graduates students with both a high school diploma and college certificate or degree.

Online Identity Management - sometimes referred to as Reputation Management - is all about how you manage the way you are presented and perceived on the internet and the effects that your online presence has on your real-world activities. It is to the 21st century what traditional offline PR was to the 20th. In practice, it's an aggregation of hundreds of different processes and theories, encompassing how people find you through search engines (SEO and Paid Search), how they engage with the image you've created for yourself online (social-networking and web development et al) and how your supporters react to and represent their perception of you when they converse and communicate with other people (viral marketing, SMO and online PR). OIM is a technical science in as much as it's an ideology; this article hopes to explore some of the basic questions around it and help you understand its relevancy a little better.

Netomata makes networks more reliable and flexible by automating network configuration.

We build tools that generate complete configurations for the various devices that make up a network, starting from a simple, light-weight model of the network. Generating configurations in this manner provides a number of critical benefits by ensuring consistency, eliminating human errors, and easing both network expansion (increase in size) and evolution (increase in scope and capabilities).

local financing organizations take notice of accounting and management problems. "Earlier this month, LDFA board member Mike Reid - who was treasurer and a member of the LDFA's audit committee - resigned over of what he characterized as the board's decision not to hold Spark responsible for its accounting."

How bad do you think it’s going to get?

During the bubble, something like 1,600 companies were funded. I hear in recent years there’s between 1,200 and 1,300, including some older investments. I see VCs clearing out a minimum of one-third plus of those investments. The banks will tell you the same thing. It’s why you have to keep your powder dry. You really have to watch what’s going on.

I would rather paraphrase what Spolsky and Atwood said: Figure out what you’re good at. Check that there is a market for what you’re good at, that people want to pay you for doing it. Then make sure you do it. From your perspective, everything else should be non-core. So get others to do the rest, focus very hard on what you’re good at.

So, let's return to the concept of the community manager. Whose "community" is it to manage? The people in your organization may be a part of a community, may have even participated in birthing it, may even be trusted members, but to think they occupy any special super-node is nothing short of delusional. Does making someone responsible for these functions absolve others in your organization from active participation? It's not a community if everyone doesn't feel free to participate as an equal. As soon as you make this someone's job you devalue the contributions of everyone. I'm thinking the whole concept of a "community manager" is a very bad idea.

We want to find an acceptable way to help us make sure that we’re truly tackling topics important to you, our valued readers, so we’re trialling a method for producing and presenting on-line surveys. If you have a moment, please complete our short survey into how people manage their time at work. It will take you less than five minutes — probably less than three. We’ll report back the results in a week or so.

Thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets).

What is social capital? My 474 friends on Myspace, my 320 friends on Multiply, my 309 followers on Twitter, my 146 Followers Plurk, my 538 friends Iconbuffet and my 234 friends Facebook. This is the Whuffie Factor I had in my favor. 1547 or so people (some are dupes), that is about a dollar a person. All my years of social spelunking paid off in the form of Whuffie.

Amid all this hi-tech digital trickery, it is sometimes nice to be able to cast one’s mind back to the simpler analogue age and the measuring devices of the past. For example, we hooked up an analogue meter like those used in many industries for decades, fed it some different input and ended up with a literal desktop dashboard that measures average website response time.

not all stupidity is amenable to deflection by process, and even when it is, the overhead created by process is often not worth the savings in deflected stupidity. Stupidity is frequently a one-off, and a process designed to deflect it within an organizat

The root of the misunderstanding is that managers put too much emphasis on trying to create highly optimized efficient processes and the organization then becomes a victim of inflexible mechanization, thereby stifling entrepreneurship.

This podcast by Mark Graban with Dr. Sami Bahri, “The World’s First Lean Dentist” is well worth listening to.

on using kanban as a software process management tool; note to self, review as a queue management process for proposal development

By setting a kanban limit we can guarantee to the Governance Board that we are meeting our commitment to dedicate a certain percentage of our resources to sustaining activity, without dedicating specific heads.

AISA is conceived as an interactive and integrated electronic environment for the office worker at any level in the bureaucratic hierarchy. An AISA workstation is conceived as the synergistic coupling of a human and an electronic part, each contributing w

This paper provides an overview of the system, with emphasis on the module that proposes the next item to which an administrator should give attention and suggests the appropriate action to perform with respect to that item.

Employees choose which projects they want to work on, and bonuses are assigned by a system called the “Love Machine,” which lets employees praise their co-workers for completed tasks.

we discussed how we could make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy.

Pay-Per-Click Judo is doing more with less in Pay Per Click management. Pay-Per-Click runs on specific pressure points that can tell you all you need to know about the success or failure of your campaign.

beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control.

And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checkin

This is a Mozilla Firefox extension for interacting with Amazon EC2 (API version 2007-08-29). The source code also functions as an example of how to use the Amazon EC2 Query API from JavaScript.

After an intense petition campaign and facing a crowd urging that local management of the Bedford Public Library, TX, be maintained, the Bedford City Council last night voted 4-3 against outsourcing library management to Library Systems and Services, LLC

"The average citizen, when they walk into the library, they will see well-trained, well-educated, customer-service-oriented people working in the library," said Bob Windrow, director of sales and marketing at Germantown, Md-based Library Systems and Servi

But I’ve learned a few things as a trial-by-fire project manager, and one is that my attitude affects my team’s ability to work. So I made the call: it’s better to show up late than to show up angry. I went to Target instead of the office, and calle

Search marketers and reputation management professionals should know that there are legitimate ways to correct errors in Wikipedia. Knowing the right way to fix things is even more important now that Wikipedia results frequently appear in the top listings

Ten things Google has found to be true.

As humans we have the capacity to remember – and to forget. For millennia remembering was hard, and forgetting easy. By default, we would forget. Digital technology has inverted this. Today, with affordable storage, effortless retrieval and global acces

Probably the most effective thing we did was institute per-engineer bug limits: if any engineer's bug count passes 20, they have to stop working on features and fix bugs instead. The basic idea is that we keep the bug count low as we go so that we can sen

family binder / family planner notebook howto

Every successful organization—from a baseball team to a Fortune 500 company--has its leaders, its behind-the-scenes worker bees, its savvy strategists who excel at their jobs. They are the “go-to” people when something needs to get done. Business

“More companies die of indigestion than starvation.’’ (as seen in HP/Compaq proxy fight SEC filings)

most popular kaizen article in delicious

We’ve got Google bringing their AdWords office to Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of their hiring mantra’s is no jerks. I am always scanning for trends and look for similar themes and topics showing up in different venues. Well, this ‘no jerks’ rule is n

This week, IdeaCast producer Steve Singer talks with Don Tapscott, co-author, with Anthony D. Williams, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

project management group in ann arbor meeting 2/19/2007 6:00 PM

checklist to help you build teams with the right people for the task

However, the empty inbox should be the ultimate goal. Think of it as the monster at the end of the final level of the incredibly popular video game that is Gmail.

organizations create software systems that mimic their own organizational structures. is this part of systemantics? must look.

Socrates: And the cause of this surprising change in fortune?

Glaucon: I did what you suggested. I listened to the women

Socrates: What did they tell you?

Glaucon: Many things. But in short they said to make boundaries, create attractors, stabili

from chris dent

flash based task tracker

small things, like keeping people in a good mood, have tremendous impacts on culture and performance in organizations.

GEO promotes organizational effectiveness by identifying and promoting grantmaking practices that improve grantee performance.

mostly about how to run a law firm

on management at Microsoft vs. Juno

find small, high-value things to do, and have your whole team sneak them in every day