I Done This Support Google has long had a reputation for being a place that’s near impossible to get a job if you aren’t a Stanford or MIT grad. They not only asked you for your college GPA, they even asked you what you made on your SAT as a pimple-faced high schooler.
Recently, that’s all changed.
Image: Bill Sodeman/Thomas Hawk Hey, you’re pretty awesome yourself. Go ahead and do great things!
Image: rytc This painting on the wall of a Zurich office building is actually an art piece called “How to Work Better” by artist duo Fischli/Weiss (that’s Peter Fischli and David Weiss). The interesting part? As described in the Guardian‘s obit of Weiss: How to Work Better (1991) is a manifesto comprising 10 persuasive but empty sentences, … Read more
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
Change your life with habit hacks.
You’re hiring people to think.
The 5 most dangerous creativity killers.
Want to make some key improvements in your life? Make them the centerpiece.
Bad sleeping habits cause employers almost $2000 per employee a year.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Want to make reports of your dones to show off your progress?
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First, the seed being sown falls on good ground, but the birds get it. Then it falls on shallow ground and can’t grow. Then on thorny ground, where it withers away. And only with the last attempt it falls on good ground and the seeds grow.
So we must shift our focus. We don’t want to look for which seeds thrive and which don’t. We want to know what the rate of success is.
Buffer’s Leo Widrich describes Jim Rohm’s law of averages in explaining his approach to measuring success.
Great things are not accomplished with a silver bullet shot of optimism but require work and a kind of faith that is informed by reality.
Image: Sergiu Bacioiu
In many companies, your manager will know the team’s and company’s objectives, but you won’t. He may keep crucial information from you so that he can consolidate decision-making power.
Not so at Qualtrics, the extraordinary Provo, Utah-based company that did $50M in revenue, raised $70M from elite venture capital firms Sequoia and Accel, turned down a $500M acquisition offer, and grew its headcount to nearly 300 employees in 2012. At Qualtrics, transparency is perhaps the company’s most important value for one simple and obvious reason—”Nowadays, you’re hiring individuals to think.”
Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the ‘happiest,’ by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.
Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers – NYTimes.com
Google has long been known as an elite organization bordering on elitist. It’s fascinating to see how their conception of prospective candidates has changed as they’ve looked at the data over time, departing from a SAT and GPA-driven view.
Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
The rise of the culture hacker.
The antidote to burnout is progress.
Check in with people. Don’t check up on them.
Want to be an excellent leader? Read these 10 books.
Teach why startups fail.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Have you checked out your word cloud to see your language of getting stuff done? Just sign into iDoneThis, click on “Visuals”, and then click on “Word Cloud”. Which words are most prominent?
We’ve seen an interesting trend at companies that are extremely culture-focused: the culture hacker. Software developers have built internal developer productivity tools since time immemorial because great engineering cultures push for automation and improving iteration speed. But now developers are turning their attention to addressing team dynamics and how the whole company functions and works together on the whole — in a word, culture.
At many companies, company values are just words on a piece of paper tacked to a wall somewhere. At Zappos, they’re extremely thoughtful about giving their values bite. For example, they’re famous for paying new employees to quit. After new employee training ends, each employee is offered the opportunity to quit their job and walk away with $1,000. They do this because one of the Zappos core values is “be passionate and determined”, and paying people to quit ensures that those who remain are incredibly enthusiastic about their work and in it for the long haul.
J.T. O’Donnell, CEO of CAREEREALISM Media, has an interesting to-do list of 10 recurring to-dos that she tries to do every day. This list isn’t made up of specific tasks but more general ones. Think family or genus, rather than species. Read something related to my industry. Read something related to business development. Send two emails … Read more