Technology Rewriting the Rules of Business 200
theStorminMormon writes "Fortune magazine is running a story describing the overthrow of Jack Welch's old rules of business. (Welch responds here.) Although the article lists Google and Apple as two paragons of the new rules of business, it fails to note that the old rules of business originated from straight manufacturing firms while the new rules of business are coming from the (more service-oriented) tech sector." From the article: "Steve Jobs has emphasized that Apple hires only people who are passionate about what they do (something that, to be fair, Welch also talked about). At Genentech, CEO Art Levinson says he actually screens out job applicants who ask too many questions about titles and options, because he wants only people who are driven to make drugs that help patients fight cancer."
It's about passion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about passion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about passion (Score:2)
Ask not what your employer can do for you; ask what you can do for your employer.
Re:It's about passion (Score:2)
Re:It's about passion (Score:2)
Most seem to be passionate about making lots of money,
not the companies mission or destiny.
On the "larger risk and liability" two things.
The CEO and executives dont usually suffer the consequences
of their decisionmaking, the rank and file do, in layoffs.
Rarely does the board remove the CEO. And usually then,
the golden parachute that is part of their contract leaves
them well set up.
Second, they make the decisions, why shouldnt they be the
ones that the consequences
What do folks like me do? (Score:4, Insightful)
I work to live not live to work. I will do my job to the fullest, but I want a life. I don't want to wake up when I'm old and find that I'm alone and regretting that I didn't live my life instead of wasting it in the office.
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
I will second that.
In fact five years is an absolute maximum. More likely two years or so and the inevitable depression and disillusion set in in everyone but people who are clinically insane. Once this has happened the productivity goes down the drain.
In addition to that hiring mechanisms like this set a social immaturity requirement for most new recruits, because most socially mature people do not "burn in the job", read the "small print" and ask questions. The percentage of available workforce who ar
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
There are many reasons people can't do what you suggest. Some people didn't have the ability to go to school or otherwise learn what they love. Or maybe they don't know they can do what they want. These are real obstacles.
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Are you kidding me? How about "Can't find an enjoyable job?"
Seriously, do great jobs just rain out of the sky for you or what? I'm currently training my off-shore replacement and expect to be unemployed by the end of the year.
And life is very, very, hard to enjoy when you're not making good money. Almost everything enjoyable costs money. And you just can't let yourself enjoy the moment if you're worried about "How much am I paying for this?"
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
And life is very, very, hard to enjoy when you're not making good money.
Depends what you mean by "good money". The science says that above a minimum money does not buy happiness [timesonline.co.uk]
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Do you know how much money 25 thousand pounds is in US dollars? That's 46k *That's* your minimum?
Since I've only made over that once in my lifetime, am I allowed to be unhappy now?
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Depends on your location, wealth and spending power. Just making the point that pursuing money at the expense of other things can eventually be counter productive.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Maybe look of another line of work (Score:5, Insightful)
If your mission in life is best accomplished at the office, then how can spending your time there be a waste? If you are genuinely afraid that, when you are old, you will regret the time you spent at work, then maybe you chose your career poorly.
Many or even most people choose their career poorly. Sometimes this is avoidable. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes the best occupation is one that pays poorly or not at all. Too many don't even try. They just chase the money instead. But those who do manage to unify their passion with their career are more effective employees.
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:3, Interesting)
It's impossible to blend "fun" and "work" in any consistent/logical decision that necessarily produces
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:4, Interesting)
As regards these management philosophies, this translates to selecting employees for whom their career is the end-all-be-all. As a manager, that makes a lot of sense, as long as the people are somewhat balanced and won't burn out too soon.
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
The way we use the word today, if you enjoy it, it's not really work, is it? It's a hobby that pays.
I'm definitely trying to work my way to a point where I can make money while doing things that I enjoy. I'm getting closer...
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
Alarm clock? How pleasant is starting the day via an alarm that is designed to keep me from doing what I'm doing? Do people time their shits, and punish themselves when they are late?
If I didn't care about money i'd do exactly what I'm doing now, but I'd do it when I wanted, how I wanted.
I'm confused why money keeps coming into the picture.
It's impossible to blend "fun" and "work" in any consistent/l
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
Deal, if you fuck me and feed me and make wise choices with the money.
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
Happiness comes from within ultimately. People often think that things like money/status will make them feel happy, only to find out they don't. Really, to have the best sho
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
I'm willing to bet that even those guys still feel like they're 'working' sometimes and would rather be out riding, especially when the bike they're building
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:3, Insightful)
If your mission in life is to sit in an office so some CEO can sit on a yacht and decorate private 767s, then that is a sad thing indeed.
If you live in a world where everything is free, yes. It's not a good occupation when the bank repossesses your house and your kid can't go to the dentist when he has toothache.
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2, Insightful)
Excluding things like my wife, daughter and family, I basically have four passions in my life: music, rock climbing, kayaking and flying. About seven years ago, I did a six month stint as a flight instructor. When I was up with a student, I thought flight instructing had to be one of the greatest scams on the face of the earth--I mean, I was actually getting paid to do something that I had previously shelled out $$$$$ to do.
Unfortunately, at the end of six months, I was burned up and
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:2)
and still treated poorly by management..
What incentive is there to unify our passion with our career when we can just do enough to get by?
Most employers can't tell the difference between someone who is passionate about their work and someone who is punctual but merely claims to be passionate about their work.
Re:That's an interesting statement. (Score:2)
Does the employer own the employee? Do they own the employee's work, time and thoughts? During what hours? Can they order their employees to work? During what hours? Being passionate about the work one does is simply being respectful. If their employees aren't pass
Re:Maybe look of another line of work (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a little oversimplistic for me. Some passions can't easily be turned into a paying career. Some passions can be a paying career, but there may be other problems with that career. It simply isn't always as simple as "doing what you're passionate about."
Be
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Re:What do folks like me do? (Score:2)
Crazy Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Crazy Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
Other methods of screening (Score:3, Insightful)
They are are just waiting to get hired and once they are, they lay back and start making all kinds of demands.
The Secret of Jack Welch's Success (Score:5, Interesting)
From his rebuttal:
> When has there ever been a divergence between shareholders and customers? No one is out saying, "Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents." They're just not doing it.
25 years later, the secret of his success slips out: he has never owned a wireless phone.
Re:The Secret of Jack Welch's Success (Score:4, Insightful)
When has there ever been a divergence between shareholders and customers? No one is out saying, "Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents." They're just not doing it.
I thought "Well he's obviously never bought a Sony product"...
Re:The Secret of Jack Welch's Success (Score:2)
Um, I was once told that "Customer's rate companies better on customer service if they have a few small inconviences that are quickly resolved, than if they have no problems, so we are going to start delaying mail server maintenance."
Where does that fall in the 'just not doing it' scheme?
Companies
Re:The Secret of Jack Welch's Success (Score:2)
Not so much measuring but laying responsibility. The guy at the top gets the credit for everything that goes right. That's only fair. Conversely, unless he's George Bush, he gets the blame for everything that goes wrong.
Re:The Secret of Jack Welch's Success (Score:3, Insightful)
If there were, you'd hear a fuck of a lot less of that.
Hire passionate people (Score:5, Interesting)
Welch's rule was to grade your players and go with the A's. Some of us might call that a meritocracy. To the B or C graded employee, of course, it looks like an unbalanced, unfair gold-key system driven by self interest on the part of senior managers.
What's the alternative? "Hire passionate people."
Am I the only one who imagines the following conversation: "Look, Bob, I know you're working hard. Your code is better than everyone else's on the team, and that's great! You did a good job getting everybody working together on that one project, too, and you were right about cutting out those side jobs -- if we were still eating those expenditures this project would have crashed and burned months ago. But Dave's the right guy to get this promotion, even though we only brought him in from that middle-manager position at Nabisco three weeks ago, and I'll tell you why. Frankly Bob, you just don't have Dave's passion."
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, you believe ... it's easy to believe.
Where's the benchmark for "passion"? How do I prove I have it? How does a manager evaluate me for it? If Dave was hired because of his passion, and Bob was hired because of
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that should be a no-brain-er, because I don't think that that people who wrote that list are hiring, as they are writers just trying to capture a perceived trend.
In his rebuttal, Jack mentioned that he was quite proud of reducin
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Jack and his team picked, promoted, and nurtured some pretty good people, but others who have superficially implemented 'his style' have not been so successful.
Articles like this are good for self-examination, and should not be used as a manifesto. Of course someone will use it as such, and will likely miss the meaning altogether, surely even resulting in yet another example of your complaint.
I disagree - it should be a manifesto - hire good people, cut out the crap, do great things. Jack's strategy
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
One might argue that it ought not be the real point of most businesses. But as a matter of empirical fact, it is. By my own observation, business hierarchies have far more to do with monkey psychology than they do with efficiency or effectiveness.
The business world is full of charismatic underachievers who understand that "passion" really means "kissing up to the boss" and "manipulating the poltics and emotional we
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Perhaps, you're showing a greater 'passion' for the subject.
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
And that is where the problem lies -- where lesser companies take, say, Apple as an example but completely misinterpret the idea and begin hiring the least qualified people based upon such subjective intangibles as passion. I can see 'Bob' easily getting sidelined -- Showi
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
For a lot of companies that would really depend on Bob's ass kissing skills. If Bob sit's in his cube & makes magical code flow across the screen like water over Niagra Falls, but tells the manager he's wrong, why he's wrong, and offers proof of why he's wrong, chances are he's going to sit in his cube until they take his caffeene pickled corpse out. But Dave, who grovels, says yes
you miss the point (Score:3, Insightful)
The manager you imagined is just an example of a bad manager, and not how I imagine hiring passionate employees at all. I would imagine the manager hiring Bob and hearing Bob talk
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Yeah, that would be the first time that objective merit has won over subjective goals and vision.
Apple has fanatical customers as well as staff. Call up 1-800-SOS-APPLE, and the computer voice is a little more human sounding than most. Its perceived as a male voice over a female one (female v
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Apple has sayings like "Think different", Microsoft is more goal oriented with "Where do you want to go today?"
They're both lying. Apple let's me do the things I need and mostly stays out of the way, while MS is taking the slow boat to hell. That's why I will never move past Win2k, and why I have a powerbook.
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
AKA, "hire only A players". And good fucking luck with that.
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Frankly Bob, you just don't have Dave's passion."
Gee Ted, that's too bad. Can you run a project on passion? I want money Ted, that's why I come here and drive your projects. Give me more money.
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
Passion can't be benchmarked, nor can any measure be made to show how it directly (or indirectly) affects performance. The definition of "passion" is also up for grabs and can be twisted either to hurt or aid the individual being measured against it. For example, most engineers view being passionate as working 100% towards the product's vision, ensuring it is done right, sacraficing through long hours, and ignoring a lot of peripheral, non-core, problems (e.g. insulting behavior by managemme
Re:Hire passionate people (Score:2)
This was absolutely the case. Every year GE would rank their employees and the bottom 10% were out. It didn't matter if you did an acceptable job, if you were in the bottom 10%, you were gone. The same way with management - there was an up or out bias in the managerial rank. If you didn't keep swimming upstream, pretty soon, you'd find yourself in the dead 10%. At a divisional level, this was true also. If there was not a clear, short-term pa
The A's have it: a darker shade of brown (Score:2)
Jack's still got it (Score:4, Insightful)
I do agree with one item, weed out your worst. It is true. You will come to find that that passionate ones will not be lost in this. I'm in a company which doesn't do this, its a good old boy club. As such we still make money but never really move forward. We have so much deadwood it stifles innovation. The only time things change is when someone dies or retires.
Re:Jack's still got it (Score:2, Insightful)
Jack's Still A Dumbass (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose your workers' performance is in the 90th, 85th, and 80th percentiles for performance. In grade school, that would be a solid B-average workforce. Now the bottom gets slashed, knocking out all of the 80th per
Compensation is ALWAYS Important (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a fine line between passion and simple exploitation of that passion to get stuff done for cheap. And I don't trust most businessmen to look out for my best interests when cutting a deal.
What he really meant... (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare someone be interested in their own benefits!?!?!
Re:What he really meant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What he really meant... (Score:2)
A manufacturing firm really has to plug away and build up reputation while keeping quality consistent year after year (mind you Genentech had better keep up quality too -- look what happened to Chiron). What you really want there are well-manufa
Re:What he really meant... (Score:2)
Re:What he really meant... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know... I think what's being said is pretty fair. It seems kind of like a crazy thing to say if you think of it as "people who are focused on their own good vs. people who sacrifice their life for the good of the company". On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense if you're trying to contrast "self-serving back-stabbing little pricks who are only interested in moving up" with "people who, even if they might like promotions and such, are a little more interesting indoing a good job where they are"
Re:What he really meant... (Score:3, Insightful)
How dare someone be interested in their own benefits!?!?!
Should you ever have a daughter, I'm sure you'll respond the same way. Yeah right. If someone wanted to date your daughter you'd be very interested in whether or not he is interested in "his own benefit" or that of your daughter. There is no difference between that and looking for s
passion vs. obsession (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience some of the people who are obsessed with their job (spending nights / weekends) actually hate it.
Does anyone else see a creepy Apple vs. Microsoft comparison here? I know a couple of managers at Microsoft, and the "old" rules sound exactly like what they do.
Re:passion vs. obsession (Score:3, Insightful)
Trust me, when a boss talks about wanting passionate employees, they don't mean someone who has a healthy work-life balance. They mean someone whose emotional attachment to what they do can be exploited for the good of the company--and the CEO.
The cure for passion is professionalism, which is amongst other things is the attitude that high quality work deserves high quality compensation.
I'm Not Convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done.
And would they hire someone "passionate" in their late forties or is this merely another codeword for "naive new graduate"?
Ame
Re:I'm Not Convinced (Score:2)
In prominent successful and stable firms, like GE, there are many valid arguments for AVOIDING the most passionate people.
Passion als
money for nothing, chicks for free (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple on the other hand is so clearly old line. Make quality and useful products targeted to an audience willing to pay for the products. Charge enough for the product to create a good profit. Give good service before, during, and after the sale. Charge enough so that at the end one has enough to pay for fixed costs, manufactureing, service, overhead, and research and development. Do not be afraid to change the product to meet demands, and throw in a bit of flash. This probably had not changed since Ford innovated the car in on color Black, with evolved into the mustang of many colors. I think the old Ford put some big dogs out of bussiness as well.
I understand what the article is saying, but the article is talking about established firm. Apple, as an established firm, did exactly what it was supposed to do. That is fixed itself. Apple has been, and is, a major manufacturer of consumer and proffesional intergrated computer solution. So is Dell. MS only supplies software. Apple is and will continue to be, at least in the near future, a to manufacuturer of high tech solutions. The have proven that they will adjust to meet new needs, just as old bussiness says they should. The article cites IBM, which also did what it needed to do. Refocus on the customer, develop customer oriented products that provided real value. They talk about how the iPod is unique, but how many new catagories of product did IBM help create? The selectric, the PC, SQL, GML, etc.
It is ludicrous to think that anything other than good products or services matter, or that creating new products is something new. IBM exists because it started creating products and focused on customers.
As far as google, that is a story yet to be wrote. They have an Enron like grasp on the ad market, unregulated, not transparent, unpredicatable. The success may be last remant of the dot com boom, or they may be able to leverage advertisers in the same way that TV did. If they are succesful, it will be nothing but bussiness as usual. Create a product, namely adwords, charge enough for it to generate a profit, and use some of the cash to innovate.
I think what happened, especially in the 70's and 80's, was the sense of entitlement of the big corporations. That somehow Americans were obligated to purchase the products no matter how horrible they were. In a perverse way, they were applying the soviet model to capitalism, where the people had to buy what they state supplied, except in out case capatilism provided such an oversupply that we had the illusion of choice. This was illustated with the government bailout of chrysler. In fact, some of the few comapnies that haven't leared thier lesson are in the auto industry. Chrsyler has so given up and is running ads featuring it German owner. In the end what we may be seeing is not new rules of bussiness, but the return to the basics. Make a product, sell a product at a fair price, and realize the consumer is the boss.
Re:money for nothing, chicks for free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:money for nothing, chicks for free (Score:2)
Thou shalt not question. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thou shalt not question. (Score:2)
The Gravy Train (Score:5, Insightful)
Start-ups and small companies rarely have this problem. It's after your company turns out to be Google, then everybody wants to climb on board.
passion vs results (Score:2)
Customers vs. Shareholders (Score:2)
Clearly, Mr. Welch does not have a cell phone or cable TV.
pasion == cluelessness (Score:2)
Passionate people who don't give a shit about corporate politics are much more maleable.
Of course, after they get their passion crushed, they're even easier to work with, particularly since they're also clueless about politics.
Hmmm. Maybe I'm in the wrong place.
That's funny (Score:2)
I automaticly screen out companies that don't answer questions about salaries and options. I only want to work for companies that are passionate about compensating me.
but is levenson's strategy working (Score:2)
For instance, Genentech got a huge amount of publicity when one of its anticancer mabs worked in colon cancer - but in this case "works" meant extends median survivial from 14 to 16 months.
I suppose if you are a cancer patient or a family member, two months is a lot.
But if you are passionate about curing cancer, looks more like a super, super $$ drug that does
Just what we need: some fresh BS (Score:2)
It reminds me a bit of a scene in the Hudsucker Proxy:
REPORTER #4
How do you respond to the charges
that you're out of ideas? Has
Norville Barnes run dry?
NORVILLE
Not at all. Why, just this week
I came up with several
You have to remember what a business is for. (Score:3, Insightful)
The main rule is to remember what a business exists for. And that is not "to make money." Within three weeks of starting b-school we were being told that that was the route to disaster, because although that may be why people invest money or labour in the company, that is their reason, not the company.
The real purpose of a company is satisfy the wants and/or needs of a market segment at a price that the market segment is willing to pay. If you can do this and turn a profit, the company will continue. The market (And here, I mean the customer base, not the stock market.) does not care if you are making a profit. It does not care that your shareholders want ever-increasing profitability.
One of the thing about the "old rules" in the article is its emphasis on the stock price. This is to take your eye off of your market, and I contend that this is the major cause of most of the septic corporate behaviour in the world today.
In fairness to the CEOs, the market and thus the boards of directors insist on this devotion to share price. From the article: "Never before has a CEO more needed to take risks, but rarely has Wall Street been less receptive. A recent Booz Allen study found that a CEO is vulnerable to ouster if his stock price has lagged behind the S&P 500 by an average of 2 percent since he took the top job." (God forbid we should take a momentary hit is stock price because we are developing a new market.) "Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says he knows a number of colleagues who are planning to step down because of the difficulty of balancing the shortterm pressures of the Street with what's in the longterm best interest of the company."
Despite what many people think about the "intelligence" of the stock market, the function of investment funds is only to make money. There is no incentive in the stock market to take the long view.
In the book "Up the Organization", the author, Robert Townsend, relates that when he was hired to be the CEO of Avis, he insisted on one condition: "Don't talk to me about the stock price for two years!" He didn't want to be distracted from the long term goals by worrying about the vagaries of the stock market. I have alwys thought Mr Townsend to be a very smart man.
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
Well, I assume you could, but I don't recommend it.
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
And if Steve Jobs isn't lying (I'm too cynical not to suspect that he is), you're exactly the sort of person he's looking for. I'm with you - I'm in it for the coding. I enjoy learning about the core business (the real stuff like, "what do we sell" and "how do we make money") but only as it relates to learning it well enough to automate it.
Re:Yawn... (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, I agree that this is an article for suits (well, what do you expect from Fortune) and it's packed with business jargon that means very little. A lot of non-tech types make fun of techie jargon, but the jargon means something; when we say "TCP/IP," it's because it's a lot quicker than saying "transmission control protocol and internet protocol," and a whole lot quicker than spelling out, in detail, what each of those terms actually means. Suits have long had a habit of either taking technical jargon (from various fields, not just CS) and twisting it until it doesn't mean anything, or just making up jargon that didn't mean anything in the first place.
"Six sigma," mentioned in the article, is a fine example of this. How many suits really understand what a "sigma" is in this (or any) context, or why six of them is an interesting quantity? Then the six-sigma crowd compounded their sins by using the phrase "black belt." And of course there's all the military talk they love to throw around, this bunch of lifelong civilians who wouldn't know which end of an M16 the bullet comes out of. As a mathematician, a martial artist, and a veteran, I find this particular combination to be the Holy Trinity of bad suit-speak.
So the answer to the question, "Why should we care?" is, "Because that's where the money is" -- but that shouldn't keep us from pointing out what a bunch of jackasses they are.
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
What? Six Sigma is the name of a specific approach to management of a company. It's copyrighted (owned by Motorola) and "Black Belts," "Green Belts," "Champions," etc. are the titles of specific roles within the program. It's not a generic (which is a mistake in TFA, they should have capitalized it) term, it's a proper
Re:Yawn... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
As to the smugness... I think you're projecting onto the author. The piece is primarily observational, I'm not really sure where you're going with that statement about "look how smart WE are" (emphasis mine).
I'm guessing you weren't involved in big business in the past two deca
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
What? Six Sigma is the name of a specific approach to management of a company.
It's great for process oriented manufacturing concerns. It's crap for an engineering company. You need the freedom to fuck up in order to make the really good things that cause growth, which means that you must occasionally thrash the black belts. There are good ideas in the approach, but it looks like the sort of thing a weak manager would latch on to dogmatically.
"Black Belts," "Green Belts," "Champions," etc. are the titl
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
Yeah. Well, duh. Its about process improvement by designing measurements that allow you to control deviation as nearly close as is feasibly possible to the onset of drift. An engineering company's concerns involve the creation of new processes. Talk about putting shoes on a snake!
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
And the new economy stuff is mostly about making new processes (with a healthy dose of existing processes to support it), so yes, there is a difference, and 6 sig or whatever needs to accomodate that. That or not hew strictly to something that doesn't match what you need.
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
Re:Yawn... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets see, i need a fool-proof disaster recovery scheme. Best practices or art? I choose best practices. File server? Yep, best practicies. Email? Exchange, please.
Like i said, there is r
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
See, i disagree. If you got into IT for creativity, you should have looked into marketing. IT is about standards, best practices, and things 'just working' for your customers (ie the company's internal people). Yes, there are places where creativity is good, but no more than any other 'office job' at the same company.
I went into software, so creativity is important. How else do you come up with stuff that people want and that make their lives easier?
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
Personally, I've worked for some major corporations in the day, but I've found my most favorite jobs to be small businesses.
Small businesses always pay less, but its always easier to sleep easy at night and easier to wake up in the morning and be happy with life.
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:2)
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:2)
But the
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
Re:Yawn... (Score:2)
lost sectors (Score:2)
Blinking a few little industries like Financial Services (banking, corporate, private, hedge and mutual fund management and advisory services); Corporate Services (outsourcing of payroll, HR, fulfillment, customer service or IT); Legal Services (anything other than IP law); Medical Services; et. al.
Re:The IP sector. (Score:2)
That's a little short-sighted.
To reduce the service sector to either high-tech or fast food is a rather stupid thing to do. Last I checked "service" also included plumbers, electricians, construction workers, mechanics, nurses, doctors (practicing doctors instead of research doctors), lawyers, police and fi