Tag Archives: innovation

Tech Garage

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Unique opportunity to become a founding member of a new innovation team.

 

Want to stop talking about what we’re going to do and actually be given the freedom to create rapid prototypes? Are you a developer/hacker/maker in your free time always exploring new technologies as they come out? We want people who are great at coding to try out new things, then hand off the top solutions to a team to industrialize the assets. Come build with us in the Breakthrough Ideas and Tech Garage, a techy startup-like team that is exploring new technologies to amp up our offerings. We are interested in people who can work in an agile fashion and help us quickly assess new technologies to determine their fit for BPO. We will be creating rapid prototypes and MVPs that allow us to get immediate client feedback to see if an idea has legs and should be invested in further. Work in a fast-paced agile environment to try out the newest and coolest tech and bring it to our BPO clients. Continue reading →

Using Social Media Without Jeopardizing Your Career

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by Alexandra Samuel

Effective business communicators know that a brisk, bulleted memo is often more effective than a multi-page document, that an executive summary is at least as important as a full report, and that a PowerPoint deck driven by a few key images and bullets works a lot better than a deck that contains a word-for-word transcript of your presentation. We all know that less is more.

Yet even those who have mastered the art of brevity in traditional business communication may have a tough time mastering online communication. Whether it’s email, chat, or a social network, word count isn’t just a matter of style—it’s often a technical requirement. Add to that the expectation that your online voice should sound conversational, engaging, or even funny, and communicating online may be the biggest (and certainly most frequently encountered) writing challenge that we face in business today. Here are some guidelines that can help make those messages productive and satisfying—rather than a liability. Continue reading →

How to Manage a Team of B Players

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by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

In 2004, Greece surprised the world by winning the European Championship, the toughest tournament in international soccer. Despite not even being a dark horse in the competition, and with a team of mostly peripheral and unremarkable players, they overcame France and hosts Portugal (twice) to lift the trophy. Even hardcore soccer fans would be unable to name more than two players in that Greek squad, yet few will forget the remarkable collective achievement of a team that faced odds of 150/1 for winning the trophy.

What allows a team of B players to achieve A+ success? A great deal of scientific evidence suggests that the key determinants are psychological factors — in particular, the leader’s ability to inspire trust, make competent decisions, and create a high-performing culture where the selfish agendas of the individual team members are eclipsed by the group’s goal, so that each person functions like a different organ of the same organism. In the famous words of Vince Lombardi: “Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” This is true for all teams, of course, but if you’re leading a team of B players (people who are just average in terms of competence, talent, or potential), your leadership matters even more. In fact, if you are leading a team of B players, you have to be an A-class leader; otherwise, your team will have no chance. Continue reading →

Tech Innovation Lead

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Lead the Tech Innovation Breakthrough Ideas team to experiment with new business models and technologies that may lead to disruptions of to our clients’ offerings.  Coordinate, prioritize, and inspire the team to develop and test breakthrough ideas. Ensure the team has ample opportunities to expose technology innovations to business processes, capabilities and ecosystems to create innovation opportunities that either create disruptive value to clients or drive step-change operational performance improvements.  Responsible for coordinating team members and stakeholders, including clients, internal business process owners, and executive management. Promote the team and its successes and gain the financial, executive, and operational support necessary to drive breakthrough ideas forward to maturity. Continue reading →

Dividing Team Tasks: Is There a Better Way?

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by Phanish Puranam

Self-managed teams may sometimes adopt task divisions that are all wrong for the project. Managerial intervention can help avoid this.

Suppose you were on a team tasked with manufacturing a single handmade wooden toy. For this project, a few component objects must be made from scratch and slotted together to form the finished piece. How would you break the project into manageable tasks to be divvied up among the team?

If you’re like most people, your default option would likely be to assign each part of the toy to a different individual or sub-team. We could call this method object-based, because it focuses on separately creating the pieces, or intermediate objects, that later unite to make the whole. Another approach could be to divide the work into activities that apply across all the parts, such as cutting, painting, and varnishing. Without considering the specifics of the project, such as the number of finished pieces needed, or the skills required to make the various parts, it’s impossible to judge which way would be more effective; but one thing is certain; it is unlikely that the object-based division would always be better. Nevertheless the tendency to pick object-based task division regardless of the task can be very powerful. Continue reading →