Three Signs of a Miserable job

Patrick Lencioni's latest book discusses the topic of job satisfaction. A summary of this book and an interview with the author can be found on HBR's podcast. According to the author,the key factors for job satisfaction and thus performance are:

Anonymity- Employees are often miserable in their jobs because of anonymity. Quite simply, employees feel that they are transparent and unimportant. If they don't feel a personal connection, if they feel that their managers do not take a personal interest in them, they often do not like their jobs.

Relevance - Employees need to feel their jobs are relevant. If they don't feel they can positively impact others, or that their jobs have some meaning, they are often miserable.

Imeasurement - One's job performance needs to be measurable. Employees need to have some way for them to assess their own performance. In such case they are not dependent on a whim of a manager relative to performance appraisal. This is why salespeople are often happy in their jobs. It is because they have measurable evidence of their performance - sales.

VoIP Basics

Nice eBook about VoIP by ShoreTel. The book explains benefits of VoIP in general.

Shoretel Article

FuelQuest - Cisco Case Study

"We can really function as a virtual organization,” adds Vladimir Collak, Senior Network Engineer. “We can hire industry experts who might not consider relocating to Houston. With our systems, they don’t have to. They can work from home offices and appear tothe outside world as if they were sitting at our headquarters. Their extension, their voice mail, e-mail, everything can work fromwherever they reside.”


More on this case study

Value Innovation

Basic principles of economics and marketing teach us that companies are successful because they satisfy their customers’ needs. Those companies that do not satisfy these needs eventually perish. Others may still contend with competition. Thus, to survive in a completive environment, companies need to make the best offers to keep and attract customers. One could therefore ask - How does a company effectively compete in the marketplace? How does it make better offers? While the answers are complex, the author believes that to compete effectively, companies need to differentiate themselves. Differentiation pressures generally cause companies to innovate their products as well as business models. In order to innovate, which is difficult to do in a vacuum, companies need to stay close to their customers and practice market orientation. Unfortunately, market orientation does have its limits. Namely, market oriented firms are generally unable to innovate outside of customers’ value systems [5]. To free themselves from these limits, companies practice value innovation in addition to market orientation.
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