On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites

The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.

A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.

The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.

For the article…

Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers: Readings for Effective Secondary Education & Workplace Learning Practice

In today’s shifting global economy and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organization, how do we train the rising generation of knowledge workers with the knowledge, skills, and the ability to perform and add value in a hyper-intensive competitive global marketplace?

What are the methods and strategies for effectively preparing the future knowledge worker generation? What needs to be done in our institutions of higher learning? What initiatives and methods need to be adopted by organizations for greater engaged learning and transference of knowledge to practical application in the workplace? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.

This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational learning and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professions of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to train the next generation of knowledge workers that will drive an enhanced competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.

But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.

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• London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.

• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.

• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.

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Globalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work: Readings for Seeking a Competitive Advantage in an Increasingly Global Economy an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from  The Organisation imprint.

“Globalization” is a key concept that represents a wide range of complex processes in our modern world. These processes have wide sweeping impacts on the international political economy, international capitalism, and the ability for organizations of all types to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and successfully compete in an increasingly global economy. Additionally, increasing “globalization” over the past several decades has changed the dynamics of an increasingly international labor force, how organizations compete for this labor, their internal labor dynamics, and ultimately how they do business. As such, the nature of work and the workplace has also shifted dramatically over the past several decades.

This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to “globalization” and its wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to academics and students interested in the interplay between macro global processes and the more micro organizational and individual impacts, while also instructing managers, policy makers, and practitioners of all types interested in the role that “globalization” is playing in shifting international labor dynamics and the transformation of the modern workplace.

Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.

It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.

Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.

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The eleventh issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 11 contains:

• Sustainability and Economic Theory: An Organism in Premise by Abdallah M. Hasna.
• A Study of the Impact of University Values and Culture on Staff and Student Attitudes by Aspa Sarris.
• Reconfiguring IT and the Cultural Dimension in Knowledge Management Practices by Fahmi Ibrahim and Stephen Barr.
• Student Management in Chinese Higher Education Institutions by Xiaoli Jiang, Xiaoping Ma and Yumei Wu.
• Integrating Knowledge Management and Lean Thinking to Achieve Six Sigma Performance by Rania A.M. Shamah.
• A Review on Determining Key Capability Indicators in Individuals and Proposals on Applied Capability Evaluation by Mona Shekarriz and Alireza Mousavi.
• Systems Thinking and Fratricide: Operationalizing Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning by Anthony J Masys.
• The Management of Change in Information Technology: Approaches of Academic Library Directors in the United States by Zhixian Yi.

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

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Sometimes confusion can be as instructive as precision. The travails of Dubai Inc have left commentators struggling for the right phrase to describe Dubai World and its various siblings. They have come up with various formulations—state-controlled, state-supported, quasi-state, parastatal—without ever quite capturing what they are talking about. And Dubai is not the only place that is challenging the business vocabulary in this way.

Wherever you look you can see the proliferation of hybrid organisations that blur the line between the public and private sector. These are neither old-fashioned nationalised companies, designed to manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim according to their own strength. Instead they are confusing entities that seem to flit between one world and another to suit their own purposes.

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The tenth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 10 contains:

• The Use of English at the School of Business and Management, Institut Teknologi Bandung: Investigating Issues Based on Students’ Experience by Andika Putra Pratama and Aries Feizal Firman.
• Multicultural Change in Nonprofit Organizations: A Comparative Literature Review by Maryrose Dolezal.
• Mobilising the Poor for Decision Making: Experiences from among the Ogoni of Taita Taveta District, Kenya by Mary Omosa and Linet Misati.
• Gender Differences In MBA Students: Work-life Balance, Opting Out and the Increasing Importance of Flexibility by Jenny Keil and Karen A. Somerville.
• Organizational Change Skills: A Study of the Literature and the Education Available from American and Canadian MBA Programs by Karen A. Somerville and Karen S. Whelan-Berry.
• Knowledge and Learning Frameworks: The Cyclical Model of Knowledge and Learning and the Knowledge Cube for Higher Education - A Case Study by Janette Young.
• Convergence of Perceptions on Work Related Issues: East Meets West in the 21st Century by Intan Osman, Zainal Ariffin Ahmad and Ummu Kolsome Farouk.
• Encouraging Youth Entrepreneurship: The Role of Institutional Environments and Learning Experiences by Rosemary Kamau-Maina.
• Adaptive Knowledge Management in Organizations by Oleg Tilchin.
• Harmonising Culture in Co-operative Business Ventures: Using a Simulation in Virtual World by Honghong Dai and Jay Bal.