When I was growing up, it was all about “Apples in the classroom.” Then, while I was in college, every student had to have access to a PC and connected printer so we our term papers would be legible. If you’re a school-aged child today, though, chances are you’ll interface with Google hardware before you ever hear the words “Apple” and “Microsoft.” My husband grew up in Nor...

At this year's SilkRoad Connections conference, keynote speaker Cheryl Cran challenged our attendees to upgrade their leadership operating systems to meet future work requirements. How can we change how we think, do, and share? Twenty-First Century Changes and Challenges The future of work will be about saying goodbye to blaming, bureaucracy, and bad leadership. Gen X, Gen Y, and Zoomers (baby boomers who refuse t...

I recently conducted some research on gender differences in the workplace and learned that the same behaviors that were praised in men were often criticized in women. In particular, women who were more assertive, or confident in expressing their views, were often perceived negatively. Assertive men, on the other hand, were viewed as strong and competent. A colleague pointed me in the direction of this Fortune piece by Ki...

At last week’s SilkRoad Connections conference, researchers from Kaiser Associates presented two innovative ways to consider and impact the employee experience. The business case for tweaking our approach is clear. Research shows that organizations with high employee satisfaction outperform peer organizations over time by approximately two to four percent annually and 89 to 184 percent cumulatively – even con...

At SilkRoad Connections, David Wentworth, principal learning analyst at Brandon Hall, shared that most organizational learning is still done in the classroom (66 percent). But classroom learning has its limitations. For one thing, 61 percent of companies believe that employees need to interact with learning on a daily or weekly basis in order to be effective at their jobs. Furthermore, according to the Ebbinghaus Forgett...

Are you having trouble choosing a business location for your company? Depending on your product or service, it may make sense to start a new business in a particular state, city or town—or to not have a physical business location at all. And although it seems like digital shopping has reached a new high and e-commerce is king, data from the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce reveals that in Q1 2016, about 93...

Summer is one of the historically slow seasons for many businesses. Small-business owners everywhere will take pleasure in outdoor sports games, swimming, barbecues, and…work as usual? According to a June 2016 Small Business Trends poll, only 28 percent of the 2,412 small-business owners who participated said they will not be working over their summer vacations this year. Understanding that worker absenteeism and...

I got into Northwestern University despite far-from-perfect SAT scores and missing the valedictorian spot by one grade. If I were a millennial, I would have had much longer odds. Born in 1976, I’m a late Generation X-er and have had less competition for everything pretty much all my life. You’ve heard of Generation X. Due to plummeting fertility rates, the media called our birth years the 'baby bust.' Gen X i...

For the last few months, Brexit – or the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union – has dominated global news coverage. But for those of us concerned with digital transformation, are there practical implications? Here, digital transformation expert Mark Skilton from Warwick Business School sounds off on the challenges and opportunities in a disrupted world. Digital transformation + Brexit = wha...

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, has a compelling proposition: once machines track your every move and tell you exactly how to become more productive, will you listen to them? A few years ago, in support of the pioneering practice of people analytics, MIT invented employee badges that allow organizations to tell which employees are most productive, and where thei...