What’s In This Issue?
This Week’s Main Stories
Story 01Consumers Are Not Always Right (And Maybe Don't Deserve Nice Things)
Story 02More Tony, Less Toby. Inside The Modern Reinvention of HREven More Stories
- Uber Applies For Patent To Detect Drunk Passengers
- Nike's Sold Out Nigerian World Cup Jersey Resells For 3x The Price
- Star Wars And The Battle With Toxic Fan Fiction
- With Bees Scarce, Drone Pollinates A New York Apple Orchard
- Moz Founder Rand Fishkin Bares All On SEO Industry
- How Suicide Quietly Morphed Into A Public Health Crisis
- Domino's just started fixing potholes on roads
Consumers Are Not Always Right (And Maybe Don't Deserve Nice Things)
Yes, Elon Musk finally released his flame throwers to the consumer market ... and people promptly began using them in totally inappropriate ways. It is a predictable side effect of our culture of Everyday Stardom that consumers behave badly ... just because they can. This week, there were plenty of examples that maybe we don't deserve all the nice things and technology that we have access to.
In France, students will be banned from using mobile phones in school. In China, one city created a slow walking "zombie lane" for oblivious people who walk slowly and text. To curb the rampant gaming of their Kindle Unlimited system, Amazon finally shut down a notorious scammer who was racking up his earnings by manipulating Amazon's algorithms. And the retail industry as a whole is launching a crack down on "chronic returners" of products.
The theme in all these stories is consumers behaving badly - and it flies in the face of the old adage that the "customer is always right." Ironically in some cases, the customer is actually a lying, manipulating, or immature simpleton that has little self control and even less self awareness. You know, exactly the sort of person you probably shouldn't listen to.
More Tony, Less Toby. Inside The Modern Reinvention of HR
I will be at the big SHRM trade show starting Sunday, and so I couldn't help spotting several interesting articles this week related to the future of work, corporate culture and the practice of HR itself. One of the most interesting from professor Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic spoke about the futility of the job interview and why it is such as overrated form of assessment. Another focuses on the challenges of managing talent that lives in a dual-career household.
The theme seems to be that the way we are interviewing, hiring and motivating workers is wrong, or at least flawed. As a symbol of this shift, the rise of the "Chief Culture Officer" has been so pronounced over the past seven or eight years that top tier business schools are even training MBA candidates on how to become one. Yet the stereotypes of the HR person as the chief rule enforcer (like Toby from the TV show The Office) endure. What will it take for HR to become the ones leading and nurturing the transformation of culture? To be less like Toby and more like Tony Hseih from Zappo's?
If you would like to read more thoughts on this topic, check out my LinkedIn article that I just posted this week focusing on the "modern reinvention of HR."
