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  • 'Coffee is for closers,' and Other Rules for Startups, from Mark Cuban

    Mark Cuban has had a great deal of success starting companies, and leading them, in his way. He believes in keeping companies flat, fun, and focused. At Entrepreneur , he lists 12 rules for the people who start new businesses, and for potential employees of startups. A few of Cuban's rules might sound familiar, but they are worth highlighting. Like rule #4: Sales Cure All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales. and #5: Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but aren't as expensive to pay. But we also find it interesting that Cuban clearly feels strongly about the type of environment that he believes foster success. For example, #7: No offices. Open offices keep everyone in tune with what is going on and keep the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show him or her how to use the lock on the bathroom. There is nothing private in a startup. This is also a good way to keep from hiring executives who cannot operate successfully in a startup. My biggest fear was always hiring someone who wanted to build an empire. If the person demands to fly first class or to bring over a personal secretary, run away. If an exec won't go on sales calls, run away. They are empire builders and will pollute your company. Read Mark Cuban's 12 Rules for Startups here .

  • Inc.: 'The 5 Hardest Jobs to Fill in 2012'

    Keith Cline , a "start-up headhunter" and founder of VentureFizz , is trumpeting start-ups in the tech sector as key drivers of economic growth in 2012. He thinks there will be jobs in the sector--maybe even more jobs than workers who are qualified for those particular jobs. So while the job-seekers to jobs ratio overall remains high and foreboding for most workers, Cline says top candidates in these five areas will have strong bargaining power: Software Engineers and Web Developers Creative Design and User Experience Product Management Marketing Analytics Read Cline's full analysis at Inc. , here .

  • Job Seekers to Available Jobs Ratio

    December has brought a small wave of positive news on the unemployment front--though much of it is better described as "less negative news." Lest we get carried away by dips in the unemployment rate and jobless claims, Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz reminds us that the conditions are not ripe for a major shift. Shierholz points to the ratio of job seekers to available jobs, which remains above 4:1. Shierholz: To put this figure in context, it’s useful to note that the highest this ratio ever got in the early 2000s downturn was 2.8-to-1, and in December 2000, the month the JOLTS survey began, the ratio was 1.1-to-1. While the job-seekers ratio has been generally slowly improving since its peak of 6.9-to-1 in the summer of 2009, today’s data release marks two years and 10 months—147 weeks—that the ratio has been above 4-to-1. A job-seekers ratio of more than 4-to-1 means that for more than three out of four unemployed workers, there simply are no jobs. In October, there were 10.6 million more unemployed workers than job openings. Furthermore, the lack of job openings relative to unemployed workers is in no way limited to particular industries such as construction—unemployed workers dramatically outnumber job openings across the board, in every major industry. Read the full post here .

  • Jay Shambaugh: Export Strength Sign that 'Economy is not Fundamentally Flawed'

    As much as the US economy is struggling, exports have been strong ever since the recession ended. According to Jay C. Shambaugh , of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, exports have risen 23% since the end of the recession. This is easily explained by the weakness of the dollar, right? The costs for US goods abroad have decreased along with the strength of the US economy. Not so fast, says Shambaugh. Writing at Econbrowser , he points out that the patterns of where exports have risen do not match the dollar's relative decline: The takeaway for Shambaugh seems to be that, while exports can not serve as the fix for the US economy's problems, their relative strength is a sign that the foundation might not be as cracked as some suggest: The ability of U.S. firms to increase production and sell to markets where demand is growing is just more evidence that the U.S. economy is not fundamentally flawed or broken. Firms can find workers and increase output where they have customers. Yet while exports to growing foreign markets have been soaring, at home, residential construction has collapsed, structures investment by firms has collapsed, and state and local government spending has declined. All of these are a serious brake on demand. Compounding all this is the fact that real Federal Government consumption expenditures and gross investment in the third quarter was 2% below that of a year ago. This acts as a further brake on growth in output and employment. Some businesses may complain about fear of regulation (though in surveys their number one complaint is lack of customers) and some commentators may worry about structural unemployment and a lack of appropriate skills amongst the U.S. work force. There is plenty of reason to always make sure that supply side policies are sensible and worker training and education is adequate. But these do not seem to be the problems of today. Based on exports, the evidence shows that where there is demand for their products, American firms are more than ready to produce and to sell. Read What can exports tell us about the economy? here .

  • Intuit Small Business Empoyment Index Shows Jobs Growth in September

    The Intuit Small Business Employment Index brings some much-desired good news on the small business front. The index shows job growth in nearly every region. The total jobs gained in small businesses for the month of September were not large--50,000--but wages and hours are also ticking up. Get the details in this infographic from Intuit's small business blog : via: Small Business Employment, Compensation, Hours Worked All Up in September 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC] (Hat tip Barry Ritholz )

  • Laura D'Andrea Tyson on 'Anemic Balance Sheet Recovery' and Jobs Crisis

    At the Economix blog, Laura D’Andrea Tyson says that as some of the world's largest economies try to avoid a double-dip recession, it is important for policy makers to attack the jobs crisis. And the only way to make progress in fighting the crisis, she argues, is to correctly diagnose the cause: As one small-business owner told The Los Angeles Times, “If you don’t have the demand, you don’t hire the people.” And the majority of economists agree on this diagnosis. They also agree that the recovery from a balance-sheet recession can be agonizingly long, with significantly slower growth and a significantly higher unemployment rate for at least a decade. Recent data indicate that the United States is on such a course, and many economists are now drawing comparisons between it and Japan during the two “lost decades” following Japan’s 1989-90 financial crisis and ensuing balance-sheet recession. A recent study by the economist Robert Gordon confirmed that the shortfall in private-sector demand, especially the demand for consumer services, residential and commercial construction, and consumer durables, is the primary cause of shortfalls in production and jobs. Read Recovering From a Balance-Sheet Recession here .

  • Startup Success and Getting the First Hires Right

    Gurbaksh Chanal has successfully built a few companies, and he has come to believe that the potential success of any new business depends on the first hires. The first five hires are especially important. Get them wrong and the company will not take off. Chanal wants his first hires to be hungry. He explains his hiring philosophy in this short interview at Big Think :

  • HBR: 'The Case for Executive Assistants'

    Technology can't give the best executives all the backup they really need. True personal support? There's no app for that. In the May Harvard Business Review , Melba Duncan makes The Case for Executive Assistants . Duncan, President of the Duncan Group , argues that while the process of finding the right executive assistant may be more difficult than other hirings, the cost of making the wrong hire can be much more damaging. Duncan made the case in this IdeaCast:

  • Building a Strong Tech Team in a Startup

    Entrepreneurs with high tech savvy seem to have an edge in the increasingly digital, Twenty-first Century startups, but there are some notable exceptions. In his online Forbes column, Martin Zwilling points to Groupon 's Andrew Mason as an example of someone with significantly more business know-how than technical skills who was able to build a successful new company. And the lesson, Zwilling says, is to "bootstrap the technical team," using the following approaches: 1. Hire an expert consultant for initial interviews and recommendation. 2. Start with great credentials, and focus on the culture fit. 3. Interview former employers, more than the candidate. 4. Ask early candidates how they differentiate themselves from their peers. 5. Use questions to test analytical and problem solving ability. 6. Use existing team to find a new manager or peer. and 7. Outsource your technical requirements. Read Zwilling's descriptions for each of these approaches here .

  • Making Sense of the Latest Fed Announcement

    The Federal Open Market Committee expressed qualified confidence in the recovery. And the Federal Reserve will be keeping interest rates low, and will bring about an end of its second round of quantitative easing. From the FOMC release: Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. The unemployment rate remains elevated, and measures of underlying inflation continue to be somewhat low, relative to levels that the Committee judges to be consistent, over the longer run, with its dual mandate. Increases in the prices of energy and other commodities have pushed up inflation in recent months. The Committee expects these effects to be transitory, but it will pay close attention to the evolution of inflation and inflation expectations. The Committee continues to anticipate a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability. To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to continue expanding its holdings of securities as announced in November. In particular, the Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings and will complete purchases of $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the current quarter. The Committee will regularly review the size and composition of its securities holdings in light of incoming information and is prepared to adjust those holdings as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability. Read the full press release here . Following the FOMC meeting, Fed chair Ben Bernanke spoke in a highly anticipated press conference. And he defended the Fed's decision to end QE2, saying that the policy was "never meant to be a cure-all." Here is a video excerpt from the Wall Street Journal : And for some interpretation of Bernanke's presser, we turn to MoneyWatch , where Mark Thoma discussed the Fed's latest announcements with MoneyWatch.com editors Eric Schurenberg, Jill Schlesinger and Jack Otter :

  • Economic Outlook: Assessing the Staying Power of Near-Zero Interest Rates

    In his latest column for CBS Moneywatch , Mark Thoma asks How long will it be until the Fed raises interest rates? And he shares some helpful recent analysis from Glenn Rudebusch , senior vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco . Rudebusch has a collection of graphs that hit on seemingly all of the key variables when it comes to monetary policy decisions. From the positive trends... ...to the not so positive. Rudebusch argues that the unemployment rate is key, and that the slow rate of recovery for jobs trumps overall economic recovery when it comes to any move on the target interest rates: Given the extended nature of the expected recovery to levels of unemployment and inflation consistent with the Fed's mandate for full employment and price stability, the policy rule also suggests little need to raise the funds rate target anytime soon. Of course, this projection of future policy will change as economic forecasts are revised. Such conditionality is consistent with the FOMC's forward-looking policy guidance from its January 26 meeting, that "economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate for an extended period." In the simple rule, the length of the "extended period" depends on the expected paths for unemployment and core inflation. Therefore, the downward revision over the past few months to the projected path of the unemployment rate translates into a higher path for the funds rate and an earlier liftoff from a zero funds rate. However, according to the simple policy rule of thumb, the positive unemployment news since last October appears to have shortened the duration of the "extended period" of near-zero interest rates by only about three months. Substantial monetary policy accommodation appears warranted for some time. Read all of Rudebusch's analysis here .

  • For Small Businesses, Hiring in 2011 Brings New Opportunities, and New Challenges

    If indeed the economic recovery continues to the point where small businesses are able to start hiring, managers will likely be using a whole new set of tools to find candidates than they did three years ago. Social media presents some new opportunities. And the sheer number of people available to work has to affect the process (good candidates are out there, but finding the best candidates may take more time). At Small Business Trends , Rieva Lesonsky writes about how big corporations are planning on going about new hires this year (she cites the Wall Street Journal and a Corporate Executive Board survey). And she argues that there are some key lessons for small businesses: First, get back to basics. I think it’s ironic that big companies are turning to some of the time-honored tactics small companies have always used to find employees. Getting referrals from current workers, using your network of contacts to seek candidates, and even looking to your competitors as sources of job applicants are all strategies that work well for small businesses. Second, take advantage of the ability that social networking and the Web have given us to supercharge our employee-search tactics. In the past, you would have had to actually get on the phone with 50 or 100 contacts to put the word out that you’re looking for a new marketing director, now you can let people know about it with the click of a mouse. Third, focus on quality, not quantity. Putting the word out to a few select people you truly trust gives you better results than posting a job opening on Facebook (although the latter still beats a general job board listing for delivering relevant candidates). You’ll save time by not wading through piles of applications—and find the perfect employee far faster. Read Do You Need to Hire This Year? Where Will You Find New Employees? here .

  • Time Cover Story: 'Where the Jobs Are'

    Time Magazine 's latest cover story bears a somewhat optimistic headline: Where the Jobs Are . But the picture is not all rosy. Assistant Managing Editor Bill Saporito checks in on companies that are hiring, and finds that some of them are having trouble finding the right people to fill jobs, even in places like Southeastern Michigan with an unemployment rate above 13%. The big takeaway from the article is that job placement experts expect the number of job openings to continue to grow: Grownups with actual work experience may be seeing more daylight. Gautam Godhwani, CEO of Simply Hired, which aggregates job openings from employment websites like CareerBuilder.com, company sites and newspapers, says his site's leading indicator is flashing green. "Before the downturn happened, we had 5 million job openings. This dropped to 2.1 million job openings in the first months of 2009, and lo and behold, in the second half of 2009 the bottom fell out of the economy," he explains. The reverse is now happening. "In the last six months we're back to 5 million jobs in our database. So there are some reasons to be optimistic." The $64,000 question is, So where are those 5 million jobs? Some of the answer is obvious. Health care and education, the perennial job comets, are doing well. But professional and business services will do well too. That's a category that includes firms like Deloitte but also office-cleaning companies. According to an analysis by Moody's Analytics for TIME, professional and business services will create some 119,000 jobs this year for bachelor's-degree holders. That's more than health care and education will create in the same category. (Health care and education will generate more jobs for graduate-degree holders than will business services.) There also seems to be a virtuous circle beginning to take shape. CareerBuilder.com reports that 27% of the companies it surveyed across all sectors plan to add salespeople, an indication that firms of all stripes see rising revenue opportunities. At the same time, they will be advertising openings in like numbers for IT and call-center jobs. "In terms of sales jobs, we've seen everything listed from a basic entry-level representative to team leaders," says CareerBuilder spokeswoman Jennifer Grasz. "The company is going out with the sales force to get new business, being supported by the IT folk, and the call center is working to keep the customers they get happy," she says . Read the full article here .

  • ADP Payroll Report: US Companies Added 297,000 Jobs in December

    ADP just released its December payroll report, and it shows a big boost in private sector hiring. Bloomberg 's Timothy Homan reports that companies "boosted payrolls" more last month than any previous month since the survey began in 2001. Seasonal hiring always makes December payroll numbers a bit different from other months, and the ADP report only includes private sector jobs, but this is likely welcome news ahead of Friday's Labor Department jobs release. Homan: Employment increased by 297,000, exceeding the highest projection in a Bloomberg News survey, after a revised 92,000 rise in November, according to figures from ADP Employer Services. The median estimate in the Bloomberg survey called for a 100,000 gain last month. Faster job growth will fuel the income gains necessary to further spur consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. A Labor Department report in two days will show companies added 150,000 workers last month and the unemployment rate eased to 9.7 percent, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Read the full article here .

  • Ned Hallowell and the Steps to Getting Employees to 'Shine'

    Edward (Ned) Hallowell , formerly on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and now the head of the Hallowell Centers, is a psychiatrist who seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes humans tick at work. His latest book, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People , is all about learning how to manage employees and put them in position to succeed. Hallowell argues that the old method of just getting people to work harder doesn't get results. Rather, a good manager must master five steps in order to get the most productive and reliable workforce: select, connect, play, grapple, and shine. He describes the steps in this Harvard Business Idea Cast:
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