January 2009
1 post
"Change the Role, Not the Person" -- Latest... →
Change the Role, Not the Person Q: We’ve spent a lot of time and money on training sessions to increase diversity awareness and a lot of people seem to respond well. Why don’t we see better bottom-line results from these programs? A: The goal of most diversity programs is to maximize diversity and inclusion and therefore foster an improved work environment. Some believe the absence of inclusion...
December 2008
1 post
UserVoice » Customer Feedback 2.0 →
UserVoice is is an interesting forum-polling hybrid in which companies can poll their users for feedback, while users can offer suggestions unbidden. This might be project-specific or more wide ranging, and allows users to suggest organizational or process improvements, and also for someone in the organization to provide an “official” response. Each user is given an finite number of...
April 2008
1 post
Betting to Improve the Odds - New York Times →
An article in the NY Times serves as a nice primer about the emerging role of prediction markets for decision making and innovation in the corporate setting. The article notes that companies such as Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, Best Buy, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels, and Google are using prediction markets to harness wise crowds in order to figure out things like what the cost of...
March 2008
4 posts
Diverse Juries Perform Better Than All-White... →
A fascinating study, authored by Samuel Sommers of Tufts University, examined decision making in diverse groups compared to non-diverse groups in a jury setting. He put together 29 mock juries of 6 people each; half of the juries consisted entirely of white people, and the other half of 4 white people and 2 African-Americans. Apart from the ethnicity, the jury selection was randomized. Each jury...
5 tags
SHRM - New Diversiteria Q&A about implementing vs... →
Here’s a new Q&A piece by James Borwick of Diversiteria posted at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website. Scroll down at the SHRM site to the Q&A section. It is accessible to SHRM members only. For those who don’t have SHRM membership, the posting is reproduced here:What is the difference between implementing diversity and activating diversity, and why should...
Putting Innovation in the Hands of a Crowd - New... →
A nice quick description of Kluster, the latest of several companies which attempt to organize, formalize, and monetize crowdsourcing for companies looking for innovation from outside their own workforce. Probably the first of these companies was Innocentive, which was started up by Alph Bingham, a very clever fellow who, among other things, pioneered prediction markets at Eli Lilly’s eLilly...
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0... →
For all its limitations - a lingering sense of unreliability being foremost - Wikipedia has been a remarkable success story. Who would have thought, when it began, that an encyclopedia written by anyone who felt like adding their two cents would turn out to be as accurate, not to mention greatly larger in scale, than Britannica. But is it an example of the wise crowd at work? Chris Wilson at Slate...
February 2008
1 post
Diversiteria →