It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Smashing The Clock

What an amazing idea! Why, if someone had come up with this idea, say, a year ago, why, they could be rich right now!

Splitting dinner checks can cause a splitting headache, even when the diners are a math-oriented data miner, a database security specialist and an expert in networked games.

Fed up with haggling over shared debts, Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate students Shashank Pandit, Amit Manjhi and Ashwin Bharambe three years ago created Buxfer, short for ''bucks transfer.'' The social-networking site with a personal-finance focus allows users to form groups of friends or housemates and track who owes what for utility bills, dinner tabs, day trips and other shared expenses.

No more haggling: Grad student Web site tracks shared expenses

Like smokers seeking a cure from their deadly habits, city politicians and economic development officials have a long history of grasping at fads to solve their persistent problems and rebuild middle class cities.

Today, a new fad is bewitching urbanists and pols alike. Known as the "creativity craze," it promotes the notion that "young creatives" can drive an urban revival.

...

The "creative solution" pointedly avoids such hurdles [good schools, good zoning policies, a city not beholden to unions], suggesting that the key to urban resurgence lies in attracting the diverse, the tolerant, and the gay. Having such a population is well and good, but unlikely by itself to produce a revival, let alone a diversified economy.

This is an urban strategy for a frictionless universe.
Why do supposedly serious people embrace such ideas?

...

San Francisco, according to economist David Friedman, has actually lost employment at a rate comparable to that of the Great Depression. It is increasingly a city without a real private-sector economy.

These folks (and this organization appears to be Hillary's baby) clearly have an agenda of their own, but the criticism of Florida is not without some merit, even if they have oversimplified his thesis. As Florida points out:

The US should not be worried about losing out on the low-cost, low-skilled end of the global labor market; it should be worried about other countries slowly chipping away at its ability to grow, attract, and retain top creative talent.

When I asked a group of my students whether they would prefer to work in good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory or lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon, they overwhelmingly chose the latter.

Going back to David Friedman for a moment:

Professor Friedman is also a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where he is known as Duke Cariadoc of the Bow. He also founded the largest and longest-running SCA event, the Pennsic War.

His comment about SF job loss:

Since late 2000, Bay Area employment has plummeted by as much as 18%, a near-Depression rate of decline. Yet, the region is remarkably devoid of pro-growth sentiment. Few of its elected officials display even a passing interest in job creation. Meanwhile, the rest of the state has been doing markedly better.

It should be noted that this article is nearly three years old now, and the data is surely even older. Besides, the statistic and the Depression reference are misleading, particularly in the way Kotkin and Siegel use it. It suggests people are out of work and homel... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Too Much Froth

"Getting on Oprah is like winning the lottery," said Marianne Diorio, senior vice president of global communications for Estee Lauder. "Because her audience really trusts her, if Oprah or her producers sincerely fall in love with some product or person, the results can be spectacular," Ms. Diorio said.

The Oprah Treatment

Raytheon directors punished the chief executive, William H. Swanson, by taking away almost $1 million from his 2006 compensation yesterday because he failed to give credit for material that was in a management book he wrote.

This is a follow-up on a story from two weeks ago about "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management."

You might also want to check out this comparison of the books and Swanson's responses, including that "He sincerely regrets the entire incident." As in, I wish no one had brought this issue to national attention.

Last week, an NYT columnist quipped:

The whole situation is enough to make you wonder whether we now have lower expectations for chief executives than we do for teenagers.

He was referring to Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism in her debut novel.

This first surfaced on the weblog of Carl Durrenberger.

Chief's Pay Is Docked by Raytheon

The electronic version of this article is awkward to navigate, but I found it to be interesting reading. You have to visit the "gallery" to read the interviews. (Click through the link at the bottom of the lead-in text.)

Marissa Mayer, a VP at Google, uses Pine (not Gmail) to process her 700-800 daily work emails. On a weekend, she'll sit down and do email for 14 hours straight.

Wynton Marsalis has never sent an email. John McCain can't type. Richard Posner doesn't get to the office until 10, and then he goes home after lunch. (He works everywhere.) The BlackBerry is a very polarizing technology. (As if you didn't already know that.)

Here are the executive summaries from the interviews:

Don't just cope with information -- revel in it.

Cut through the noise.

Get away from the routine.

Rise early -- and have the occasional jolt of joe.

Challenge each other -- but don't hold grudges.

Focus relentlessly.

Be compulsively organized -- and delegate.

Take a break, even if you work Sunday nights.

It's a game of pinball, and you're the ball.

Be open to ideas that come over the transom.

Seek the most efficient mode of communication.

Work the phone -- and the clock.

Secrets of greatness: How I work | FORTUNE

For Tom.

ARE you bored with bird flu yet? Yeah, me too. While senior executives are all resilience planning this, training day at a plush conference centre that, the rest of us are left to get on with our everyday tasks. But come the revolution (or the radiation attack on the City/alien landing on your building/blooming bird flu), junior and middle managers will have to act. You’d better hope that someone has a plan ...

via IEEE, which wrote:

Do you know your company’s plan for responding to bird flu? Or a flood? Or a bombing? If not, you’d better ask.

It pays to expect the worst

Don't get too friendly with your staff.

Organizations may have become flatter, but leaders still need social distance in order to take the big-picture view. Here are ways to combine friendship with leadership.

Managing Social Distance in 'Flat' Companies

Dating clubs, credit cards, and video games are all examples of multi-sided markets, where firms need to get two or more distinct groups of customers on the same platform. Professor Andrei Hagiu discusses this new field of business research -- and why it matters to you.

New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets

For every business, the choice is stark: "Change--or die." At any moment, fully two-thirds of America's companies claim to be in the midst of some type of organizational revamping, though most of these initiatives will fail. What many companies neglect to recognize is that organizational change needs to come from within, no matter how profound the external forces. Positive change requires "change agents" throughout the organization--those individuals who can translate the strategic vision of leaders into pragmatic behavior.

This book identifies the qualities of great change agents and how these skills can be mastered to serve as a catalyst for change throughout the organization. Illustrating these principles through examples from world-class organizations, Dealy and Thomas highlight the five key qualities of great change agents; they:

* challenge the status quo;
* stoke the fire of creativity;
* embrace the necessity of conflict;
* manage risk rather than avoid it; and
* develop new change agents.

Bringing the process of change out of the realm of the analysts and consultants and to the front lines, the authors show you how to thrive in a world that demands nothing less than continuous change.

Change or Die : How to Transform Your Organization from the Inside Out