It’s not really a war; it’s a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds — the leaders, the builders, the doers, all the combined skills that make up rocket soup and of course the money that make it all happen, with barriers to business entry lower than the’ve ever been (rocket soup is what rockets needs to run on in one of my daughter’s favorite shows, Little Einsteins). At least, that’s the way it felt as I walked through Cruzioworks from my co-working office to the restroom and past the packed day-long classroom on covering HTML5. Or maybe it was jQuery. Or C#. Or

Understanding talent vitals, the heartbeat of your business — you don’t often hear the term “vital signs” applied outside healthcare, but in my Leadership and HR circles I’m hearing more people talking about “talent vitals,” so the term appears to have crossed the chasm.

Just add water, sunlight and really long tethers. This is how innovative creativity blossoms in virtual global teams, right? Well, not quite, but the good news is there are so many communications tools available today that it makes it the next best thing to being there when building a quality business team. In fact, many HR and recruiting technology startups that I’ve spoken with of late have software development teams here, there and practically anywhere, and with video conferencing and a little sleep deprivation, you can meet with dev teams every day. This gives you and them the opportunity to create,

It’s feast or famine, but the flexibility of the feast is what can be so tasty, especially when we’re hands on in the creating. Sometimes that’s out of necessity, sometimes it’s out of want, and sometimes it’s the very essence of survival to keep food on the table. And by 2020, there could be 70 million of us. Welcome to the Freelance Nation. Companies have been operating leaner then ever the past few years because of the economic apocalypse, shedding millions of jobs of all shapes and sizes, many of which will never see the light of day again. For many

He sat at the end of the table, listening to us intently but comfortably, as if every word we spoke gave him new meaning to everything he already knew. Sometimes he placed his elbows on the table, two fingers from his right hand resting on his cheek. Sometimes his hand were in his lap, his sitting posture impervious to slump. Regardless of his physical demeanor, his focal strength was immediate and sure, the conflux moment into moment his to share with us. When he spoke, it was deliberate and sure, not rushed, and with the calming intensity of the still sea

It’s like a bad high school movie — where one clique picks on another less popular clique. But in this movie, it’s not the popular kids who taunt the geeky ones. No, in this movie the still popular kids are traditional Annual Performance Reviews and the geeky aberrations are the pundits pushing to change the system. But like the perennial popular kids of lore, these not-so-bright knuckleheads have a C average. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled Performance Reviews Lose Steam: Performance reviews have long received poor grades, even from those who conduct them. Nearly 60% of human-resources

Week after week of tweeting “The World of Work” questions and answers for an hour with a few hundred folks, many of whom you’ve never met, all within the context of 140 characters or less in big old Zen sandbox – It’s a little crazy if you think about it. I mean, who would want to do that? We would. When Meghan and I launched #TChat one year ago as an extension of the TalentCulture community, we realized it was going to be an exciting (and challenging) medium to talk about everything from recruiting to human resources to social media to business leadership

During my niece’s high school graduation three years ago, the school honored those family and friends who had served in the armed forces. My father was in the Air Force, so we smiled proudly as he stood while the song played on, “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder…” Then, at the end of the graduation, Dad said, “Well, now we’ve got another graduation in two years.” (That was my nephew.) “And another one in 18,” I said. (That’s my eldest daughter, Beatrice.) He laughed and shook his head. “I don’t know about that one, son. Don’t know if I’ll

It’s simple enough: I want to be moved and schooled by what I read. A book, a short story, an article, an essay, a blog post, a Facebook update or a Tweet — all of writing is good story — the push and the pull — the laugh and the tear. Good story is the human experience, but it’s not so simple to tell– or, more appropriately, retell. Fifteen years ago an editor told me that, “You haven’t quite found your voice yet; you haven’t fallen through the center of the earth and back again. It takes experience and practice to