Policies and Procedures – Page 51 – IS Survivor Publishing

To cut your budget, hire expensive employees

By: Bob Lewis|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated: February 16, 2009

Ready for ugly?

Unemployment has reached 7.6 percent, up from 4.9 percent one year ago.

Ignore this statistic. It counts only those actively looking for work — not a particularly useful metric. More interesting is the employment level, down 4,218,000 adult Americans in the last year.

It’s interesting if you’re among the unemployed, less because misery loves company than because who needs this much competition?

And it’s interesting if you’re a CIO, because with this many people out of work, there have to be opportunities to hire great people.

Hire? In this economy? I’m kidding you, right?

Methodologies are fine, so long as they aren’t processes

Where does an author or speaker’s responsibility to be clear stop and the audience’s responsibility to comprehend begin?

A number of years ago an official in Washington DC used the term “niggardly” in a sentence. He was chastised, not because he had used a racial epithet but because he should have known some of the people who heard him might have thought it was a racial epithet.

While not as extreme as this example, I received a very angry e-mail from a long-time subscriber because of last week’s column.