What happened to GM? It used to be said that “what’s good for GM is good for America” (actually, it was a rather arrogant former CEO of GM who said it but I don’t have the time to mythbust). Of course, now it seems that GM is just symptomatic of everything that has gone wrong with America over the past 50 years. Is there a chance things at GM could turn around? Is there a chance they can re-learn all the leadership lessons they once taught the world? In what I think is an incredibly detailed, informative and concise video, Fortune’s senior editor at large Alex Taylor III not only breaks down the last 50 years at GM and also gives us a peek into what might be a much brighter future.
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Things are tough all over. Jobs are scarce and the ones you can find offer low pay and few if any benefits. What are the Average Joe and Josephine to do? Well, you could throw your hands in the air, sell all your worldly possessions on craigslist, move to the wilderness and live off the fat of the land or you could take a deep breath, shine up your resume and check out Fortune.com latest list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Most lists just give you a company’s ranking and a quick paragraph or two about who they are. But the nice thing about Fortune’s Top 100 list is that it includes job listings (provided by simplyhired.com) for each company. As well there are subsections that cover the companies that offer the best benefits and the companies that offer the biggest pay.
But this list isn’t just for job hunters, it’s also quite helpful for all you leaders out there. Motivating, engaging and retaining those you lead is a top concern these days. So it couldn’t hurt to get a small peek behind the curtain in order to find out what makes employees happy and content.
Whether you are a direct report or a leader, Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For is a list you need to check out.
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The Year of the Smart Phone
Experts in the social media, technology, and marketing industries have put their fingers to their temples, rolled their eyes into the back of their heads, and started to mutter quietly to themselves in order to predict what will be the ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ trends in 2011. This year the experts all agree on one thing. They predict that we will all be lucky witnesses to the era when businesses begin to take the smartphone revolution seriously.
They say that businesses concerned with branding, marketing, and, of course, selling will need to stop worrying about building the perfect, old fashioned, 2.0 website and start making apps, mobile stores, and mobile advertising. It’s, the experts cry in unison, the future and it’s in your hands and it’s not going anywhere.
Currently, I’ll never be able to buy anything on my phone. It’s four years old, the keypad sticks, and the only way a business could try to sell me something is if they left a very clear voice mail and mailed me a catalog. But, I know I’m in a snobbish minority. It’s obvious that cool people, people with things to do and people to see, have smart phones and trust them enough to guide them to highly rated burrito restaurants and correctly handle their online banking needs. It makes sense that businesses will start to have more confidence in smartphone platforms to do their branding, advertising, and selling.
Stanley Bing, business author and Fortune magazine blogger, doesn’t agree with the experts . He writes, “Smart phones….can’t go on, really…Future generations will look at pictures of us all, circa 2011, the way we regard those serious men in their fedoras in the 1950s. Don’t they all look silly now in their funny little hats?” Thinking about smartphones from this prescriptive makes them seem comic already, but even if they won’t last–it’s an inevitable trend we’ll have to live with for the next few years.
While Bing writes with humor and a knowing wink, it’s wise to realize that the smartphone revolution will have just as many casualties as any other social media, technology, and marketing uprising. In a few months we’ll start to see articles breathlessly entitled, “7 Mobile Marketing Mishaps You Need to Avoid” and “4 Companies That Did Mobile Nose Dives.” Sadly, most of us will read these stories on our smartphones paying no attention to the late summer day.
It’s my prediction that 2011 will be the year that blogs and consultants dedicated to ‘mobile business solutions’ will flourish and multiply outrageously. However, the bad news is that the number of mobile experts, the people who actually know how to build apps and design mobile stores and advertisements, won’t expand their rank at the same clip.
Pic Credit: BigPru
