Motivating Employees With Cash or Gifts?

You will love this entire blog from the author of "Predictably Irrational".

"Imagine that you worked for me, and as your year-end bonus, I offered you a choice between $1,000 in cash or an all expense paid weekend in the Bahamas, also worth $1,000. Which option would you chose? If you are like most people who have answered this question, you would take the cash. After all you might not like the Bahamas and you can decide for yourself how to best spend the money. "
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As a kid I played this little game at school we called 'telephone line'. Twenty kids were hurdled up into a circle. One started by whispering a sentence in the ear of his neighbour, so the other kids couldn't hear what was said. The neighbour would say the same sentence to his neighbour, and so on, until the sentence was 'round circle'. The fun of the game was comparing what the last one had heard with what was originally said. Mostly, they didn't even come close.

Photography by ItzaFineDay.

In project communication, feedback is the most effective tool a manager has.
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Last year I talked to Massimo Sgrelli from GotThingsDone about the future of Project management software. His company had just released version 1.0 of their product WhoDoes back then. Almost a year later, they present WhoDoes 2.0.

In the previous conversation Massimo explained that his company strongly feels that project success depends on two factors:

• Every person in your team must know what to do every morning
• Information must be shared in real time

Their project management product, WhoDoes, has been primarily designed to fulfil these needs.
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This is a posting in The Fish Pond Metaphor series by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar.

The image we like to have of our understanding of globalization is the one popularized by Thomas Friedman, that of a flattened world, in which economic development or potential are equally spread all over the world. Although we would love to believe this, the reality is different. "Globalization has changed the economic playing field, but hasn't leveled it", argues Richard Florida is his article "The World Is Spiky".

Photography by Jaros?aw Pocztarski.

Using several different ways of looking at the globe results always in the same pattern: economic development is clustered, large urban areas create a so-called spike.
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In my series called Proud Postings I ask other bloggers in the Project Management arena: "What are the 3 postings you are most proud of?". This time three great postings from Andrew Filev. He writes on his blog Project Management 2.0 about how Enterprise 2.0 technologies influence project management. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Wrike.

Photography by MikeOcampo.

1. Bridging the Three Gaps in Project Management

MLab Roundtable was a remarkable event. We discussed the ways to improve existing management practices and I had a chance to tell what inspired me to start working on the online project management software - Wrike. I have been managing businesses for more than 8 years now, and I know how inefficient traditional project management tools, like e-mail or Microsoft Project are. Most businesses now have three major gaps that could be easily filled up with the right tool.
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I know this site can get confusing from time to time. I genuine apologize for that. But an ever increasing number of Project Managers is doing an increasing amount of projects effecting many peoples lives. So what we do matters. We need to know what we are doing. We need to know our Project-Management-Self.

Photography by GhostBoy.

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that you can create a balance between plan-driven and agile approaches. You also know that humans need to categorize everything just to make sense of the world. When combining the two statements together, it will become obvious that "plan-driven" and "agile" are also some arbitrary concept created by humans to support the limited mind. There is no natural law defining "agile", there is no eternal balance putting each of them on the extremes of some kind of scale.
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