I don't often post promotions of this sort, but I like this company. I have read all three of their $5.99 eBooks on Management, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship. They are a bargain packed with great advice and information. Their website, Caliper Corporation has white papers, case studies and podcasts...all for free. And the event below is free!  Caliper is in Princeton, NJ.


Why Women Leaders Are One of Your Greatest Talent Assets.
I’d like to invite you to attend a complimentary networking and learning event we’ll be holding in Newport Beach, CA on November 7th from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. at The Island Hotel Newport Beach on Why Women Leaders Are One of Your Greatest Talent Assets.

This event will feature a panel discussion with three influential women leaders who will discuss their leadership journey as well as the challenges and successes they’ve dealt with in their careers.  

Also, Caliper expert Carol Chenot, VP of Organizational Development Services will facilitate further discussion by sharing the results of Caliper’s Women Leaders study, which will help you:
·         Ensure that gender diversity aligns with your corporate values
·         Build that diversity into your selection process
·         Understand the unique development issues that women leaders face and how can they be addressed
·         Learn how women in 2013 are addressing work-life balance proactively and productively.

To reserve your spot and to view the agenda, click here.
This will be a great opportunity for you to network with other Southern California leaders, hear the latest research, and explore practical tools for ensuring that gender diversity in your organization leads to targeted business results. 

Frank Costanzo
Senior Vice President of Sales
CALIPER  Helping Companies Hire and Develop Top Performers
Sloan Award Recipient for Excellence in Workplace Effectiveness and Flexibility
506 Carnegie Center, Suite 300 | Princeton, NJ 08540  | Office: (609) 524-1323

It sure can and has been repeated. I have watched Whole Food gentrify an entire locale all buy themselves in less than 6 years. Now that is brand magic! Status by association, indeed.

Who are you networked with? Who are you name dropping in your CV and on your blog? How can you shine in the glow of an other's radiant sun?

There is a lesson to be learned here aside from eating organic and free range. If we worked as hard on our brands and reputations as Whole Foods has then people would want to hang by with us too, and even hire us.



Can the Whole Foods Effect Be Repeated?
By Kriston Capps

Urban-issues columnist Will Doig tackles the so-called Whole Foods Effect in a Salon story about development in Detroit—and well, development in every city that’s seen significant gentrification in the last decade or so. Detroit is the latest—following Washington, D.C., in 2000, Pittsburgh in 2002, and Boston last year—to see a neighborhood jolt following the announcement of the arrival of a Whole Foods.

In Detroit, developers are betting big that the Whole Foods Effect will transform Midtown—$4.2 million big, Doig reports. “That figure suggests city leaders believe that Whole Foods is a force unto itself that can give a neighborhood the escape velocity it needs to break free of its doldrums,” he says, and then asks: “Are they right?”

Doig writes that Whole Foods occupies a unique position in the food-market eco-system: It’s a debt-free company with 50 new stores coming online. Businesses piggyback off of Whole Foods’s advance work: The company looks for neighborhood areas with 200,000 people (a college-educated set at that) living within a 20-minute-drive radius. That may be Whole Foods’s greatest signal to developers and businesses: They’ve done the math so you don’t have to.

The numbers bear out, Doig writes:

An exhaustive 2007 study by Johnson Reid quantified the effects that individual urban amenities have on home prices. Using hedonic modeling, it found that a specialty grocer will increase surrounding home prices by an average of 17.5 percent, more than bookstores, bike shops or gyms (with the caveat, of course, that this varies greatly depending on the situation — in the instances studied, the increases ranged widely from 6 to 29 percent).

Then he digs into the effect it’s had on D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood (which is a stone’s throw from ARCHITECT’s offices):

When Whole Foods moved onto P Street in Washington, D.C., 13 years ago, the only nightlife on the block was a divey (and awesome) rock club called the Vegas Lounge. The Lounge is still there, but it’s since been joined by a popular burger joint called Stoney’s, a “food-to-fork” locavore restaurant called Logan Tavern that owns a farm 30 miles south of the city, a Starbucks (open till 8 p.m.), a coffeehouse-slash-bar called Commissary and several retail stores, all squeezed onto the same block as Whole Foods.

His D.C. example raises a couple of salient points. One big plus to the P Street N.W. Whole Foods is its design: Its parking lot is small and underground, as it was clearly meant to fit into the neighborhood, not replace a big chunk of it. Many of the Whole Foods throughout the U.S. Northeast, in fact, are designed to encourage walkable communities. Other grocery stores in D.C. looked like the original Whole Foods in Austin, Texas—that is, a stand-alone, big-box grocer with a great deal of its footprint set aside for parking. When the D.C. Whole Foods opened it 2000, it was the only grocery store signaling urban density at the time.

Back then, Whole Foods was also one of relatively few grocery stores serving D.C. at all. A Safeway store popularly known as the Soviet Safeway—so named for its frequent shortages—was then the closest grocery store, and that one was a neighborhood away. It’s hard to say whether the Whole Foods Effect is the function of a singular urban-organic-brand signaling, or if Whole Foods is just a savvy company identifying niches in the marketplace.

Doig puts this question another way: “Could a Safeway gentrify a neighborhood like Midtown Detroit? Could a Wal-Mart?” Doig says no—but Safeway and Wal-Mart want this answer to be yes. Wal-Mart is opening six new stores in D.C., and the preliminary designs that the company has released for its first foray into the capital look nothing at all like their sprawling cousins in the suburbs. They look like Whole Foods. Chains such as Safeway and Giant are updating their brands to follow; a popular Giant a mile or two up the road from the Logan Circle Whole Foods is known widely as the Gentrification Giant—because it appears to have contributed to (or to have benefited from) the sort of growth that the Whole Foods Effect describes.

One thing is clear: When it comes to big-store grocers spurring urban growth, Whole Foods has won the first-mover advantage.

  Here is the source of this article

This comes as no surprise. I do a values assessment with clients to determine what has worked in previous jobs and what they want in future positions.

I have seen the majority of people leave for the lack of value satisfaction primarily caused by a bad boss, carnivorous teammates, or a toxic corporate culture. It was rarely if ever the money. Money factors in leaving if they have not gotten raises in several years or been passed over for promotions.

Typically people focus on negotiating the money on the way in, so they know what they are getting. They often ignore the red flags on the people and culture.

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Hard to believe? According to Michelle McQuaid, a world leader in positive psychology interventions in the workplace, if you feel unappreciated, uninspired, lonely, and miserable, you’re not alone.

In a survey of  1000 American Executives McQuaid found a “whopping” 35 percent of Americans are happy at their job. And, 65 percent say a better boss would make them happy. Only 35 percent say a pay raise will do the same thing.........A 2009 study published by the Harvard Business Review suggested, “…the majority of people say they trust a stranger more than they trust their boss.”

read more here

Anyone who thinks they should wait and see how things progress will be left behind in the dust of societal, economic, cultural, and political change. The job you will have tomorrow may be in an industry that is just being born today. The products, markets and companies of next month and next year may not have existed 6 years ago. Facebook opened its site to the general public just six years ago.

This article is a great testimonial to the power of change driven by technology. Now in YouTube stars are born, serious money is made, and the global economy feels more and more like a neighborhood.

A decade ago the record industry’s gears clicked along more or less as they always had: Labels signed up promising acts discovered by A&R scouts, paid those acts advances against future music sales, and hawked that music through a sprawling network of radio programmers and retailers. Today, with album sales continuing to plummet—in 2004, 666.7 million albums were sold; by 2012 that number was down more than 50 percent, to 316 million—labels and artists depend more than ever on touring and merchandise for revenue. Songs are ads meant to help sell tickets and T-shirts, and YouTube is beginning to rival radio when it comes to breaking those tracks. Recognizing this, the trade magazine Billboardrecently overhauled its formula for determining the most popular music in the country, giving YouTube plays more weight. The following week, Harlem Shake topped the Hot 100 chart—the first instrumental track to do so since Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme in 1984. Five weeks later, it was still there.

Read more at Bloomberg BusinessWeek

They have been doing the same ridiculous surveys for year and the results never change. Neither does the corporate response  to the answers. Employees want to be better paid. It is no secret that the American worker's standard of living and income has continually lost ground over the past 30+ years. The workloads increases while the wealth has not trickled down and it is unlikely to do so as globalism continues to level the employment playing field. Only the very few types of skilled professionals will be sought after and well compensated.
On the other hand, the continuous request for flexibility has shown some improvement over the years as global, distributed teams have increased the necessity to work remotely and at staggered times across borders, as has the increased cost of energy. It seems that having employees work from home saves on energy costs at work.
People have wanted the same things since serfdom ended: to be recognized for work done not micromanaged for time put in, to be rewarded fairly, and to trusted and treated as thoughtful, contributing adults not mindless drones.  

CareerBuilder Survey Reveals Most Wanted Office Perks and What Motivates Workers to Stay With Companies
CHICAGO, January 24, 2013 – .....A new CareerBuilder survey explores which job factors are most important to today’s workers. More than 3,900 full-time workers nationwide participated in the survey conducted online by Harris Interactive© from November 1 to November 30, 2012.
Nearly one-third of employers (32 percent) reported that top performers left their organizations in 2012 and 39 percent are concerned that they’ll lose top talent in 2013. While most workers (66 percent) stated that they are generally satisfied with their jobs, one in four (25 percent) said they will change jobs in 2013 or 2014.

How important is title?
While upward mobility is a key factor in job satisfaction and employee retention, having a certain title isn’t important to more than half of workers (55 percent). The vast majority (88 percent) reported that salary matters more. Other factors that outrank job title in what is most important to workers are:



· Flexible schedule – 59 percent
· Being able to make a difference – 48 percent
· Challenging work – 35 percent
· Ability to work from home – 33 percent
· Academic reimbursement – 18 percent
· Having an office – 17 percent
· Company car – 14 percent
Read more

How to Judge Potential Employees on Behavior and Mannerisms This is the title of a video from About.com Human Resources that says,"A potential employees behavior and mannerisms can be the most telling part of the job interview. Learn how to gauge actions and behavior to see if the candidate would be a successful employee."

Hopefully, I have successfully reverse engineered the process advised in this video so that my clients display appropriate interview behaviors to match any interviewer. Our goal is always to do what it takes to turn the interview into an offer.  You can always turn down an offer if you think your are not a fit or it isn't quite the right opportunity. 

But you don't want to hand over that power to the interviewer. You control your total delivery during the interview, not just what you say but how you look, sound and move when you respond.

The most scary statement a recruiter can make is to tell you to relax and be yourself. Do not do that!  But this does put you on the alert to be very attentive to the recruiter's body language, mannerisms and the non-verbal feedback to the answers that you supply to their questions. That's exactly what they are doing to you!

Interviewing as an art  should be a well choreographed dance between you and the interviewers. How many times have you lost out on a great position because you didn't read the interviewer correctly or rubbed them the wrong way? Record your voice as you practice answering questions. Use your laptop to video your practice interviews. Microsoft OneNote will actually record the screen as you to this so you can track your improvement. 

If you get really good at interviewing in any situation, with any style of interviewer, and any company then you can afford to be your self when you want to not when they want you to.

It is so addictive when surfing around the Internet to identify and click on interesting bits of information, articles, news stories with the little Pinterest Pin It button and post an image and link to one of my Pinterest boards.

Pinterest is a visually, discriminating version of Delicious.com, and Stumbleupon. I pick out a relevant image on the article's page, tag it and attach a brief comment/opinion of my own. I use the image to attract your attention to the information and the article.

I know that's not exactly what Pinterest intended but it works. Most people put up a collage of clothes, artwork, jewelry, photos, fashion, food, travel, movies and music images. You know, lifestyle.

Just look at the Pinterest category list. There is no category for business, the economy, globalization, philosophy, history, politics, careers and jobs, or any of my board titles. Pinterest has self-created its own limitations because it focuses on the image as an end unto itself rather than the means, conduit and connection to an even greater end... the source of the image and attached link.

I connected my Facebook profile to Pinterest so that all my pins post to FB. I have had, in just two days, several people comment and repin a number of pins. Now that is cool because nobody comments on my blog posts, except for the occasional spamer.

Check out my Pinterest boards on Career Tools, Global Economy, Working Wisdom and Culture.
You may get addicted too!