“Three of my favorite topics are international labor, entrepreneurship and hiring - so I asked a good friend of mine to put together an essay for this site. Courtney Couch runs a company called Web Creators. They provide private labeled website building. The guys from WebCreators decided to open an office in India and Courtney has spent much of the last year out there. The following is an essay with photos highlighting his experiences recruiting customer service and programming talent by setting up an office in Bangalore. Please post comments if you like this post.”

“I’ve worked for companies that spent their entire ad and marketing budget on making their existing users deliriously happy. Let’s say your marketing and/or ad budget doesn’t have the same legs it used to, or that you’ve just decided to make a change. Or maybe you don’t even have a marketing budget. Is there something you can do that might be more creative and, in many cases today, at least–if not more–effective?”

“An ‘elevator pitch’ is a quick and concise way to communicate who you are, what you’re trying to do and why you do it better. It’s much more than a mission statement, it’s understanding your business in a way that gets people excited and thinking.”

“How do you get good ideas for startups? That’s probably the number one question people ask me. I’d like to reply with another question: why do people think it’s hard to come up with ideas for startups?”

“To understand what determines whether a job is designed for high performance, you must put yourself in the shoes of your organization’s managers. To carry out his or her job, each employee has to know the answer to four basic questions…”

“Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.”

“Much of the used computer equipment sent from the United States to developing countries for use in homes, schools and businesses is often neither usable nor repairable, creating enormous environmental problems in some of the world’s poorest places, according to a report to be issued today by an environmental organization.”

“Are you in the midst of a traditional development project that cannot take a leap toward Agile, but you know could benefit from being nudged in that direction? Does your project have stakeholders or management who are willing to discuss the merits of Agile development but won’t give you the time to investigate an Agile methodology, much less switch to it? Are you a project manager or team lead who has read or heard a bit about Agile development and wants to experiment with it but are, yourself, too skeptical to make a large upfront investment?”