“Quite a bit back, I wrote on the subject of “No Job Titles.” The subject has come up again within Adaptive Path, as Todd’s post shows. There’s also been discussion on internal mailing lists, which prompted me to write the following…”

“Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”

“A new IT department is being born. You don’t control it. You may not even be aware of it. But your users are, and figuring out how to work with it will be the key to your future and your company’s success.”

“A form of intelligence relating to the emotional side of life, such as the ability to recognize and manage one’s own and others’ emotions, to motivate oneself and restrain impulses, and to handle interpersonal relationships effectively. Originated by Daniel Goldman, psychologist, denoting the cluster of traits/abilities relating to the emotional side of life.”

“People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.”

“Erik K. Antonsson, a prof at Caltech, has a page of quotations related to design and engineering. Some samples: ‘If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.’ -Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.”

“As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers took away from improving our software, but we learned a lot and now we have a much better customer service operation.”

“…while having fewer meetings is definitely the way to go in many workplaces, eliminating all meetings is not an option in today’s team-based work environment. This means that having good meetings become essential… If we really want open, fun, creative, participative meetings we need to go beyond the standard advice and venture into slightly-weird-land. Here are five easy ways to do it.”

“I was talking with a friend recently that works the customer service phones for the company she is with. She mentioned that her company expects her to solve any customer’s problem in three minutes or less. That sounds like a policy created by someone trying to save a few bucks while thousands of potential sales walk down the street to the nearest competitor.”

“Welcome to the 100 Best Corporate Citizens page. For the past eight years, Business Ethics Magazine (and now The CRO) has been working with KLD Research & Analytics to rank and recognize publicly listed U.S. companies that excel at serving a variety of stakeholders. The 100 Best Corporate Citizens list is regarded as the third most influential corporate ranking, behind Fortune magazine’s ‘Most Admired Companies’ and ‘100 Best Companies to Work For,’ according to a PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey.”

“Keep track of GTD blogs, software, news, etc. all on one page.”

“Steve Murphy, CEO of publishing company Rodale, says, ‘A line in a William Blake poem inspired me to think differently about my day: ‘Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.‘ This has made a huge difference in my life. Now, I take out a yellow pad every morning and write my thoughts for the day, which allows me to be much more strategic and proactive than reactive.’”

“Dynamic identities fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that consistency is essential to an effective corporate identity. The more we see the same corporate symbol — or so the consistency camp argues — the more likely we’ll be to recognize and remember it. Companies adhered to this throughout the 20th century; and the designers of some of the most successful identities, such as Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books in the late 1940s, and Paul Rand as a consultant to IBM from the 1950s to the early 1990s, were renowned for their rigor.”

“Here are three founder scenarios, all with parallels to cases I teach our MBA students: #1: You have an idea for a great product and want to start a company. Do you start it yourself (and keep all of the equity) or do you find a good co-founder (with whom you have to split the equity 50/50)?…”

“People ask me, ‘How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?’ Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial. If I own company FOO, I don’t need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they’re doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.”