In the echo chamber of discussion since Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ordered her employees to end telecommuting and move back into the office, there’s been a general consensus that telecommuting may make employees happier, but it’s not always good for the company or—especially—innovation at a company. More
Does proximity matter for innovation? Marissa Mayer thinks it does, and has been getting chastised for it. The Yahoo CEO recently ordered her fellow Yahooligans to stop working from home and come into the office. She believes that proximity creates a better atmosphere for innovation. Yahoo’s human resources chief Jackie Reses explained in a memo: “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” But that’s not where we’re supposed to be heading in the age of the Internet. More
Humans are intelligent, yet unpredictable. Robots are programmed to be predictably logical. Can they get along? These days they don't have much of a choice, as robots increasingly perform human tasks and work with human teams. As reported in SmartPlanet, researchers at MIT are examining ways to establish trustworthy and efficient relationships between humans and robots, using a cross training approach to team building. Their research shows that teams in which a robot and its human partner swap roles on different days become more efficient. More
Futurist, artificial intelligence pioneer, and author Ray Kurzweil announced Friday that he will start a new job on Monday, Dec. 17, as Director of Engineering for Google. The inventor says he will assist the company with tough computer science problems to turn "unrealistic" visions into reality. More
That monitoring employees' every move will make them miserable might seem like Management 101, but an engineer and a psychologist say employers could have happier workers through surveillance. The idea is to apply the tools of the quantified-self movement to assess worker engagement and satisfaction throughout the day. In a story called "Can Technology Make You Happy?" in IEEE Spectrum's December issue Kazuo Yano, a nanostructured-silicon device engineer at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, along with PhD candidate Joseph Chancellor report on their collaboration to measure worker well-being with wearable biometric sensors More
According to Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick,"The building industry is falling dangerously behind other parts of the economy, raising costs and potentially imperiling American competitiveness." The inaugural Intelligent Jobsites Construction Technology Conference, taking place today in New York City, seeks to address inefficiencies in the construction industry that technology can help to remedy. More
Digital Management Partner Insights
Working from home has become the norm for many corporate employees. One in five employees worldwide ‘telecommute' on a regular basis. In the United States, more than 26 million people work from home on a regular basis, according to the Telework 2011 report. And even workers who spend the majority of their time in the office often check email and do work tasks from home—with 80% of employees completing company work on weekends and evenings. More
In this video from the "21st Century Individuals vs. 20th Century Organizations" session at Techonomy 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick asks Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and co-founder and CEO of Square, how he juggles two full-time jobs. What it all comes down to, says Dorsey, is a lot of discipline and structure, not to mention a 16-hour workday. More
In this video from Techonomy 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., Gary Hamel, director of Management Lab, challenges companies to let employees have the same financial and creative flexibility on the job that that they have at home. Why, he asks, can a woman in Bangladesh get a micro-loan more readily than the average frontline employee at a global 1000 company can get a small amount of money for something experimental? More
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