Are managers born or made?
The politically correct answer is made, but there are certain traits that can’t be taught.
Read MoreTag: Corporate Culture
What’s In a Conference Room Name?
The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
Large corporations’ enthusiasm for giving conference rooms offbeat names can no longer be considered a mere fad. The practice has been around too long, and is now a fixture (Leah Fessler in Quartz). Labeling these often otherwise indistinguishable rooms has become a method for a firm to tell the world what it’s all about. As business scholar Sarah Brazaitis puts it in Quartz, “Companies that name their conference and meeting rooms according to themes are doing so to communicate their values and organizational culture to their employees, customers, clients, and all who enter.”
The Quartz piece offers a lengthy, though hardly exhaustive, catalog of some representative conference-room-naming practices today. Sometimes the schemes are straightforward: At Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the names are those of legendary space explorers. Twitter uses bird species and, since moving into its downtown San Francisco HQ, names related to the history of its home town.
Read MoreWhen Your Company Is Not What You Think It Is (We Read So You Don’t Have To)
“If you want to work here,” CEO Stephen Gill says about his company 50onRed, “you have to be passionate about advertising.” That’s not true. If you want to work at the Philadelphia-based tech stalwart, you have to come to terms with the idea that you’re working at a company that makes its living from malware.
“The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do,” Juliana Reyes’ longread for Backchannel, goes deep on what it’s like when people find out that the business they think their company is in (advertising) is actually something much darker (injecting rogue ads into websites via malware). Some leave, some find reasons to stay ranging from greed to fear to comaraderie to the genuine technical challenges the company offers, some vacillate. It’s an outstanding, social look at what it’s like working at a company dedicated to making the world a little worse.
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