mydeco counter-cyclical start-up

“It's time to wipe your feet and come on in ... mydeco the place that makes it easier and much more fun to make your home more you.”

mydeco brings together the widest possible range of products from high street stores to niche retailers, thousands of inspiring looks to fit your budget, expert designers on hand for advice, and simple 3D tools to help you plan your room before you even open a tin of paint.

mydeco
{it's leaping, vaulting, nothing's impossible ambition}
mydeco
{it's exceptional, professional and passionately progressive}
mydeco
{it's collaborative, responsive and totally committed}

Thinking behind the idea ...

Counter-cyclical start-up theory:

“When the big players retrench, the opportunities to innovate increase. Going against the grain is where entrepreneurs win.”

mydeco founder Brent Hoberman (of Lastminute.com) is Executive Chairman of mydeco, non-executive Chairman of WAYN (a travel and leisure social network with over 9 million members), a non-executive board director of Guardian Media Group and also acts as Governor of University of the Arts College, London. mydeco employs 35 people based in Victoria, London.

"We’ve got a passionate and talented founding team on board, with experience ranging from Community-building and 3D Design to Interior Designers and Architects."

Read More......

Summary only...

Us-and-them Syndrome

“Us-and-them syndrome eats away at al-Jazeera English”

Al-Jazeera English was launched in a blaze of publicity a little over a year ago, but what has happened to the dream of creating a multinational broadcaster since is dispiriting. The collapse in morale among employees, whether caused by financial constraints, a clash of cultures or political pressures, is a pity, because competition for Anglo-American news media is a healthy thing.

Discord was sowed from inception. The English channel operated at arm's length from the Arabic channel, offering better terms and conditions than those offered to staff at its headquarters and employees elsewhere - after all, Sir David Frost was on the payroll.

The repeated emphasis that the international channel would be independent from external influence also created ructions, because it implied that the original Arabic news channel was somehow not. Pointedly, its name was changed from al-Jazeera International to al-Jazeera English just prior to its launch.

Nigel Parsons, the English channel's managing director, started well, building a channel not wildly different from the BBC - a bit bland but certainly careful to report in a balanced way.

Yet it was never clear who the viewer was: outside Africa and Asia, resources were stretched. The mix of news could only have pleased diehard internationalists; most people also want a good dollop of news from home, but there was little from the US or Britain, where many English-speaking viewers are likely to be. There was also precious little marketing or viewing data.

Then, al-Jazeera English began to be reined in. From the summer, management clamped down on overheads and benefits, querying whether expatriate journalists needed to be paid so much. Parsons was excluded from board meetings, to the point where he reportedly had to glean information from a secretary.

Now, the climate of suspicion is such that some believe that political pressure will be exerted on their journalism, although accounts as to whether this is happening vary.

Al-Jazeera in Arabic, of course, made its reputation by being in tune with the views on the Arab street, but today's talk is of a softer line on the Saudi regime.

Two Arabic journalists recently published interviews with militants on their personal websites because they could not get them aired. One was with Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, who is suspected of involvement in the killing of Benazir Bhutto. The Mehsud interview, done in December before the assassination, did not appear, but a second interview conducted with Mehsud in January did air in the past week. It is easy to stir strong feelings here, and the reality of how news organisations work is always more complex than outsiders think. But trust is breaking down. In December, an emotional staff meeting heard an avalanche of grievances. At least one industrial tribunal hearing is in the offing, and the situation is summed up in the words of an employee internet posting:

“You don't need us Westerners any more do you?”

Al-Jazeera English was meant to help extinguish such them-and-us sentiments; that they are emerging shows how bad morale is. The emotion behind the scenes is beginning to surface publicly, and once credibility drains away outside, it is very, very hard to win it back.

Source: Times Online

Read More......

Summary only...

Making talent a strategic priority

“Finding and retaining talented employees is at least as challenging today as it was ten years ago.”

Demographic trends, globalization, and the growth of knowledge work have intensified the external pressures on companies—but many of them compound the problem by failing to make talent management a strategic priority.

Executives can act on their rhetoric about the importance of employees in creating competitive advantage and embed a robust talent strategy in the overall business strategy if they focus on all workforce segments and not just on the top performers, create different value propositions for employees with different characteristics, and increase the role and capabilities of the human-resources (HR) function.
Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.

Ten years after McKinsey conducted its War for Talent research, the 1997 study drawing attention to an imminent shortage of executives, the problem remains acute—and if anything has become worse. Companies face a demographic landscape dominated by the looming retirement of baby boomers in the developed world and by a dearth of young people entering the workforce in Western Europe. Meanwhile, question marks remain over the appropriateness of the talent in many emerging markets.

Business leaders are deeply concerned, judging by two McKinsey Quarterly global surveys. The first, in 2006, indicated that the respondents regarded finding talented people as likely to be the single most important managerial preoccupation for the rest of this decade. The second, conducted in November 2007, revealed that nearly half of the respondents expect intensifying competition for talent—and the increasingly global nature of that competition—to have a major effect on their companies over the next five years. No other global trend was considered nearly as significant. Continue here


Source: McKinsey

Read More......

Summary only...