Jerry Bowles - Posts

 

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How to Become One of America’s Fastest Growing Companies – The Alsbridge Story

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Alsbridge.

In a sluggish economy, outsourcing represents an attractive strategy for many companies to remain competitive or even survive.  The challenge of building successful outsourcing relationships is formidable, however.   How do you to identify what to outsource?  How do you find the right partner to outsource it to? How do you manage the relationship in a way that assures the performance levels you require and produces the cost savings you need?  The cost of failure is high.

Helping companies successfully answer strategic questions like this has made Alsbridge one of the fastest-growing companies in America and a global leader in data-driven benchmarking, outsourcing consulting and network advisory services for CIOs.   Founded ten years ago, Alsbridge has enjoyed meteoric growth, fueled in part by acquisitions, including most recently by its acquisition of Telwares, a leading consulting firm that provides network optimization and transformation services to clients worldwide.

Alsbridge’s rise has just gotten another big boost with an investment from private equity firm LLR Partners, which ...

Getting Beyond the 'So What' of Cloud Computing - The Alsbridge Story

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Alsbridge.

Cloud computing is the all the rage these days, but many companies are still having a tough time making the transition.  The major stumbling block is not the technology—which is proven—but the "So what?"  So, you have the cloud capability.  What is it going to do for you beyond deliver lower costs?  This challenge has created a significant opportunity in the marketplace for advisory firms that can guide companies through the change management, operational alignment, and business case validation required to produce positive business and financial results.

No advisory firm has filled the niche for transformation advice more aggressively and successfully than Alsbridge, the fast-growing Dallas-based global consulting firm that provides data-driven sourcing advisory and benchmarking services for IT, Finance and Sourcing executives worldwide.  Alsbridge's core competency is helping companies reduce costs and get more value from their vendors by leveraging proprietary tools and information databases to identify and engage the optimal vendors for each client, negotiate best practice terms at fair ...

Recognition Programs Drive Performance Management

Sixty-four percent of companies that have an employee recognition program say their employees are rewarded according to job performance versus just 36 percent of organizations who do not have a recognition program in place. These are just two of the noteworthy statistics from the SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey*, announced today by Globoforce® (www.globoforce.com), the world’s leading provider of employee recognition solutions, and Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest association devoted to human resource management. To download the Winter 2012 report, click here

The SHRM/Globoforce semi-annual survey examines the current state of HR leaders’ employee engagement and recognition practices and their impact on performance management. Today’s leaders face increasing competition to hire skilled workers and retain top talent – a business’s number one asset. The survey reveals that employee engagement is still the number one priority among HR professionals. The recent survey also uncovers a connection between recognition programs and engagement and retention levels, all crucial elements amidst an awakening job market.

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A Death in the Family

I apologize to those of you who have noticed a lack of updates over the past few years.  My wife, best friend, soulmate and reason to live died peacefully at home last  Tuesday after a long struggle with lung disease. She was 67. We were married for 47 years and shared incredible experiences together.  I have worked at home for the past 20 of those years and we spent every day together and neither of us ever got bored.  I posted my personal favorite photograph and a few words on Sequenza21, my most personal blog.   The link is here. ...

A Brief History of Corporate Whining

via Ampersand

The All-Time Greatest Job Interview Question

 

Sorry.  Couldn't resist.

Lest We Forget

What we know to be not possible,
Though time after time foretold
By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil
Gibbering in their trances,
Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme
Like will and kill, comes to pass
Before we realize it: we are surprised
At the ease and speed of our deed
And uneasy: It is barely three,
Mid-afternoon, yet the blood
Of our sacrifice is already
Dry on the grass; we are not prepared
For silence so sudden and so soon;
The day is too hot, too bright, too still,
Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.
What shall we do till nightfall?

W.H. Auden, Nones

Google+ Changes Everything, or Why Mark Zuckerberg is a Schmuck

If Facebook and Twitter were public companies, they would be worth about half as much this week as they were last week. The reason is the new social networking platform called Google+ that is now being rolled out and attracting devotees at a rate that would make the new Harry Potter film's producers envious.  

I have been using Google+ for several days now and have quickly become addicted. In fact, I've used it more in the past week than I have used Facebook in the past two or three years.There is just a little too much sense of being naked in public on Facebook for my taste and my page is always cluttered up with inane stuff from relatives that I only "friended" to be polite in the first place.  I use Twitter a lot for demand generation but I have never tried to have an actual conversation.  Communicating with people in a constipated form of digital haiku is amusing for about ten minutes. 

Google+ solves those problems and many more you didn't know you had.  The way Google+ works is that you organize your contacts in Circles.  You might, for example, have an "Inner Circle" for your closest friends, a "Business Circle" for people you work ...

Finally, Social Media explained

Hat tip to my buddy Tom Stewart

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Hugh McLeod on "How to Spot a Bubble"

Say Hello to Hugh ...