Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance


Glassdoor.com recently published its list of the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance, as rated by reviewers on its site, people who have worked at the companies themselves.

Cited most often at the highest-rated companies: flexible work hours and generous time off. In other words, the things that let employees be human beings instead of cogs in a corporate wheel.

The winning companies run the gamut as far as industries and job types: manufacturing, airlines, consulting, pharmaceuticals, and services. It goes to show that work-life balance isn't about what type of job you have -- it's about who's running the place and what their values are.

In my book, this is yet another win for the internet. Previously, only journalists and magazines like FastCompany and BusinessWeek created "top places to work" lists. Now you can get the ratings straight from the (work)horse's mouth.

I've discussed Glassdoor.com in the past. I'm glad to see that the site is thriving and getting its name out there.

Glassdoor also publishes a Top 50 Best Places to Work list. Not surprisingly, it includes most of the companies that got named in the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance list.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

When Science Is Art

Can you love science – maybe even be a scientist yourself – and still be awed, even spiritually moved, by natural wonders?

No one answers that question better than my friend and colleague Sue Baugh. Her new book Echoes of Earth, which comes out this fall, is filled to the brim with photos of ancient mineral sites. These colorful, dramatic rock formations are a geologist’s dream. But the book deals equally with what these sites mean to us as living beings, and their potential to inspire us.

The Book

Echoes of Earth has been Sue’s passion and labor of love for several years. She and her co-author traveled to far corners of the earth (including Greenland, Australia, the Northwest Territories) to take these stunning photographs. Check them out (and order the book) at their website, www.wildstonearts.com.

I wish I could share what it is like to watch Sue present. Last weekend, to an audience at Fritz Pastry in Chicago, she showed slides of her photographs and her journey around the world, and shared the lessons she’s taken from that journey. Her sense of wonder and appreciation of these natural phenomena is contagious.

And, I confess, the decorator in me is salivating over the textiles being created as companion products. If those hoodies get finished anytime soon, Sue, my birthday is in September!

Can Science Be Spiritual?

I’ve always loved science. It’s why I majored in biology. I love knowing how things work, and how we can create medicine using natural processes and plants.

Science – and nature itself – can often seem dry, cold, clinical, and dispassionate (which is one reason I left the lab to pursue more creative lines of work). Yet nothing on this earth is more spiritual to me than standing in the middle of a vast forest, or on the side of a mountain. Nowhere on earth do I feel more inspired, more humbled, more imaginative, or more at peace. I’ve never been able to explain that. I just know it’s true.

I think Sue gets that. Her book covers the science: how minerals create colors and patterns in stone; how continental drift created similar geological sites on opposite ends of the planet; how colossal shifts in the earth’s crust can turn million-ton slabs of rock onto their sides so that horizontal deposits now point at the sky. But ultimately it’s about what happens to you when you witness these phenomena. It’s about how taking yourself into nature itself creates an experience that is incomparable with anything man-made.

I encourage you to check it out. I think you’ll like it.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Your Favorite Books, Ultra Condensed

If editors had contests, one of them might be, "How concise can you make this sentence/paragraph/novel?" In other words, how few words can you boil a concept down into while still retaining its essential meaning? Seventeen? How about twelve? FOUR! We have a winner!

OK, so it's not THAT exciting. You won't be seeing an Extreme Editing reality TV competition anytime soon.

But I have to give props to Better Book Titles for making it fun (and with picture goodness). In their own words:

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

For example, the classic Charlotte's Web was condensed to: "Spiders Make Great Publicists." Love it.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Outsourcing Children's Textbooks


When you were a kid, did you ever wonder who wrote the articles, study guides, and quizzes that were in your school textbooks?

Probably not. If you gave it any thought at all, you likely thought it was all written by a teacher even more boring than your own.

But now that we're adults, we should think about it. Why? Because today, much of the content of school textbooks gets outsourced to foreign countries.

It's true. A large amount of textbook content is written by non-native English speakers because American publishing houses don't want to pay higher wages to American writers.

I will be covering this subject again soon. It's too long for just one post. But for now, I'll share a blurb from a website of one particular offshore company (thanks to one of my colleagues for passing it along). This company says it provides "end-to-end content management" for schools and other clients. And yet its own website is a compelling advertisement for why you shouldn't hire them for such work. For the record, this blurb contains:
  • Singular/plural errors: 2
  • Comma misuse/omission: 4
  • Hyphen misuse/omission: 3
  • Erroneous capitalization: 7
  • Incorrect word choice (e.g. "Corporates" instead of "Corporations"): 3
  • Run-on sentences: 2
Would you want this company teaching your kid how to read and write?

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Founded in 1994, I------ today services many of the top 20 global publishers with highly specialized offerings across segments such as STM, Academic, Higher Education, School, Trade etc. With presence across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific it is currently positioned amongst the top 6 publishing services companies in India. I------ has a strong team of 1200+ highly qualified professionals with diverse skill sets delivering top notch quality to their customer which is only reflective in its long standing relationships with many of its customers.

Headquartered in Pondicherry, India, I------ has its Global Service Delivery Centers at India (Pondicherry and Chennai) and the US (Chicago and New York) services its customers through wholly owned subsidiaries in the UK and USA.