Category: Business

I found a great online Tshirt business.  You upload any picture you want and then you can offer that image on Tshirts, buttons, mugs, etc …  Cafepress tells you how much it costs them and you mark up your Tshirts with your design however much you want.  When people order your Tshirts, Cafepress makes them to order, sells them to the person that ordered it and pays you the markup.  Pretty cool way to get custom Tshirts made … or to make some extra money.

There are some great designs already up.  Some of the most popular themes are:

• anti-Bush
• army wife
• autism

It only takes minutes to get setup.  Have fun!

Photo by redune.

They’ve proven again that hard work, not talent, is the secret to success. Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success – October 30, 2006.

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

Even when you consider people like Tiger Woods and Warren Buffett.

CEO’s now make a teacher’s annual salary in a day: A Teacher’s Year, a C.E.O.’s Day: The Pay’s Similar – New York Times.  Now I’m sure there are less people qualified or able to be good CEOs than teachers, so supply and demand says they should probably make a little more, but 365 times more?!?

I’ve always encouraged people who dislike their jobs to just leave or look for another one.  (I had a friend once who spent at least 50% of the work day chatting with other people because she couldn’t stand her job.  She even told her manager in hopes they would fire her – she wanted the severance pay.  It didn’t work.  Five years later she finally quit!)  I know that quitting is much, much harder to do than it is to say, but here’s a factoid that might help convince you.

employees who felt their supervisors treated them fairly had a 30 percent lower risk of heart disease

Find the right job and boss for you – your health might be at stake! Here’s the rest of the article Is Your Boss Killing You?.

I don’t post about work related topics on this blog, as it’s my personal blog, but I wanted to let everyone know that I now have a work blog: Stormy on Open Source!

In this New York Times article,  Executives Gone Wild: It’s Not a Pretty Sight – New York Times, Ben Stein compares what employees and stockholders are losing to what executives are making at a few large corporations.  For example, at Delphi, the chairman wants to cut workers’ pay from $25/hr to $12 an hour while the top 600 manages are going to make $510 million.  Read the article for a few more examples like that one.

12 weeks maternity AND paternity leave at 75% of pay at Google! 

At Google, Cube Culture Has New Rules – New York Times.

According to this study women not only shy away from competition (regardless of their abilities) but they also shy away from risk and underestimate their abilities.  The article really "rang true" to me.  It matches what I’ve been seeing among my female friends and their work environments.

Do Women Shy Away from Competition, Even When They Can Win? – Knowledge@Wharton.

The answer seems to be experience.  From Tenure, Turnover and the Quality of Teaching – New York Times.

The most important single influence is experience: first-year teachers are much less effective than others. The second year is significantly better, and by the fourth year, most teachers hit their stride.

But it’s not as clear cut as it sounds.

It is not entirely clear whether this experience effect is learning by doing (the more you teach, the more effective you become) or survival of the fittest (those who are not good at teaching tend to drop out early).

I think they miss the point though.  What makes a good teacher?  They assume it’s a teacher whose students improve on tests.  (And that may be the case but it should not be assumed.)  The business world tells us it’s all about metrics.  People will tend to do what you measure them by.  So if good teachers are those whose students get better scores on tests, teachers will work hard to make sure their students do well on tests.