Pay-For-Performance or How to fail your human resources management
I am the president of non profit organisation which helps children and adolescents to foster the acquisition of knowledge and skills allowing a personal development, a self-esteem and sense of responsibility by working on a barge [2], doing sport and acting imaginatively and creatively through the organisation of cultural events.
As many public administrations we are publicly funded and collect few donations to be used to increase the salary of our team (a coordinator and two animators). We try to keep them motivated, as my HR manager told me more that 5 years ago, but it doesn’t work.
My definition of the motivation is:
- Inform honestly on the difficulty of the job (but psychologists say: if you don’t experience it you can’t truly evaluate its difficulty or simplicity – think when you had your first child)
- Focus on the dreams of the employees but use their past knowledge and interest (e.g. we had a professor or theatre courses who never gave any classes to our children)
- Answer honestly to the questions of the employees
- Involve the employees during each discussions when strategic decisions are made
- Give a full autonomy to the employees to organise activities with our children
But apparently it is still not sufficient, the work looks too hard:
- Maintaining a barge of 38×6 square meters
- Educating children though the work, the sport and the culture
- Motivating children
On top of that, we had difficulties to recruit new members of our Management Board as people are too busy to dedicate time for a mid-long term; On the contrary, we find easily volunteers for short-term (read semester) participation to achieve the goal of the organisation with the children.
Definitively, the motivation is not the only reason why we will keep our children, employees and members of the Board in our organisation.
Recently I found a definition of the motivation which made by Daniel H. Pink. He is an American writer, author of many books focusing on the world of work.
Below is a talk presenting the gap between what science knows about motivation and what companies apply. Apparently, we don’t need sweeter carrots and sharper sticks, we need a whole new approach, an approach that puts more stock in intrinsic motivation.
Dan identifies three elements that comprise a new way of thinking about motivation [1]:
- Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
- Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters.
- Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Based on that assumption I’ll be able to evaluate our definition of the motivation to keep our employees proud of them and willing to help children who need guidance during this ‘crisis” era where the bonus of the individuals have generated one of the biggest economical decline!
let’s watch this 5 stars talk:
[1] End of December, Dan will release a new book: “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”
[2] Semaphore nonprofit organisation: http://asblsemaphore.skyrock.com/
Finding the name of your company or service
When you look for a name for your company or your service, use this strategy:
Use a name that represents to your clients:
- What you do
- How you do it
- and What you deliver
For example: Technology, Consulting and Integration Solutions
Photosynth – Child in movement
Here are my first shots using my Canon EOS 450D and making them available through http:///www.photosynth.net from Microsoft Research team. “In simple terms, Photosynth allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automatically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.”
Netbeans, GlassFish, OpenSolaris are dead!
As you know IBM is apparently about to buy SUN Microsystems. It is interesting to see that a IBM covers almost entirely the portfolio of SUN.
Why are they buying the company?
Is it because SUN is cheap?
Is it because IBM wants to improve OpenOffice and make it a better competitor of Microsoft Office?
Is it because IBM want to stop to fund Eclipse and use NetBeans instead (or to kill the competition)?
Is it because IBM wants to buy their customers?
One important aspect is the following: if IBM really buys SUN Microsystems we can easily foresee the end of the competition in the open source world for at least those tools:
- NetBeans vs. Eclipse
- GlassFish vs. WebSphere
- MySQL vs. DB2
- Solaris vs. AIX
- etc.
It is clear that this buy happen
- IBM will drastically increase the monopolistic position in many IT areas
- The customers of SUN Microsystems will have to migrate to the IBM tools within the next 5 years
- The open source world will loose its competitiveness against closed source applications
I just hope that the European Commission and Mrs Neelie Kroes will avoid such buy for the sake of the competition!
Microsoft, the biggest distributor of Open Source Software ever?
First, Microsoft and Novell agreement gave to Microsoft the opportunity to be one of the biggest seller of Linux Operating System
A few months ago, Microsoft released the Microsoft Web Application Installer[0] that allowed limited amount of Windows users[1] to easily install widely used Open Source software. But strangely, the Readme file [2] contradicts the list[1] supported Operating Systems by saying: “…Windows Vista RTM is not supported due to the lack of FastCGI support for the version of IIS that ships with it…”.
I haven’t found a given explanation justifying the first selection: DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce, phpBB, WordPress.
It seems that the first Microsoft choice doesn’t focus on developers but on users of open source software: The tools proposed are not exclusively manageable by high skilled administrators like OBM,
What are the reasons why Microsoft releases such installer? I found several good reasons:
- To increase the amount of PHP developers on Windows OS
- To increase the amount of ASP.NET developers by Open Source developers
- To increase the usage of Internet Information Services (IIS) by Open Source developers
But today, I used the same link to see what happened to this initiative and I can only say that it has been abandoned!
Microsoft is now providing a kind of LAMP stack of Microsoft Free solutions: .NET Framework, IIS and Extensions, SQL Server and Visual Web Developer.
That is a great idea for the Microsoft .NET developers but will once again prove that Microsoft has difficulties to find a breach into the open source community cohesion against them.
[0] http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebApplicationInstaller.aspx
[1] Supported Operating Systems are: Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008
[2] http://forums.iis.net/t/1152406.aspx
[4] http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
