When Your Friend Becomes Your Boss

Here are some handy pointers (and a couple case studies) on how to handle that moment when your buddy becomes your boss by the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict at Work, Amy Gallo.

Do:

• Openly acknowledge that your former peer is now in charge and you intend to work well with her
• Put yourself in his shoes and try to figure out what will help him be successful
• Set yourself apart by being willing to share concerns and deliver bad news

Don’t:

• Assume that your relationship won’t change. It will — and should.
• Expect that you will get special treatment because you’ve worked with the boss before
• Kiss up. Many people do, but your new boss will be wary of such behaviour.

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Fall In Love With Grammar

Spend a week with this free spell and grammar checker installed in your Chrome browser and I dare you not to fall in love with this app.

Grammar checkers are far from new, but this thing will instantly fix over 250 types of errors, most of which Microsoft Word can’t find because Grammarly checks everything you write on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nearly anywhere else you write on the web.

And then there’s the weekly report card – last week I made 30 mistakes due to a “missing comma in a compound sentence”.

Damn.

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Email, Chat or Face-to-Face?

Here’s a little research proving that a face-to-face request will profoundly increase the likelihood of getting the job done – in fact, it was 34 times more effective to eye-ball your requestee.

Most of us wouldn’t be too shocked to find that face-to-face outperforms text, so why do we still resort to the keyboard so often?

Well, according to assistant professor of Organisational Behaviour at the ILR School at Cornell University, Vanessa K. Bohns, it comes down to this:

“people tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication… the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests.”

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Visa Vanishing Act

For those in the know, changes to the 457 visa programme have been in the pipeline since 2014.

But no one expected to return from Easter long weekend to find the Government had slashed 216 jobs from the skilled occupation list (and caveat 59 other occupations) in a move that has blindsided industry and experts alike, not to mention visa applicants.

If you’re still trying to work through who in your company (or whether you) might be affected, here’s a detailed summary from The Migration Agency’s Sarah Thapa.

In her words:

“There was no advanced warning nor public consultation on the removal of occupations (which is the ordinary process for changes to skill lists). Many visa applicants have lost their eligibility for a work visa overnight, which puts them in quite a tenuous situation…”

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I am Human

A senior associate at a top-tier firm pulls no punches in their anonymous letter to the NSW Law Society, setting out their beef with the ingrained workplace vernacular that describes people, team members, and colleagues as mere “resources”.

Here’s the rub of it:

“Legal business leaders are as quick as greyhounds to adopt the latest buzz words and demand that their organisations become “agile”, “disruptive” and “creative”. But in their zeal to chase after fashionable notions, they remain blind to the commercial folly of viewing skilled lawyers as “resources” rather than people.”

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Relax to The Beat of 432Hz

We all know that music can influence our mood – if we're in the gym, pick some big thumping beats. Need to chill out? Hello, Jack Johnson.

But even Jack can't compete with the science of solfeggio frequencies, found in music that's composed at certain vibrational frequencies which help us on a subconscious level deal issues such as healing and releasing emotional patterns.

Binaural beats, on the other hand, bring you into alignment with certain brainwaves states - alpha, beta, delta, theta, gamma, etc.

Head of Legal ANZ at Cognizant and founder of Trinity Health & Living, Diana Nguyen explains:

"Theta brainwaves are the state you are in when you're in deep meditation. Alpha brainwaves are normally when you're in the state of deep sleep and the beta brainwaves are what we're typically accustomed to during our waking day, focused on cognitive tasks. What you want is more of the delta/alpha or theta brainwaves and not the beta!"

For me, right now, bring on the beta.

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Sleep is So Hot Right Now

If you're dreaming of a better night's sleep or chasing the performance-enhancing benefits of some good shut-eye, here's a fantastic wrap of the latest apps, gizmos and gurus to help give you your daily dose of Zzzzs.

In the end though, I'm hearing director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs, Nancy H. Rothstein who concludes:

"All this writing, all these websites, all this stuff. I’m thinking, Just sleep. I want to say: ‘Shh. Make it dark, quiet and cool. Take a bath.’”

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The GC's Public Policy Role in an Era of Political Distemper

Here's a detailed look at the GC's increasingly important role in corporate public policy in an era marked by geopolitical uncertainty and change.

In the words of former GE senior vice president-general counsel, Ben W. Heineman, Jr.

"As a result of the inside counsel revolution which has made her a core member of the top management team, the GC as lawyer-statesperson must go beyond the basic question, “is it legal?” to the ultimate question for corporate action, “is it right?”"

To help GCs carry out their extended mission, they should adhere to six core principles in public policy:

1. Develop fairer, clearer facts in policy disputes
2. Balance values in conflict
3. Defend globalization while addressing its problems
4. Build broad coalitions
5. Promote bi-partisanship and compromise
6. Take ethical action in the absence of regulation

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Patent Data Reveals Top 50 Postcodes for Australian Invention

Fancy a data-backed 'heat map' pinpointing Australia's hottest locales for innovation, right down to the postcode level?

Well Mark Summerfield has crunched some 35,000 data points on patents (sourced from the rather impressively named IPGOD) to rank the top 50 postcodes for Australian inventors.

Spoiler alert: #1 spot goes to... Epping, NSW.

And while modern communications and IT are said to break down geographic barriers, the analysis tends to still back:

"a correlation between innovation, business growth and proximity to centres of academia and research."

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Raising Your Profile to Get Board-Ready

How do you go from being an industry expert to becoming a board-ready thought leader?

These are the questions that helped SC Moatti–bestselling author and member of multiple boards including Opera Software–develop a framework to increase her visibility and raise her profile for board opportunities.

The framework consists of three steps that are continuously repeated and refined:

1. Join the conversation
2. Shape the conversation
3. Drive the conversation

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