"...keeping you great" Ten Minutes with the Growth Guy
HEADLINES: (from Shanghai)
Calculating Billable Utilization Rate - for professional services firms, this can be a real challenge. Here's a link to information on how to do this.
"Jellies" for Telecommuting and Freelance Workers - and this from the Herman Report - I must be behind the times but this is the first I've heard of "Jellies" - a common place for young computer workers to co-mingle so they don't get so lonely and can share in the camaraderie of others - read up on it concerning some pitfalls and how you might put them to work for you.
Fastest Daily Stand-up Meeting - Scott Farquhar, co-founder of $35 million Sydney-based Atlassian sent me a link this week to their "day in the life of the Confluence team" blog post - it's 74 seconds long and features the fastest daily stand-up meeting I've ever seen! Confluence, a simple enterprise wiki designed for team collaboration, is one of their main product lines used by over 13,000 customers in 106 countries.
Core Values Video - noted Farquhar "We then held a competition (posted internally on our wiki!) asking our staff to create a video that showed what it was like to work at Atlassian. John Rotenstein instead came up with a video about our core values and interviewed our staff about them. The first time I found out about it was when it was finished. We have followed your articles about core values and followed Jim Collins' articles on creating them. I just wanted to share with you where it can lead and how employees then adopt them themselves." Here's a link to their 6 minute Core Values Video (PG-13).
China Update - the 200 plus executives in my Shanghai and Beijing workshops were upbeat - though they acknowledged that increased domestic competition is forcing a focus on productivity and management effectiveness not required until recently - thus the intense interest in the Rockefeller Habits. My host, Fred Crosetto, founder and CEO of Ammex , a major manufacturer and distributor of rubber gloves, is another excellent case where a Seattle-based entrepreneur has set-up direct operations in China not only for manufacturing but for the creation and production of much of his sales materials; has his outbound and inbound global sales being handled by his call center teams in the Philippines (who often outsell his U.S. teams) and has moved his family to Shanghai where his children are learning Mandarin. He's taking advantage of global resources to make his firm competitive domestically and internationally.
China Taxes - and learning from the lessons of Hong Kong, which has had 50 years of sustained economic growth, China on January 1, 2008 reduced corporate taxes on domestic companies to a flat tax of 25%, giving them a further advantage over U.S. firms that pay some of the highest corporate taxes in the world. Hong Kong has had a flat tax of 16% on individual income, 16% on real estate profits (after a mandatory 20% deduction for maintenance), and 16% on corporate profits (17% for some) without the double taxation we experience in the U.S. - in turn there aren't a bunch of complicated deductions or additional business-paid taxes on behalf of employees though personal top bracket income tax rates are still high at 45%.