Human Capital Briefs

Even if you love your job, it’s common to feel burnt out from time to time. Perhaps you just wrapped up a big project and are having trouble mustering motivation for the next one. Are some forms of rejuvenation better than others?

To grow and innovate, organizations have to come up with creative ideas. At the employee level, creativity results from a combination of expertise, motivation, and thinking skills. At the team level, it results from the synergy between team members, which allows the group to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

Delivering bad news is tough. It’s even harder when you don’t agree with the message or decision you’re communicating. Should you toe the line and act like you agree with the decision or new policy? Or should you break ranks and explain how upset you are too?

“Virtual work” is increasingly just “work” for most of us. But as Peter Hirst, director of the executive education program at the MIT Sloan School of management, told me, there’s still something special about face-to-face interaction.

I sat down with Jay Parikh, the company’s Vice President of Engineering, to discover what his priorities might suggest more broadly about the future of operations. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Twitter chief Dick Costolo is leaving his post in two weeks, and co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey will be taking the reins as interim CEO. It’s not the company’s first leadership shakeup, but unlike previous ones, it’s a response to sluggish performance, rather than to rapid growth. So what happens now?

How do you measure a CEO’s impact? An HBR team recently addressed that question by ranking CEOs according to the increases their companies have seen in total shareholder return and market capitalization across their whole tenures.

A big challenge in today’s world of far-flung, complex supply chains is the limited understanding of the impact on your operations of unexpected disruption at one supplier’s site. We developed a method to help prioritize the financial or operational impact of risk.

Brian Fitzpatrick joined Google as a senior software engineer in 2005, shortly after the company’s IPO. Brian specialized in open-source software development and he quickly became a champion within the company for various initiatives focused on end users.