Anyone can be a problem solver, but the most valuable employees are the ones who are problem finders. Problem finders have their antennae up and are acutely aware of what’s going on in their surroundings.
A surprising number of employees will notice but ignore things that go wrong. They’ll walk right past something that needs to be fixed. They mean no harm; they just aren’t thinking in terms of correcting things that need to be corrected.
Many business problems result in waste, inefficiency, and additional exprense. Problem finders are important to a business because they save time and money, and they usually help the business find better methods for getting things done.
New Tack for de Blasio: Wooing Business Leaders He Once Denounced
On a purely political level, there is a clear logic to Mr. de Blasio’s attempt to reset his relationship with business leaders, and Wall Street executives in particular. He won the mayor’s race with an atypical electoral coalition anchored by minority and liberal white voters — a base of support that has remained largely intact. But no mayor in the better part of a century has won re-election in the face of deep hostility from the business community.
How to Design Software Users Love
Kevin Hale of Wufoo (which was acquired by SurveyMonkey) talks about how the most important thing about customer service is that you have to do it all the time, in every department.
Has American Business Lost Its Mojo?
Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., put it this way in an email to me:
It’s becoming more and more difficult to run a successful business in the United States without doing lobbying, campaign contributions and other deals with politicians. This I think is the most dangerous, I would even say nefarious, trend for the creativity of American business in general, and young and new businesses which we badly need in particular.
.. New firm creation feeds into this big time. If you don’t create new firms, then workers are likely to remain locked up in their previous jobs or just go to unemployment because there aren’t new, higher productivity jobs to which they can be reallocated.
.. The drop in new business start-ups should be seen in the context of other key indicators — for example, a lack of labor liquidity, which is a measure of “the rate at which workers leave one firm to go to another,” according to Acemoglu.
.. The authors conclude:
If our assessment is correct, the United States is unlikely to return to sustained high employment rates without restoring labor market fluidity.