The Value of Role Models in the Downturn
Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about the people and companies that have shown resiliency in this economy. “A time of cynicism and mistrust can be made brighter by focusing on heroes. And because every story of success is also a story about persistence despite obstacles, the lessons can be applied to one’s own situation, as a source of inspiration and practical tips.”

The seeeeeeriously cool way out of a downturn
On his blog, “Chief Happiness Officer” Alexander Kjerulf lists a few ways for organizations to stay positive during a crisis. “3: Involve employees in decisions… An intended byproduct of the focus group sessions was that information about the crisis and how it was being handled spread quickly throughout the organization. When the initatives were announced to the employees, most people had heard about them already, which created more trust.”

5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
Getting your business off the ground is hard, knows Andrew Warner, as he shares noted engineer Paul Buchheit’s advice in an article on Mashable. “Launch a scaled-back version. You can find a simple, scaled-down way of launching anything. “Tesla [the financially struggling electric car startup] spent a lot of money making these cars, but there are people making electric cars in their garages. So it’s always possible to do a scaled-back version of what you have in mind.”

Two New Ways To Find A Job: Auction Yourself Off At JobaPhile Or Do A TwitterJobSearch
TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld profiles two startups looking to give jobhunters a helping hand. “Developed by UK-based job search engine Workhound, TwitterJobSearch pulls up Tweets that are only job-related and links to the underlying job posting. Most of these seem to link to other job sites such as CareerBuilder or more niche job sites which all seem to be using Twitter to post their latest openings. But with TwitterJobSearch, you search across all of them, and results are ranked by both relevance and by how recently they’ve been posted.”

Reid Hoffman Tells Charlie Rose: “Every Individual Is Now An Entrepreneur.”
Leena Rao of TechCrunch features excerpts from Charlie Rose’s interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. “But I think that one of the key things — the reason why I think risk tolerance is important is because what happens is people delude themselves they’re not taking risks. They say, oh, I’m going to get a job at, you know, Hewlett-Packard or I’m going to get a job — and that’s not risky. Well, look at current economic climates. Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”

It’s Not as Bad as You Think
On TechNewsWorld Ed Moyle discusses long-term investment opportunities like creating effective strategies, building better methodologies and training staff. “At a macro level, the equation is simple: The workload of certain areas in our security organization is directly tied to business activity. So when business activity is down — as is the case right now — organizations that were staffed to capacity prior to the downturn now have slack space in the workload of these folks. Since the cost of replacing these resources is high, it’s probably cost-prohibitive to adjust levels of staff to meet the change in the short-term demand.”

Steps Towards a More Sustainable Life of Less
Leo Babauta of Zen Habits shares his ideas on live better with less. “We work more than ever before, despite advances in labor-saving technology that mean we should be able to work less. We do so to support a lifestyle that has become more expensive than ever, because of the new levels of convenience and abundant consumer goods that we’ve become accustomed to. We can break out of this trap, by consuming less and then needing to work less.”