Monthly Archives: January 2015

Unless you occasionallyexamine your beliefs, they control you. Every so often you have to look closely at what you believe to be true, and question it. You have to ask Why do I believe this?

Maybe it was taught to you. Maybe theres no validity to your belief at all. I feel that way about the practice of Human Resources as it widely taught. We teach HR people to comply with employment laws, and often we dont teach them a lot more. We view the purpose of HR this way: Our HR department makes Acme Explosives a great place to work and keeps us out of court.

We are obsessed with the compliance side of HR. We imagine that there are employees hiding behind every pillar and cubicle wall, waiting to jump out and sue us. Thats ridiculous, and its also a self-fulfilling prophecy. I worked for two startups that got much bigger, fast.

I joined my first startup when sales were USD $1M per year and ran their HR function as the company grew to $180M in sales. I was nineteen when I walked into that company, and 28 when I left.

Next Next, I joined U.S. Robotics, where sales were $15M in my first year on board. We grew to $3B in annual sales. We focused on trust and communication all the time, and had so few employee relations issues, even with nearly ten thousand team members, that I can remember each situation in great detail. This was a fast-growing company with deep pockets. Why didnt we have more employee relations problems?

We didnt have them because were were always listening, asking Hows it going? How are you doing? and making it easy for people to tell us when something was off or needed attention.

We treated the culture as a strategic advantage and a competitive weapon.

Roger was a senior leader in the Sales group when I started at USR. I asked him How do you get customers to buy?

Its a great product, he said, but if I can get them to come here they always buy from us.

Here meant our office, with the manufacturing plant just behind it and attached to it by a long hallway. If Roger could get a customer onto our premises for a tour, the customer was sold. Why? The energy was so good, the customer wanted to be part of it. They believed in us once they walked around and saw people happy and trusting and working their asses off. Who wouldnt?

Continue reading here:
Reinventing Human Resources For The Human Workplace

By Jackson Landers January 4

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. Ken Cuccinelli is holding a raw oyster. It is a small, round oyster with an unusually smooth shell and a distinctive black stripe. He stands on the deck of a crabbing boat that rocks gently on the Chesapeake Bay. The former Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee tilts his head back and eats his first sample from the oyster farm that he co-founded with a small group of friends.

After losing an election, some politicians become lobbyists. Others immediately begin running for another office. Cuccinelli helped start an oyster farm on Tangier Island, in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Praised on Fox News, scoffed at by The Daily Show, the outspoken conservative now seems focused on creating a new source of sustainable jobs for people on Tangier. And on how the oysters taste.

The first settlers arrived on Tangier from England in the 1600s. Their modern descendants speak an Americanized dialect of Restoration-era English. With only 83acres of the island high enough for human habitation, cars are rare. The 727residents (as of the most recent census) typically walk or drive golf carts and scooters. Cable TV and Internet access only arrived in 2010. While Cuccinelli lost the gubernatorial election to Terry McAuliffe in 2013, he won over Tangier Islands devout Methodists, earning 90 percent of their vote.

The oyster-farming enterprise was the brainchild of Craig Suro, chairman of the Tangier Island Oyster Co. and once Virginias assistant secretary of health and human resources under then-Gov. Mark R. Warner (D). He was visiting Tangier several years ago with business partner Tim Hickey on a duck-hunting trip.

They hit on the idea of oyster farming as a new industry.

We realized that this would get them out of having to depend on quotas, Suro said, referring to catch restrictions on crabbing. You can harvest farmed oysters year-round. And this turned out to be the best possible place to try to grow oysters.

Suro might be right about Tangier being ideal for growing unusually good oysters. Most oysters are farmed in mesh bags dropped into just a few feet of water within arms reach of shore. This makes it cheap and easy to raise and harvest them. But the lower salinity of water in brackish creeks or close to the shore also tends to result in oysters without as much of the briny flavor that some aficionados prefer. In the center of the Chesapeake Bay, higher salinity makes a brinier-tasting oyster. Tangier Islands new oyster beds are also suspended just beneath the surface, bobbing along under pairs of black pontoons over 12feet of water hundreds of yards from shore. This distance isnt a problem because Tangier Islands hardy watermen already have crabbing boats that are easily turned to a new purpose.

The result of this system is a fast-growing, briny oyster with a clean flavor profile that comes from never having been in contact with the bottom. The constant agitation of the free-floating mesh sacks in mid-water also results in oyster shells that are unusually polished and smooth.

Cuccinelli, who lives and practices law in Prince William County, was initially brought in to help with the legal side of the business but quickly found himself enlisted in whatever work presented itself painting the boathouse, driving anchor posts into the bottom of the bay and diving from a boat to set up ropes for the pontoons.

See the article here:
Ken Cuccinellis post-politics endeavor: oyster farming