A colleague sent me this article from the Studer Group called “The Long Goodbye”. It caught my eye because it formalized something I’d been considering for a long time: When someone decides to leave his or her company, it’s rarely an immediate reaction to a shockingly negative experience. On the contrary - it’s often the delayed result of an experience that “left a bad taste.”

The article tells the story of a nurse who applied for a position for which she was ultimately not selected. What left the bad taste was not that she didn’t get the job, but rather that she found out that she wasn’t selected when the new hire was announced and it wasn’t her.  That’s an understandably difficult blow. If your organization doesn’t have enough respect for you to talk to you personally in such a case, why would it be reasonable to invest your loyalty in it?

Now, such an occurrence doesn’t mean the nurse is headed out tomorrow – but “will she return calls from another organization if called? Yes. Will she look online for openings at other organizations? Most likely. Will she leave? Yes, if something doesn’t happen to retighten her loyalty.”

The negative experience plants a seed of discontent that may one day grow into full blown rejection. So how do you avoid alienating your employees like this? The article first suggests a specific communications program for employees who aren’t selected for promotions -but that seems to me to be a point solution. The second suggestion is more appropriate: talk to your employees.

GigaOm highlights Yahoo’s new attempt at retaining top talent. Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether different from the Google 20% – wherein Googlers get to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing – it is both a way to satisfy the innate desire to create as well as a method for harnessing that creativity.

The blog discussion is also pretty interesting. Some people think money rules, but others see real value in letting employees explore. I wonder if such tactics are purely in the domain of the high-tech world, or if there’s applicability beyond technology. Could you see something like this at Pfizer or Ford?

I was sent this article written by Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Yankees, that was recently published in BusinessWeek. Now, regardless of what you think of the team, you have to admire Joe. Just being able to remain the manager of the Yankees for this long while working for George Steinbrenner has to give you some insight into the man’s pluck.

The truth is that he’s a very insightful guy with real heart (somehow in my mind, I always envision him crying after winning something), and in the article he shares some of his thoughts on managing talent. In part, he talks about how he uses one of the team’s worst moments (letting the Red Sox take the momentum, and the world series, away in 2004) to motivate his people to always be ready. But he contrasts that motivational technique with a keen understanding of the fine balance between emotionality and competitiveness. A quote:

These days it is so important for a CEO, or any manager, whoever it is, to be aware of his or her personnel. We are in an age of computers, and everything is so damn impersonal. But in the end, it still comes down to people. You have to make people feel necessary. Even if their contributions are minor, it adds to everything else. That’s what makes the machine work. I love players with heart, not necessarily emotion, but those who deep down are driven by something more than mind and body. I don’t play favorites. The 25th member of the squad is just as important as the first guy. And I can’t let my own emotions get in the way of competing. I have had to release guys I loved, and keep players I didn’t necessarily care for.

A rather illuminating rant on the state of tie-wearing ensues over at the UK’s guardian. Apparently, the number of professional men wearing ties has dropped 14% over the last 10 years to 56%. This still seems too high to me.  If get a vote on the topic, I say die tie, die. All ties. No exceptions.

I once had a job where I had to wear a tie. I felt as if, at any moment, someone might walk over to me, grab said tie and lead me around the office by it. Like the reins for a horse. Not to mention the airflow restricting qualities. In fact, according to this wikipedia history of the tie, there are other health related reasons to abandon the tie including “entanglement, infection, and vascular constriction.”

Don’t get me wrong, I respect that there are certain situations in which the formality of a tie is appropriate. I’m thinking of weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, deal closings. crucial client meetings and other such instances.  Where the show of respect conveyed by the formality is important. But as a regular, day in, day out kind of thing – the impracticality of an otherwise purposeless slip of colorful fabric seems quite silly. To my mind, it adds to the perception that how you look is more important that what you do. Rubbish.

What’s the consensus, do ties still have a place in the workplace? Can anyone make the argument FOR ties?

Another post from a few days back on SystematicHR (I just can’t keep up with the guy) in which Dubs hopes that the future of SaaS is a world in which vendors can use abstracted data from their systems to help customers learn what’s working and what’s not for others in their business / industry. After all, across millions of users and hundreds of companies one could imagine all kinds of delicious data that, in anonymous and abstract ways, could be used to identify trends, successes and failures across all kinds of situations.

In fact, this has been the holy grail of such systems for years. Today, such data comes from surveys. But if one could get data directly from what companies are doing, as opposed to what they are saying, how much more accurate and powerful would it be? We think a lot. That’s why were already doing it. We think it’s a huge value to our customers – and one of the ways we’re helping to drive customer success.

Erik took a moment to reply to Dubs’ post. Here’s part of what he said: “We are looking at aggregate data from that enormous resource of ours. To look at what works and not we use publicly available financial information and cross reference those two. The findings we make are very interesting and are being used to further push our thinking of leading practice in different areas.”

You can read more about SuccessFactors research here. And if you have questions for Erik, just email him.