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Showing posts from July, 2014

Inability Of Organizations To Manage "The Flow" Of Talent Management

The flow , a concept developed by one of my favorite psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, matches the popular performance versus potential matrix that many managers use to evaluate and calibrate their employees. For people to be in the flow they need to be somewhere in the middle moving diagonally up. Ideally, this is how employees should progress in their careers but that always doesn't happen. To keep employees in the flow you want to challenge them enough so that they are not bored but you don't want to put them in a situation where they can't perform and are set up for a failure. Despite of this framework being used for a long period of time I see many organizations and managers continue to make these three mistakes: Mistaking potential for performance Performance, at the minimum, is about given skills and experience how effectively person accomplishes his or her goals. Whereas potential is about what person could do if the person could a) acquire skills b) gain acce

Too Much Background Noise when Recording Lectures with Smart Phone or Table Built-in Microphone? Check Out the Ampridge MightMic

Mobile devices are convenient tools that students use to record classes and lectures, reporters use to record news conferences, and business people use to record meetings. Some use note taking apps like Notability , Remarks , or Livescribe+ to augment their notes with audio recordings. The benefits of recording the audio can be minimized by poor quality recordings from built-in microphones. Built-in microphones tend to do a poor job of isolating sounds which results in background noise that makes the desired sounds difficult to hear, especially for people with hearing impairments. The AmpRidge MightyMic microphone plugs directly into the headphone jack of any smartphone, tablet, or computer that supports microphone input. It proves an alternative audio output jack so users can still plug in headphones while the microphone is plugged in. Its compact size makes it easy to use in class and makes in relatively discrete. The MightyMic microphone works well with an iPhone and is only slig

How Apple Could Improve the App Store for VoiceOver Users

Potential  Feature for App Store Would you buy a song that may or may not play, a car that may or may not fit in your garage, or a remote that could or could not work with your TV? Probably not, but a similar problem is facing VoiceOver users (and users of other built-in accessibility features) every time they look for a new app on the App Store. This user base is growing quickly due to high quality accessibility features that Apple builds into every iOS device. Currently, the App Store offers no way for users to know if the app will be accessible before hitting the buy button. For VoiceOver users, this means throwing away money if the app turns out to be inaccessible. While the issue of app accessibility has been getting a lot of buzz lately, hopefully Apple can implement some solutions to the problem before and until app accessibility is virtually ubiquitous. One way to help users know if an app is accessible before hitting the buy button is to add an accessibility report to the app