Outdoor Haven

Shutterstock Dear Liz, I’m in an awkward position at work and I could use your advice. I am the Regional HR Manager for an educational software firm. We’ve been hiring quite a few people this year and my problem has to do with one of our new hires. We made “Jerry” a job offer last Tuesday, when he was at our office for a meeting with our Director of R & D and our VP of Engineering. Jerry accepted the verbal offer on the spot and I prepared his offer letter, which he signed before he left the building. Jerry is supposed to start working here in two weeks. Immediately after Jerry’s acceptance, we ran into some snags. First, Jerry’s wife Elaine called me with questions about our health plan. I don’t usually talk much with our new hires’ spouses and partners, but I answered her questions. She wanted to walk through specific health conditions she and Jerry are being treated for, and have me tell her the exact coverage amount for each cond...

Shutterstock It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options. If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees . While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough. A survey by CEB found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job. When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout . Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs. “Brownout is different from burnout because workers afflicted by it are not in obvious crisis,”Kibler said. “They seem to be performing fine: putting in massive...

Pause 0:17/0:54 Most businesses are run by highly intelligent people. Yet, when things fall apart it’s usually due to these highly intelligent leaders’ stupid mistakes. Tragedies happen when smart leaders, who are otherwise great, sabotage themselves, day after day, with mistakes that they can’t see but are obvious to everyone else. How can smart, experienced people with impressive track records make such stupid mistakes? Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, spent six years searching for an answer. He and his colleagues studied 51 of the business world’s most notorious failures, interviewing CEOs and people from all levels. He and his team found that the poor decisions these smart leaders made were sometimes intentional and sometimes accidental, but they always followed a clear pattern of hubris that ensured even the most successful enterprise could be run into the ground. Shutt...

What if people fall out of love with the iPhone and stop buying Apple’s smartphone? With so much of Apple’s business built around the handsets, any sustained fall in sales would not be welcome inside Cupertino. Unfortunately for Apple the evidence points to just that scenario. With Apple declining to reveal how many iPhones were sold over the first weekend , it has been left to analysts and marketers to work with third-party data and come up with an answer. The ever-reliable Ming-Chi Kuo at KGI Securities has been  looking at the volume of smartphone shipments  to provide the geekerati with the latest data point. Kuo’s data matches with those available from other sources using different methodologies. The iPhone 7 Plus sales are better than expected, but the overall volumes are being dragged down by lower shipments of the smaller iPhone 7.  Apple iPhone 7 (image: Ewan Spence) As noted previously on Forbes , Tim Cook and his team have been...

Classroom teachers need more help from experts that aren't available By Nicole Riva, CBC News The creation of individual education plans (IEPs) for students is supposed to help children learn despite challenges they have. But there often aren't enough supports in place for teachers or students. (Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com) Parents of a child with a learning disability can feel like they're on a "detective mission" within the education system. The first clue they need is an individual education plan (IEP), which outlines what a child needs in the classroom and should suggest ways to help them learn. But the IEP doesn't solve the case. In fact, the bigger mystery for parents and teachers is often how to actually put the document to practical use. Janet Ridsdale's been lucky navigating the education system with h...

Residents wear masks for protection from smog during a day of heavy pollution in Beijing, China, in December 2015. Coal-fired power plants, household burning of coal and wood to produce energy, and transportation remain big generators of pollution in China. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) More than nine out of 10 people worldwide live in areas with excessive air pollution, contributing to strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and other problems, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. The U.N. health agency said in a new report that 92 per cent of people live in areas where air quality exceeds WHO limits, with southeast Asia, eastern Mediterranean and western Pacific regions hardest hit. Worst polluted cities likely don't monitor air quality well: WHO PHOTOS | Smog solutions: 6 cities' attempts to deal with dangerous air pollution The country-by-country figures come from new satellite data over rural areas to complement traditional ...

The Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten is intensifying its play for shares in the massive American market for online shopping through a new deal with FinTech company Payoneer. The deal between the two aimed to open up access to Rakuten’s American platform, Rakuten.com, for international vendors. Like fellow e-commerce giants Amazon and Alibaba , Rakuten’s e-commerce platform is open to third party merchants. Until now, merchants outside of the U.S. have had limited access to the American customers on Rakuten.com. “This is a new process that Rakuten.com is starting, in allowing international merchants to sell with us. Payoneer makes it easy for us to allow international merchants to sell on our U.S. marketplace, and to get paid in their currency of choice,” Drew Rifkin, Director of Partnerships, Rakuten.com, says. Hiroshi Mikitani, chairman and chief executive officer of Rakuten, Inc. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images for Rakuten) The mo...