The linked article above has a nice summary of recent research by Richard Florida (of Creative Class fame) on the relationships, by state, between human capital, wages, hours worked, and numbers of immigrants.

Apparently blue-collar workers are right to complain that management doesn't work as hard as they do ;)...

Oh, and the complaints about immigrants deflating wages - FALSE! (at least on average).

How do you give feedback?

A. One of the things I've learned is that it doesn't matter how many good things you say, the one bad thing is what sticks. So. therefore, feedback should be viewed in the context of time, not in any one specific episode. So if I have something negative to say, I will say it. I will be clear about it. But I won't try to couch it in a lot of positives, because people have a natural tendency to not want to hear a negative message. So I try to do it as quickly as I can, and I try to do it in the moment. But I also try to give positive feedback in other moments. To try to mix the two is often very hard, because the positive messages get lost in the one negative message, and the negative message gets garbled.

Providing effective feedback is an art, but one that is often erroneously taught as a science. Fortunately, good managers tend to see right through scripted recipes for effective feedback, as they know first-hand that what constitutes "effective" is determined by the situation.

One of the most common recipes for feedback - the "Feedback Sandwich," if you will - calls for a dash of praise followed by a healthy dose of constructive criticism, then finished of with a pinch more positive. It's a theoretically reasonable approach, and when providing feedback in a formal review and/or in writing it can be quite effective. However, in everyday practice it often comes across contrived and insincere.

In many ways, the model that Yamada points to is far superior. It's not about seeing feedback as an act and applying a single formula to all situations. Rather, it's about feedback as a process that plays out over the course of a relationship.

If you've built up a strong rapport and foundation of trust and respect with your direct reports by providing consistent, positive feedback and praise over time, then offering the negative should be a simple and straightforward act.

Good advice from a strong leader.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times announced that they would start charging readers for online content in early 2011, and since then the million-dollar question has been: will it work? Will readers fork over the cash to keep reading the Times, or will they go elsewhere?

The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 – and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it.

So, should the New York Times give up?  The trick with anchoring is that although we are not willing to pay more for the same thing, we are willing to pay more for different things.  What this means is that one approach that the New York Times could take is to present us with a new experience so that we don’t associate it with the previous anchor, and are open to new pricing.

It’s a strategy that Starbucks founder Howard Shultz put to good effect. [...]

The Times could try to take on a similar approach.

Nice commentary on the NY Times pay wall from Mr. Ariely. While I agree with him in principle, media companies have really struggled to differentiate in ways that go beyond the quality and substance of the content, which we are already getting or free. If the NY Times can rollout something different enough for us to establish a new anchor, good for them. But I'm skeptical.

Apologizing has been complicated over the years by the threat of liability. This has led to apologies that have been carefully parsed to remove any real regret or accountability. “So many apologies are constructed by legal or P.R. people” as a defensive mechanism, not as a sincere expression of remorse, Ms. Weeks said.

This can be true for politicians, doctors and business executives, but also for you or me if we’re, say, involved in a traffic accident. Should we say we’re sorry? Is that admitting fault?

In fact, it was a traffic accident in the 1970s that led politicians to try to resolve some of these problems. According to Jonathan R. Cohen, a law professor at the University of Florida, a Massachusetts state senator’s daughter was killed while riding her bicycle, and the driver who hit her never apologized.

The father couldn’t believe that the driver had never expressed contrition, Professor Cohen said, and was told that the driver had dared not risk even saying “I’m sorry,” because it could have been seen as an admission in the litigation surrounding the girl’s death.

When the state senator retired, he worked with his successor to introduce and win passage of legislation that allowed a “safe harbor” for people to offer “benevolent gestures expressing sympathy or a general sense of benevolence,” said Professor Cohen, who has written extensively on the intersection of law and apologies

Now, a majority of states have enacted “I’m sorry” laws — some that address just medical malpractice, while others apply to all civil cases.