Chefs at last year’s Championship BBQ (Photo: Bill Milne) On Sunday, May 17, professionals from the foodservice and hospitality industry will gather at Chicago’s Navy Pier for the 18th annual Championship BBQ to benefit Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the fundraiser, where they will sample tasty bites and beverages and watch chefs in action during the BBQ competition. This year’s chef lineup includes Missy Corey from Publican Quality Meats in Chicago, Stephen "Smokey" Schwartz from Burnt End BBQ in Kansas City, Mo., and judge Stepahanie Izard from Girl and the Goat. SmartBrief interviewed Share Our Strength co-founder Debbie Shore and Championship BBQ creator and former publisher of Food Arts magazine Barbara Mathias about how the event helps combat child hunger and what attendees can expect this year. How did you come up with the idea for the Championship BBQ fundraiser? Mathias: I wanted to host an event during the NRA Show that would be fun and different from what everyone else did. I thought, "wouldn’t it be great to host an event that would be for chefs and also raise money to end hunger?" Food Arts had the power to recruit all the best chefs and we had found the cause that made sense for us. After all, we are all in the business of feeding people in foodservice, ending hunger just seemed like a natural fit. How is No Kid Hungry involved in the BBQ fundraiser? Shore: We are honored to continue to be the beneficiary of the Championship BBQ. The close relationship between Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign and the restaurant and foodservice industry is highlighted so well at an event like the BBQ where we come together in celebration and to support more kids getting access to the food they need. How much money has the event raised for No Kid Hungry, and what has the organization been able to achieve with those funds? Shore: Last year, the BBQ raised $110,000 for No Kid Hungry, and the funds support our national and state-based work to connect more kids with more meals. In America, one in five kids will face hunger this year. No Kid Hungry is ending childhood hunger today by ensuring that kids start the day with a nutritious breakfast and families learn the skills they need to shop and cook on a budget. Since our No Kid Hungry campaign launch, we’ve raised funds to get 345 million additional meals to kids struggling with hunger. How has the event grown from its early years? Mathias: The first BBQ was at a restaurant in Chicago called Rivers and it took place on the patio — it was a smash hit! We didn’t have enough room for all the people that showed up. So the next task was to find a spot that could hold us all, and we found a great spot, Galleria Marchetti which had beautiful gardens and outdoor space to hold all the grills. We held the BBQ there for the next dozen years and when we outgrew that space as well, we moved the BBQ to Navy Pier, where we have been for the last several years… Last year we had over 1,000 people. The best part is that we have been able to raise almost $2 million for Share Our Strength. What part of the event are you most looking forward to? Shore: There’s a lot of positive energy generated in a room where you have incredibly talented chefs creating amazing dishes for people who understand and appreciate the power of food. I’m looking forward not only to witnessing that excitement, but also sharing the story of how the people in that room, on that night, will be making a difference for kids all over the United States as we make no kid hungry a reality. Mathias: Each year the event gets better than the previous year, so we expect this year to be the best one yet. There’s always a memorable moment … The best place to be on Sunday afternoon will be the 18th annual BBQ and cookout at Navy Pier. As always, we invite all the restaurant and hotel folks in town to be our guest.  SmartBrief is the official media sponsor of the Championship BBQ benefiting No Kid Hungry. __________________________________________________ If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email list for more stories about the food and beverage industry. We offer 14 newsletters covering the industry from restaurants to food manufacturing. Related Posts: How to let customers know you’re participating in Dine Out For No Kid Hungry Q&A with Michele Gorham: How giving back can grow your business How to be a leader against childhood hunger NRA Show 2015 to serve up 4 days of food and beverage education Accurate nutrition info, training are essential as restaurants prepare for menu labeling Q&A: Championship BBQ in Chicago celebrates 18 years of fighting child hunger originally published by SmartBlogs

Our SmartBrief on Leadership newsletter started on April 9, 2008, and it looked a little different than it does today. Remember when "Web site" was spelled that way and when BlackBerry was the market leader? What hasn’t changed is the goal of us here at SmartBrief — to help today’s and tomorrow’s leaders be a little better, a little smarter and a little wiser as they work, and to do so with a short digest that links to great stuff but only takes a couple of minutes to read. Over the years, we’ve adjust what we’re reading and collecting for you, the readers, to better serve what you want and, maybe, to nudge you in a certain direction. Last year, we added a Smarter Communication section in response to an obvious reader demand for help with the many situations where deft and nuanced communication is required. Starting this week, we’ve updated our newsletter again. What’s staying? Same e-mail, every day. Our top 3 sections, on leading better, strategic management and communications, will still deliver the same short summaries and story links. And we’re still bringing the "diversion" at the end to liven things up. Furthermore, this blog will still be bringing actionable insights about the difficult journey of leadership, whether you read them here first or discover our writers through our newsletters. What’s new? Each day, we’ll spotlight a specific area that affects leaders and aspiring leaders. Today’s is Smarter Working — every Monday, we’ll examine how to be more productive, but without simply adding more hours to your work week. The other days? Here’s the plan: Tuesdays: Innovation & Creativity Wednesdays: Customers First — a look at what’s working and what’s not in customer service and customer experience delivery Thursdays: The Big Picture — what’s next in the economy and the workforce of tomorrow. Not just lines of data, but going beyond that. Fridays: Smarter Living — helping us all get our minds and bodies in better shape as the weekend begins. And we’re adding a daily section called In Their Own Words, which will offer Q&As or first-person accounts from CEOs and others — advice and rumination directly from people who have been where you want to be. My hope is that we’ll meet more of your needs while still valuing your time. Please sign up for or pass along the SmartBrief on Leadership newsletter, and e-mail me if you have any feedback, good or bad. James daSilva is a senior editor at SmartBrief and manages SmartBlog on Leadership. He edits SmartBrief’s newsletters on leadership and entrepreneurship, among others. Before joining SmartBrief, he was copy desk chief at a daily newspaper in New York. You can find him on Twitter discussing leadership and management issues @SBLeaders. Related Posts: Running scared when failure occurs Why culture and leadership matter for disruptive innovation How 2 distributors created a digital tools strategy Why 2015 is the time for distributors to spend When to talk and when to act We’ve made SmartBrief on Leadership even better originally published by SmartBlogs

The assessment of scholarly writing has traditionally been outsourced by institutions of higher education to revenue-driven publishers. The central idea was that if a publisher judged a work to be good enough to help meet their financial goals, it was publishable and creditable. The prestige of the publisher determined just how creditable its assessment was. Thus, scarcity was assured and scholarly publishing sustained itself for a great many years. Publishers took on the substantial capital investments involved in publishing on paper: editorial and marketing staff, paper, ink, printing operations, warehousing and transportation. However, those publishers also received content and peer-review services at little or no cost owing to institutions crediting those activities toward faculty promotion and tenure. In return, higher education was provided with very sophisticated assessments of faculty scholarship at next to no cost. Faculty were provided with the opportunity to have their scholarly work validated in ways that would enhance their prospects for promotion and tenure. Research faculty additionally received improved prospects for their grant proposals as their publishing reputations grew. This symbiosis worked astonishingly well for all those on the production side of scholarly publishing. Publishers met their financial targets, colleges and universities were able to inexpensively promote and assess scholarship, and faculty could gain the recognition and validation of their work which, in turn, earned them enhanced status and income. Publish or perish wasn’t so terrible because there was an entire ecosystem devoted to the publication of good scholarship. On the consumption side, access to scholarly publications could be had through subscription or à la carte purchase. Academic libraries were the biggest customers for journal subscriptions and scholarly books, providing faculty and researchers no-cost access to as much of this content as an institution could afford. Except for textbooks, scholarly publishing was a nicely balanced market. This was also a fine tuned and delicately managed symbiosis that had evolved over many, many years. It was imbedded so deeply into academic culture, sharing the fruits of academic work this way seemed to most at the time as simple best practice. So, what could possibly go wrong? Three things: declining subsidies for public higher education, legislative open access mandates, and the emergence of e-publishing technologies. Let’s look at each of these separately. The e-publishing revolution Although digital technologies entered the world of publishing in the mid 80s, the output continued to be in the form of paper. There was a very capable genie doing page layout and automated typesetting, but still confined to the bottle controlled by a small, elite group of publishers. Thanks to Adobe’s Portable Digital Format (PDF) and, later, the International Digital Publication Forum’s (IDPF) EPUB format, it became possible to dispense with capital intensive paper entirely. Now, almost anyone could afford to create digital documents readable by almost anyone else with any kind digital device. The genie was out of the bottle. The concurrent rise of the internet provided the last piece of the machine that would enable everyman as publisher. Those digital documents could be duplicated and dispatched to any part of the globe within seconds and at little or no cost to this new plebeian publisher. Open access mandates In the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world, governments became acutely aware of the issues arising from taxpayer supported research not being freely available to taxpayers. This led to legislation and policy mandating open access to publicly supported research. Indeed, this concept has spread even to research organizations receiving no government support. It has even spread to the development of learning materials from entire e-textbooks to single concept simulations, diagrams, or images. These are collectively referred to as open educational resources (OER) and commonly reside in open educational repositories. Rather than asserting an "all rights reserved" copyright, these materials normally carry a "some rights reserved" Creative Commons license. Often, free use is permitted on condition of attribution alone. It is an idea whose time has obviously come. Declining financial support for public higher ed The last recession (2007-2009) saw radical cuts in state subsidies to American public colleges and universities. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states are still funding higher education at below pre-recession levels and the outlook for the near future is not optimistic. These as yet un-recovered higher education budget cuts resulted in tuition increases exceeding all other Consumer Price Index categories, including health care. It is no wonder that student debt rose to astronomical levels. At the same time, higher education budgets for library acquisitions were severely cut. Academic access to research journals and scholarly books actually declined. Together, these three factors provide the motive, the opportunity, and the means with which to disintermediate the traditional scholarly publishing enterprise, and that process is ongoing. However, the transition isn’t going to be pretty because cultural change in higher education has never been easy and the obstacles are not insignificant. Perhaps the most difficult obstacle in the path toward open scholarship is what to do about the assessment and valuing of academic work. The current limitations of open access publishing Even where traditional publishers continue to be involved, open access mandates dilute or negate the validation of academic work in the minds of many who serve on promotion and tenure committees. There are two models of open scholarship involving publishers: gold and green open access. Green OA is where an author publishes with a traditional publisher and then posts a version of that work on the web so that it is freely readable by any and all. Gold OA is where an author publishes with an OA publisher paying an article processing charge (APC) to cover the costs of publication, instead of that cost being covered, for example, by subscription fees to libraries. The problem here is that Gold OA publishers needn’t exercise the same cautions in deciding to publish since the APC provides all of the income they can legitimately expect. Indeed, a new kind of publisher, one that exercises no cautions whatsoever, is on the rise. Beall’s List of predatory open access publishers shows the number of these organizations growing. Similarly, Green OA publishers cannot expend as many resources on evaluating submissions as a closed publisher can because many of those who would have paid for access will now read the free open version instead. They simply don’t have the income to sustain a high level of scrutiny. Consequently, promotion and tenure committee members find it increasingly difficult to differentiate between green or gold OA publishing and vanity publishing. Yet, they must find a way around this dilemma. Failure to find satisfactory procedures to value open scholarship will only serve to disadvantage an institution in the quest to attract and retain top academic talent. Even worse is the predicament of faculty who opt to create OA learning materials such as e-textbooks and other educational objects, posting them to open educational repositories that are not refereed or juried in some way. Since anyone can share open resources that are not subject to pre-publication assessment, the value of being "published" in these venues is questionable. Young, tenure track faculty may find themselves, like Sisyphus, exerting great effort toward open scholarship without promise of reward or relief. Publish or perish remains, but finding a traditional publishing venue is harder than ever and getting properly credited through open publishing is much trickier. They find themselves far more perishable than their predecessors. Moving toward post-publication assessment So if pre-publication assessment isn’t working, what about post-publication assessment? Can we develop and implement systems and organizations that bring ex post facto assessment to the fore? We do have an exemplar in Merlot, an open repository with a fully developed peer review process coupled with crowd-sourced assessment. Merlot shows us that it has been and can be done. The trick will be to scale this concept to encompass all of scholarly publishing. Recall that peer reviewers who work for publishers are usually compensated only by institutional recognition. Can that recognition encompass work done for organizations like Merlot? What about faculty who participate in crowd-sourced evaluation? Might those institutions find ways to encourage that too? Publishers have failed to deliver high-quality assessment of academic work under open access conditions. It’s time to look elsewhere. Institutions of higher education can bridge this gap by crediting work in open repositories with peer review systems in place and by participating in the development of organizations like Merlot that conduct post-publication review in all areas of scholarly publishing. In other words, it is a simple matter of leadership. Higher education is both the primary producer of scholarly work and the primary consumer of that same work. It is no longer necessary or prudent in this digital era to add unnecessary cost to scholarly publishing via outsourcing. The return is too small. It will actually cost higher education less overall to bring scholarly publishing in-house, not at the institutional level but at a much larger scale, so that critical publishing services, such as editing, can be made available to OER contributors in an efficient and cost-effective manner. This is largely a matter of cultural and organizational, not technical, change. Frank Lowney is projects coordinator for the Digital Innovation Group at Georgia College & State University. This article is part of a content collaboration with eCampus News. The article also appears on eCampus Symposium. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email list for more stories about education. We offer newsletters covering Higher Education, College and Career Readiness, Leadership and more. Related Posts: No Related Posts Understanding why scholarly publishing today is a cultural, not technological, issue originally published by SmartBlogs

Pedagogical innovation and support has been a much discussed topic in academia, especially at this juncture, where an increasing number of universities are discussing what the university of the future should look like. The urgency of the world’s post-secondary education needs is moving faster than universities can keep up, and hence, new models of diverse scholarship not only have to be piloted, but also modeled for mainline pedagogy and scholarship. Academic culture that endorses and supports an open and free exchange of information, ideas, and output has the potential to not just increase research, but transform the scholarship that is an outcome of that research. Open access, which provides unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed research, has been touted as a model that will reform the scholarly publications of the world, or at least of our country, since 2002[1]. Yet, despite this grassroots movement to promote open access by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to build unprecedented opportunities to create an open access environment, promotion and tenure committees have been slow to adopt (if at all) the output of scholarship in open access models over the traditional monograph publishing. A survey led by information scientists [6] found that 60% of the faculty respondents felt that publishing via open access would damage their chances of tenure and promotion. From my own experiences, observations and discussions with faculty colleagues, this issue becomes more profound in disciplines such as humanities and even some social sciences where the research output has traditionally been a monographic print publication. Preaching to the choir Libraries have been vocal proponents of open access publishing and have tried to helm the movement of aligning open access publishing with promotion criteria into mainstream tenure processes, as well as work with faculty to ensure that open access publications get the same credibility as their mature and traditional print counterparts. Given the rising costs of journal subscriptions [2] and the nightmare of author rights (where most authors sign away their rights to the publishing vendors), libraries have long realized that reforms in scholarly publishing are due. Their support notwithstanding, until those open access reforms and alternative models are adopted, instituted and applied by universities and faculty, these models will stay just that — models, and not policies. New publishing also means social media Another consideration for reimagining publishing in this digital age is how social media affects scholarly research. Instagram and Twitter rule the roost in the modes for instant exchange and flow of information and SnapChat is the de facto insta-output channel. The question of how universities and libraries can capture the research and immediate outcomes that our researchers and faculty disseminate is becoming pivotal to the advancement of research goals. For example, a research lab outcome that was shared between two researchers using Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter could be crucial to another group of researchers in another part of the world; but without a communal platform to share this open access research or these building blocks of scholarship, the moment of collaboration is lost. Also, per traditional norms in academia, scholarship that is not in an H-index journal is not credible scholarship that can be used for furthering research in a meaningful way. Fortunately, this entrenched mindset about scholarly publishing is increasingly coming under question by younger faculty who see the future of scholarship in a much different way than their academic forebears. All hope is not lost A growing number of junior faculty are experimenting with dynamic and more engaging ways to collaborate and distribute their creative scholarship. As Stevan Harnad argues in his 2003 article on the research cycle in Information Services & Use: "Researchers do research in order to make an impact — so that their findings will have maximal effect on the present and future course of learned inquiry" [3] Harnad is being joined by more and more like-minded academics to make a decisive case (and rightly so) for universities, scholarly societies and faculty to move towards publishing that is not bound by the shackles of vendors and publishers. For instance, the California University System actively encourages faculty to publish in open access journals [4] to ensure that authors retain the rights to their works, and faculty promotion and tenure portfolios are not put at risk for publishing in open access journals. Indeed, there is an additional case to be made for publishing on non-journal open access platforms; for example: academic writing in blogs, on websites or even in e-laboratory notebooks is on the rise. Libraries are currently making efforts to capture this data as part of e-archives and institutional repositories, but these innovative channels have yet to seep into the promotion and tenure criteria as acceptable forms of scholarship. Moving into the future Needless to say, there are ample questions that surround scholarship produced via these emerging channels. Yet, aren’t these the same questions that have plagued traditional print publishing (and still do)? To cite only one example, quite a few high index journals have had to, in recent years, retract articles they published when these articles became marred by controversy thanks to plagiarized data or unreproducible or flawed data [5]. Scholarship can be flawed, no matter if the publishing platform is open or closed. If anything, when scholarship is published in an open access mode, there are more eyes looking at the information and vetting it, thereby allowing for a more thorough analysis and dissection over a blind, three-person, peer-reviewed process. Promotion and tenure committees and rank committees at universities, which are comprised of peers of the same discipline, should analyze the quality of the content and not just the h.index of the journal that it was published in, and need to be mindful that open access journals (depending on their structure) can have a peer review process which is just as stringent as that of those journals that are behind a paywall. Committees should also be conscious of the considerably higher impact of scholarship disseminated through open publishing, as it lends itself to more exposure over subscription-based journals or pricey hardcover monographs. And this should be a criterion that factors into the promotion and tenure policies. Beyond the tenure process, each discipline’s academy also needs to consider more than just traditional faculty research and start to look to interactive projects and experiments which could lead to new research projects. Information, when shared openly, spurs unexpected human interaction, which leads to more complex intellectual developments, and open access is the driving mechanism. Open access is just a conduit, but what it opens up is a far more robust dialogue about teaching, frameworks, interactions and inter-connected research. And that is one of the many vital things that academia needs to focus on as it shapes up for the "university of the future." Salwa Ismail is the department head of library information tech at Georgetown University. References: Open Access Directory. (2014). Timeline of the Open Access movement. [Online]. Accessed March 28, 2015 at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Timeline Corbett, H. (2009). The Crisis in Scholarly Communication, Part I: Understanding the Issues and Engaging Your Faculty. Technical Services Quarterly, 26(2), 125-134. doi:10.1080/07317130802268522 Harnad, S. (2003). The research‐impact cycle. Information Services & Use, 23(2/3), 139. Roscorla, T. (2013). Open Access to Scholarly Work Gains Steam in California Universities. Center for Digital Education. [Online]. Accessed March 30, 2015 at http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Open-Access-Scholarly-Work-California.html Cyranoski, D. (2014), Papers on ‘stress-induced’ stem cells are retracted. Nature News; Nature Publishing Group. doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15501 Pain, E. (2007). Minds Closed to Open Access. Science, 315(5818), 1479. This article is part of a content collaboration with eCampus News. The article also appears on eCampus Symposium. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email list for more stories about education. We offer newsletters covering Higher Education, College and Career Readiness, Leadership and more.       Related Posts: No Related Posts Why going Open is critical for the future of the university originally published by SmartBlogs

Beginning this month, SmartBlog on Education in collaboration with eCampus News will bring you monthly point/counterpoint-style blog posts about top issues in higher education. We kick off the content series with two experts’ thoughts on open access and scholarly publishing. Why going Open is critical for the future of the university by Salwa Ismail, department head of library information tech at Georgetown University Understanding why scholarly publishing today is a cultural, not technological, issue by Frank Lowney, projects coordinator for the Digital Innovation Group at Georgia College & State University Join the conversation on eCampus Symposium. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email list for more stories about education. We offer newsletters covering Higher Education, College and Career Readiness, Leadership and more.   Related Posts: No Related Posts Higher Ed Conversations: Open access originally published by SmartBlogs

I spend many, many hours watching the NBA playoffs each spring. The first round is, in many ways, my favorite: up to four games per day, and intense excellence from so many players and teams. The playoffs bring out heightened tensions and passions. Trash talk can turn into physical play, which can turn into blatant on-court assaults that injure players, like with J.R. Smith’s inexcusable hit on Jae Crowder. Notably, when that happens, there are consequences (usually). Smith was ejected and later suspended for two games, being lucky to not miss more time. That may be of little consolation to the Boston Celtics, but Smith’s unacceptable violence has received some measure of punishment that will diminish his team’s capabilities. Contrast that with Tuesday night, when the Houston Rockets were busy clinching a series win against the Dallas Mavericks. The series featured dozens of fouls each game, numerous flagrant and technical fouls, and a physical style of play. That happens; the officials were generally pretty good at keeping order. The game, or rather the conversation around the game, also featured a now-infamous tweet by the official Rockets account that depicted, well, emoji "violence": The Rockets fired the head of their social media team after Tuesday’s controversial tweet. http://t.co/z2r2IzUBQrpic.twitter.com/bGyEyl8qMo — NBC Sports (@NBCSports) April 30, 2015 OK. That’s petty and silly. If a player said something similar, that would be criticized by the league and the media. But it’s not the violence we described earlier. It’s not the sanctioned violence of this past weekend’s Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao bout, and it’s assuredly not the real, yearslong and under-reported domestic violence that Mayweather and many boxing fans and journalist seem to think is not a problem. But it was enough to cost the tweeting employee his job. Chad Shanks was a four-year employee of the team , and with no word (publicly) that he was a problem employee and that this horse-pistol-emoji tweet was some sort of "last straw" situation. Two things that have bothered me: Mistakes happen. Will you have a response other than, "You’re fired"? Mistakes of judgment are inevitable when communicating publicly, particularly on the "say not think" publicity-seeking platform of Twitter. (Disclosure: I love Twitter, but I regretfully don’t follow the only rule: "Don’t tweet.") Furthermore, some mistakes bring days or months of negative consequences. This was not that: The Rockets’ account apologized that night after the Mavericks’ account noted the insult disapprovingly, and there was no further outcry for reparation. Surely, the Rockets are not firing someone every time they experience a failure while performing their job? Surely, the next time a pro sports team encounters a social media crisis, there will be a plan beyond "eliminate the person who pressed ‘post’ and then carry on"? Do you have the right perspective to apply the proper remedy? Let’s talk about perspective. Firing someone for a dumb, not malicious tweet. Firing that person without much of any review when his job is to do the very type of action that he was fired for. Firing someone for a "violent" tweet when we could spend tens of thousands of words documenting the unpunished crimes and other awful actions famous people take, deliberately and with malice, that have real-life effects and cause actual harm. Similarly, pick any news story about corruption, violence or scandal and realize how horrible it is when people are harmed, often irrevocably, and yet know that justice won’t be served any time soon. This situation has literally nothing in common with those scenarios. This, instead, and I cannot restate enough, is about PR people for a anthropomorphized collection of rockets firing a guy because he might have sent too-mean cartoony symbols to a bunch of PR people for an anthropomorphized collection of mavericks. Did Chad Shanks fail? Sure. Did the Houston Rockets give him any expectation ahead of time that such a tweet would be failure, and a fireable one at that? Maybe, but if tweets like this and this were praised, the culture and expectations were clear: Be edgy, push the envelope, and be especially bold when the Rockets are winning. Well, that’s what he did last Tuesday. Sometimes, you have to fire people. But even in those circumstances, it’s up to the leaders and the organization as a whole to learn. It’s up to them to —before and after firing — ask these difficult questions: "What is our responsibility for what happened? How can we react to these failings to minimize the chance of a repeat while still giving our employees training, opportunity and trust?" Finding the answers isn’t easy. As Georgia-Pacific CEO Jim Hannan said: "We all suffer setbacks and failures, but the key is not to overreact. The real value of failure is the time spent examining the causes and addressing the problems that factored into it, and then doing what is necessary not to repeat it. Sometimes the hardest part can be accepting it and moving on." Maybe the presence of Shanks really was the cause of the problem, and getting rid of him was the solution. But if so, what does the Houston organization plan to do differently? Can’t fire your way out of a problem. And, if Shanks indeed was the problem, is Dan Le Batard a fool for hiring him almost immediately? Or is he someone who realizes that a talented person who made a mistake is available, probably willing to work hard to redeem himself, and therefore the only fool would be someone not looking to seize the market advantage. (That is, of course, assuming there’s any advantage in anthropomorphized tweeting.) If you must fire, fire people because they’ve violated the law, the rules of your company or the mores and standards of decent culture and society. Fire people, possibly, who don’t want to try to improve after proper efforts have been made on all sides. Don’t fire people for a mistake that you helped cause. Don’t run away from the problem you helped create. James daSilva is a senior editor at SmartBrief and manages SmartBlog on Leadership. He edits SmartBrief’s newsletters on leadership and entrepreneurship, among others. You can find him on Twitter discussing leadership and management issues, but not the NBA playoffs, @SBLeaders. Related Posts: Ask these 9 questions to avoid hero worship and closed minds We can still learn from leaders who don’t walk the walk The worst social media screw-ups of 2011: Live from Social Media Week — Suxorz Awards Q-and-A with Lars Schmidt: How NPR uses social media for recruiting 6 tips for avoiding social media failure Running scared when failure occurs originally published by SmartBlogs

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter. Last week, we asked: How important is a SWOT analysis in your strategic planning efforts? Critical — you can’t have a strategic plan without a SWOT: 22.76% Very — a SWOT is an important element of the plan: 34.14% Somewhat — a SWOT can help but it’s not required: 20.00% Not very — a SWOT has marginal value in planning: 5.86% Not at all — a SWOT is a waste of time: 1.38% What’s a SWOT analysis?: 15.86% Understand the Market and Your Position. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is clearly an important element of any strategic plan. For those who see it as less important, I suspect it’s because the SWOT is done and then disregarded. To use it effectively, think through the implications of the SWOT. The strategic themes you identify in the SWOT should point you in the direction of major initiatives to pursue. The better your SWOT is linked to your ultimate strategy, the more successful you can be. If you need a primer or a brush up on conducting a SWOT, here’s a quick perspective on the topic. Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, author of "Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results" and "One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership." Related Posts: How well do you recognize when something will "trigger" you in a negative way? How involved are you with "more senior" conversations? How well do you motivate your people? What best describes the mix of work you do? How are you feeling going into 2015? How important is a SWOT analysis in your strategic planning efforts? originally published by SmartBlogs

Income inequality is a divisive issue in our political climate, bolstered in no small part by lingering tensions from the 2008 financial crisis, a recent push for a higher federal minimum wage, and a 2010 Princeton University study that identified $75,000 as an ideal salary for achieving happiness. Combine that with the fact that the average CEO earns 350 times what the average employee makes in the U.S., the largest such disparity in the world, and you can begin to understand how fair pay in the workplace has become a priority for U.S. employers hoping to retain top performers. In fact, some companies are taking drastic steps to address it. I read it on Reddit Maybe you’ve heard of Ellen Pao, interim CEO of the juggernaut discussion site Reddit. She recently was at the center of a high-profile gender bias lawsuit against her former employers, a Silicon Valley venture firm. Although she lost the case, she won a devoted following and opened up a dialogue about the equal-pay challenges women are facing in Silicon Valley. Apropos, Pao instituted a new salary strategy at Reddit to combat unfair pay — banning salary negotiations from the interview process. Pao is on to something. A University of California at Berkley study found that women negotiators are considered easier to mislead, increasing their risk of entering sour deals, and a study of Carnegie Mellon MBAs found that both women and men rarely negotiate their starting salary in the first place (7% and 57% of the time, respectively), for lack of training in negotiation skills. It begs the question of whether salary negotiations are actually helping pay inequality. Pao suggests that doing away with negotiations would help level the playing field, as they aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation. Google me this Google is on the other end of the spectrum — its policy is to pay unfairly on purpose, and it’s been that way since as early as 2006, according to Laszlo Bock of Google. In an excerpt from his book "Work Rules!", Block recounted how following the company’s 2004 IPO, they had to come up with a retention strategy that would ensure their top performers weren’t poached by other companies. They came up with "pay unequally." At Google, it’s a common practice to pay top performers a bigger salary than anyone else, and it’s taken to an extreme degree. Two employees with the same job title can have a pay variance of 300% to 500%. Salary is based on results alone, and they take it very seriously. Top performers get top pay, and vice versa. This aggressive approach to salary has paid off (no pun intended), as Google rarely loses top performers. Take it with a grain of salt, since as we know Google recently paid out $415 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from an illegal anti-poaching agreement made with Apple, Adobe and Intel. Having said that, a drawback to Google’s approach is that it creates what’s called a Power Law Curve in the workplace, where the top 5% of your employees are generating the lion’s share of productivity, making the organization more vulnerable to turnover (hence the extraordinary pay required to keep them). But to gain some perspective, Google is also the type of company that gets mildly disappointed by a $14.5 billion revenue statement. Even Bock admits that the wheelbarrows-full-of-money strategy may only be useful to highly competitive companies with deep pockets. Specific Gravity Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based payment processing company with 120 employees, would be the first to admit it doesn’t have Google money to toss around, but it is taking huge steps toward pay equality regardless with a decidedly different approach: pay everyone equally, no matter their position. CEO Dan Price took a $930,000 pay cut from his $1 million salary, and he’s doing it to make sure every single Gravity Payments employee gets paid at least $70,000 (a baseline figure arrived at thanks to the ubiquitous Princeton study mentioned earlier). Price calls his radical method a "capitalist solution to a social problem," and is banking on getting a return on his investment in the form of employee loyalty, productivity and well being. Price went so far as to film himself making the announcement and share it online to spread his message far and wide. It’s notable that city of Seattle has led the nation in the fair-wage fight, recently instituting the highest minimum wage goal in the country. Gravity Payments is only the latest company to come out in support of fair pay in a city that has become the spiritual center of the movement. More work to be done As the definition of work continues to blur, everything else will blur with it, including what constitutes a fair salary. As we move forward, there will be several more experiments and debates over what workers should be getting paid for, and how much that pay should be. There is also a growing sense of social responsibility that workers are all too aware of since the financial crisis. The company of the future must find objective methods for valuing employees, because the days of saving a few bucks at the negotiation table may be coming to an end. Cord Himelstein is vice president of marketing and communications at Michael C. Fina. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s e-mail list for our daily newsletter on being a better leader and communicator. Related Posts: No ham please! What your employees really want for the holidays Should executives take an oath of office? How to kill your negotiation advantage How do you prefer to award outstanding performance? Today's bonus tracks Fixing income inequality in the workplace originally published by SmartBlogs

Every leadership expert supports the importance of having a mission and vision that everyone in the organization can rally around and use to support decision-making. But in today’s challenging world of education is that enough? We all face dramatic budget constraints due to decreased revenues. Along with the fiscal pressures comes a renewed scrutiny from the public we serve. In this environment, we must be able to demonstrate that every dollar we are spending on technology is really making a difference for our students. Models exist to help us in this endeavor including CoSN’s Value of Investment (VOI), Dr. Reuben Puentedura’s SAMR, Koehler and Mishra’s TPACK, and BrightBytes Labs’ CASE. No matter which framework you use to make decisions and evaluate the progress and effectiveness of your program, it is absolutely critical that you are basing those critical decisions on solid data that can be clearly communicated to stakeholders to ensure continued support and investment. Brad Hagg is the chief technology officer for Warsaw Community Schools in Warsaw, Ind. Brad has served in education technology for more than 16 years and is a Certified Education Technology Leader (CETL). Brad was selected as a "20 to Watch" Educator for 2013-2014 by The National School Boards Association. He is passionate about using technology to accelerate learning for today’s digital learner. ***** Tech Tips is a content collaboration between SmartBrief Education and GreyED Solutions. Have a tech tip to share? Contact us at techtips@greyedsolutions.com Miss a Tech Tip? Visit our Tech Tip archive. ***** Related Posts: No Related Posts Tech Tip: What are we aiming for? originally published by SmartBlogs

CFOs increasingly help organizations make business decisions outside the finance arena, stepping beyond their traditional role to partner with other executives on strategy and long-term planning. For many CFOs, the transformation from scorekeeper to strategic partner requires more than a paradigm shift — it requires a major step forward in data-analysis capabilities and cloud-technology adoption. Predictive analytics and flexible modeling with new cloud technologies, combined with the pervasiveness of Big Data, are interesting new challenges for CFOs who have been in the weeds dealing with regulatory compliance since Sarbanes-Oxley arose in the early 2000s. Strategic thinking is ingrained into most CFOs’ DNA, and it’s time to push that thinking to the forefront while scaling the business, growing revenue and keeping tabs on all the moving pieces. Here are four lessons that have served me well during my career and remain relevant as the role of the CFO continues to evolve: Credit: Recite.com 1. Master the fundamentals first Today, most financial departments have their compliance issues in check and are instead focusing on using data and technology to move quickly. Regardless of the situation, it’s crucial to establish a solid foundation before building beyond it. The basic infrastructure of general accounting, transaction processing, financial reporting, tax and compliance, and cash management should be humming smoothly before finance attempts to tackle broader operational or strategic initiatives. Once these core financial systems are in place, the CFO will be better positioned to lead operational work, strategy and higher level business discussions. 2. Build a strong partnership with the CIO Finance and IT must work closely together to use technology most effectively and encourage efficiency across processes and resources. In particular, the CFO can benefit from the chief information officer’s knowledge of emerging technologies and understand true return on investment. Meanwhile, the CIO can benefit from the CFO’s view of the company’s business model, revenue and future direction. The CFO should also play a key role in data standardization and definition, helping the CIO ensure cross-functional data standards. At my current company, Invoca, we use many cloud-based applications across the financial organization as well as sales, marketing, development, and product management teams. We recently invested in a state-of-the-art business-intelligence tool that enables us to gather disparate data across all our applications, with actionable reporting and analysis that helps us optimize our investment decisions. 3. Embrace the cloud As companies add more applications to their infrastructure, business-information tools will have to gather data from various internal and external systems. Cloud-based tools will become a necessity rather than an option — even for the finance department. Despite some common perceptions, moving to the cloud can actually enhance a company’s data security. It’s key to work with secure cloud providers (including SAS 70 Type II Audit certification, EU-US Safe Harbor certification and compliance with PCI DSS). Cloud-based financial management applications help streamline and standardize internal and external processes. At Invoca, we use cloud-based and mobile-friendly tools for expense reporting, procure-to-pay, payroll processing, CRM, banking and cash management, in addition to our core financial systems. Not only does this increase the speed with which data can be accessed and reduce the internal costs to support transaction processing, it also provides the agility to quickly respond to changing organizational and market needs. 4. Get smart about predictive analytics Analysis is inherent to finance, but today, the CFO must gain insight into much more than financial data. The ability to understand customer behavior, social media insights, vendor trends and other insights can bring a rich perspective to strategic financial planning. The challenge is to distill a vast amount of data into actionable insights, patterns and predictions. Technology is instrumental when analyzing massive amounts of data from different sources, then taking action based on those insights. We recently acquired a cloud-based business-intelligence tool that allows us to gather data across Salesforce, marketing automation, financial, call intelligence, our own customer activity, Web search and social media analytics and other tools. This nearly real-time visibility into data across our Invoca universe allows us to model predictive scenarios around how, when, and how much to optimize our planned investments into any customer segment, and when to decrease our investments in others. The ability to make sound decisions at light speed is critical for us as a SaaS company. As technology accelerates the pace of change across all job functions, the role of the CFO will continue to become more integral to executive strategy discussions. No other function within a company has the scope of being able to see across the organization, analyze historical trends and make informed predictions about economic value. It’s time for CFOs to adjust their job description — and for the rest of the C-suite to take note. Cynthia Stephens, chief financial officer at Invoca, has over 25 years of executive financial management, operational and strategic advisory experience in a variety of private and public technology companies. Most recently, she was senior vice president and CFO for Harvest Power, a venture-backed renewable energy company, which grew 100% annually to more than $100 million in revenue and achieved its first positive annual EBITDA during her tenure. She was previously CFO for Infoseek. Related Posts: The only financial metric business leaders need to know Collaboration: It’s not what you think it is Breaking down silos: How we did it in 4 steps Planning for the next generation of professional services providers Where do you spend your time? The strategic CFO originally published by SmartBlogs