From ForeignMBA.com: http://foreignmba.com/area.php?area=1

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

Don’t be so quick to try to get rid of your extra change. For the first time since the composition of the penny was changed to make zinc the primary component, Josh Wolfe reports that the raw materials that constitute pennies and nickels are worth more than the monetary value assigned to them by the US Treasury. With gains of 75% on zinc and 70% on copper this year, could melting coins become the next big black market business in the US (since it is, after all, prohibited by Federal law)? Hat tip to Jonathan Rhinesmith

General | Private Equity Investing

Greg Narain has some sound Advice to Fledgling Consultants.

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

AIRS has a master directory of job boards by geography and industry: http://www.airsdirectory.com/mc/directory_jobboards.guid?oemID=AIRS&siteLive=true

General | Career Acceleration

Tricks to Improve Your Memory 7 ways to recall your PIN number, the location of your wallet, or other key information. More Via Lifehacker.

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

My coauthor Scott Allen wrote on The Virtual Handshake blog: I love to read blogs, but increasingly, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all the blogs I'd like to read because there is just so much good stuff out of there. And, of course, it's all mixed up with a lot more stuff ranging from merely mediocre to just plain pointless. Recently, I've particularly become a fan of the "blog carnival" format, a weekly traveling roadshow of the best of the blogosphere on a particular topic. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the dozens and dozens of good blogs out there, and just setting up search feeds on keywords wasn't giving me a good variety. Blog carnivals, though, give you a very concise view of some of the best of the blogosphere on various topics. Here are some that you may find particularly relevant:

• Carnival of the Capitalists - 50+ weekly posts about economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance - basically anything having to do with money. I hosted this week's edition. (UPDATE: TheVirtualHandshake.com hosted another edition on May 15).
• Carnival of Marketing - Seven editor-selected posts on all things marketing.
• Carnival of Entrepreneurship - Inspired by both of the above, I started this back in February and it's going great guns. If you have a blog, I'm always looking for submissions and hosts.
• Carnival of Business - Newly launched this week.

To learn more about blog carnivals, including what they are, submitting articles, and a list of all known blog carnivals (here's another), visit BlogCarnival.com. This site is a one-stop resource where you can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual carnivals, submit posts to multiple carnivals, and have some great tools for managing a carnival if you already run one or want to start one.

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

The MBAs of the Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA program have posted summaries of all of their classes at: http://www.kr04.net/ This is a handy reference site---a summary of what you learn in an executive MBA, all on one website.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing

Adobe offers a converter to PDF format on their site (for a fee), but there are countless other options out there that cost zero. Try www.Pdfonline.com or PDF Creator. They'll convert documents from Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and so on. Via 101 Fabulous Freebies

General | Social Software

Via Marc, I was led to a blog post by David Manaster on recruiter efficiency. He reports that "It would seem that (on average) the optimal workload for a recruiter is between 11 and 20 open positions. " I'd argue that the main reason for this phenomenon is that most recruiters are using only the traditional toolkit: Excel, Word, email, phone, to keep track of their applicants. Nitron couldn't function effectively if we were this inefficient. John Younger, CEO of recruiting process outsourcer Accolo, observed:

I actually find this research to be right in line with our surveys for the typical recruiter today.

 We have found the optimal workload to be between 4 and 18 unique full-time jobs simultaneously.

 At 18 or more, the applicant screening, follow-up and tracking take a severe dive.

The astounding part is that this is the same recruiter workload of 1963! Think about it.

What else in our lives has not budged a bit in productivity in over 40 years! This is the time before e-mail, job boards, the internet and Starbucks.

The core reason is that the recruiter today operates in exactly the same model as the early 1960’s. All we have done is pave the cowpath.

 It gets worse… the hiring manager service and applicant experience have actually diminished with all the technology noise in the middle.

There are new models emerging, but there is an army of people invested in keeping things the same.

According to a staffing.org survey of 2,294 companies, during 2005, the national average Recruiting Efficiency Index was 12.3%. REI is calculated by dividing total recruiting costs, including recruiter salaries & overhead, applicant tracking, advertising fees, etc. and dividing it by total compensation recruited. Accolo reports an REI of under 7% for clients using Accolo's system. Among the drivers for that efficiency: - much higher per-recruiter workload - use of online networks for recruiting (more on that topic)

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

For the lighter side of Wall Street, check out: http://www.dealbreaker.com/ "DealBreaker is an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog. It seeks to cover the personalities and culture that shape the financial industry, offering original commentary, news and entertainment." AND http://www.thebullpenreport.net/ The Bullpen Report has much more of an insider's feel, given that it's written by investment bankers (Harvard MBAs) as opposed to journalists.

General | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Steve Pavlina's list of 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed is worth reviewing even for the non-self-employed. Via Marc Cenedella's blog

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

Valuable write-up on how some of the most successful people manage their time and their days. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371781/index.htm Via Arash Farin

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

A jobless marketing manager recently touted his accomplishments to New York search firm Canny, Bowen. He simultaneously sent the same cover letter and resume to more than 150 other executive recruiters -- and identified every recipient on his e-mail's distribution list. The shotgun approach helped chill the chances of Canny, Bowen proposing him for any vacancy. "We get a half-dozen mass mailings like this every week," reports Gregory Gabel, a managing director. "Two years ago, I never used to get these."

more...

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

From our latest FastCompany.com column:

Your dream employee is lurking out there. How do you find him or her? To track down those stars, recruiters are aggressively using online tools such as blogs, virtual communities, social-networking sites, and biography-analysis software. Here are some best practices in those areas, drawn from Accolo, Nitron Advisors, and Microsoft.

(Disclosure: I'm on Accolo's Advisory Board). full column

General | Social Software | Leadership and Management

From the Freakonomics column in the New York Times:

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. .... whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

more

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Hedge-fund guru Joel Greenblatt (also a principal of the Value Investors Club) applied Wall Street principles—and $1,000 per student—to turn around a struggling Queens elementary school. And it worked, spectacularly. more...

General | Leadership and Management | Public Markets Investing

Apparently, Gmail’s built-in 'View as HTML' functionality, which allows you to view the content of PDF files (and other types of documents) as if they were classic webpages, works regardless of the files’ usage restrictions (i.e., the functionality doesn't respect Digital Rights Management). More...

Via Boingboing UPDATE: Gmail has terminated this functionality.

General | Personal Productivity

Via Mark Hurst of GoodExperience and GEL:

Part of learning to type means learning how to position the arms and wrists. (See more on "learn to type!" here:) http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000576.php For years, to cut down on wrist pain, I've rested my forearms on a dictionary and a thesaurus, each 5 cm thick. That elevates my forearms above the mouse and keyboard and reduces stress on my wrists.

Last week I spotted in Yahoo News, "Forearm Support May Cut Computer Injuries" : "An "ergonomic board" that provides forearm support may relieve upper body pain and disorders that can develop from spending extended hours on a computer, a new study suggests.

 The device, a board that attaches to a desk and supports the forearm, lowered the risk of developing shoulder and neck problems by nearly half and significantly reduced neck, shoulder and right arm pain associated with computer work."

My favorite, though, was this quote: "The average cost per board is around $100, said Rempel. The study found that employers would recover these costs within about 10 months of purchasing the boards."

A hundred bucks? Buy a dictionary (from Gel 2006 speaker Erin McKean, please) and a thesaurus for much less than that!

General | Personal Productivity

From Tom Peters: This list of not-always-obvious tips is worth reviewing. http://www.changethis.com/21.01.111ThoughtsOnSelling

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management