A couple of weeks ago I decided to get onto Yammer, which I thought was a rather interesting way of social networking. It’s a subset of Twitter, which I’m still not a part of, and which I’ve been debating whether or not I should join. I really enjoy the real-time dialog. A friend of mine, an analyst, said being on Yammer or Twitter is rather like riding a bus, joining a conversation when you feel like it, talking to total strangers and kind of just riding along with a friend, which I thought was a rather apt way of describing the experience. Having spent a few weeks on Yammer, I am now wondering whether joining Twitter would be a good idea. I’m not sure, though,...

I have been traveling quite a bit of late. My last trip was quite interesting in that I spent more of my time with government officials than with clients as I usually do. And I found that from Dubai to China, India to Saudi Arabia, creation of new jobs was uppermost in the minds of all the politicians and leaders. And with that level of single-minded focus that exists in all these countries I do believe that this current job crisis, while very vicious, will be much more short-lived than originally thought. The fiscal stimulus, the high degree of awareness around the social costs associated with job loss, and the genuine level of comfort around jobs that emanated from various leaders that I s...

Nothing in life is all good or all bad—everything has some positive and some negative aspects along the way. If you reflect about different facets of your life, you will realize that when life deals you a particular hand, it’s entirely up to you what you’re going to make of it or what value you will create out of it. When I was reflecting about the advantages of this downturn from a personal standpoint, I was immediately able to identify a couple. One was that it made me a lot more focused about what was important to Kenexa, and the result was that our business model became tighter. We will continue to maintain profitability through the downturn and continue to grow the bus...

There have been a lot of press clips recently about inflated compensation, especially that of bankers. A lot of these are led by the Obama administration as well as the business world in general. The most intriguing thing I find is that there’s no one group that says a particular group makes too much. It’s always hedge fund managers saying CEOs and executives make too much, CEOs and executives saying venture capitalists make too much, the VCs saying bankers make too much, bankers saying entertainers make too much and entertainers saying professional athletes make too much, and so on. (And somewhere along the way we shouldn’t leave out the doctors as well.) Every group o...