Complaining about discrimination
Last week, the USA Supreme Court ruled on the matter of Burlington Northern v. White, a sexual discrimination case. Basically, the woman involved had been verbally harassed by a male supervisor in front of her all male colleagues. When she ultimately complained, he was discplined, but she was essentally demoted, and trumped up disciplinary charges brought against her (she was off work for 37 days without pay). For details of the case, read the summary here.
The reason this had made it to the Supreme Court was so that a decision could be made about what constitutes unfair labour practice and discrimination. “The court accepted the case to resolve what is called a ’split’ among the lower courts: different appeals courts had adopted differing standards for determining the level of harm necessary for an action to constitute retaliation under Title VII. Some courts required an ‘ultimate employment action’ (firing, demotion or decisions with ‘tangible economic consequences’). Others required only that the action be ‘materially adverse,’ and still others required that the action be ‘likely to deter’ complaints of discrimination.” The Supreme Court had to decide where to draw the line in issues of workplace discrimination. The outcome has huge implications for women and all minorities in America.
The Court ruled last week.
To build a better work space, consult the worker bees. In a poll conducted by Knoll, a furnishings maker, and research firm DYG, 850 workers at companies with 100 or more employees were asked what surroundings made them productive. Some 45% said they work best in private offices. The rest prefer collaborative spaces (16%), their homes (18%), or other sites outside the office (22%). 
This trend away from corporate community engagement must be reversed as we increasingly must compete for the high-tech knowledge worker. Corporate America needs to lead the way to help reinvent our communities for the global knowledge age. Together they need to find a way to start a community-wide dialogue to help define what our common future looks like and, in the process, bring these two forces or visions together.
The problem with respect to the loss of talent is of two kinds: the occasional loss of a few experienced and expensive managers, and the perennial loss of a large number of younger and less expensive managers. In both cases, the financial cost of the loss is high and amounts to a charge to the P&L (profit & loss) account. It is a huge loss, because valuable ‘implicit knowledge’ is lost with management separation.
According to the official version, the modern bikini was invented by French engineer Louis Reard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 (introduced on July 5), and named after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands, on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause would be like the atomic bomb. However it should be noted that women in Paris were wearing bikinis one year before the bikini was “invented.” This fact is documented with pictures in the July 16, 1945 issue of Life Magazine. [The magazine did not use the term "bikini"]
Social Indicators
John Cusack is one of my favourite movie stars, and he turned 40 on 28 June. OK, so’s he’s not quite A-list, and I don’t think he’s ever got a big payday role ($ 10 million or more). But he’s an amazing presence in the psyche of Generation X. His roles have mirrored our lives and our own development. You can see his bio and entire 51 credit filmography at 
An excellent article with a range of Technology opportunities that will open up as Boomers age.
“As the first of America’s 77 million baby boomers turn 60 this year, The Purpose Prize finalists are doing what society least expects people over 60 to do: innovate,” said Marc Freedman, founder and President of Civic Ventures. “These men and women – some national figures, some local heroes – disprove the assumption that innovation is the province of the young and show us the essence of what’s possible in an aging society…. More than just a set of hands, today’s boomers and older Americans represent an extraordinary pool of social and human capital. These inspiring innovators will show that investing in social entrepreneurs in the second half of life yields unprecedented returns for society.”
Australian society’s obsession with looking younger is set to collide with the reality of aging, a University of Queensland researcher warns. The current fixation with trying to postpone aging is increasing and the current senior citizens may be the last to age gracefully, says researcher Mair Underwood, who will present her study at the Emerging Researchers in Ageing (ERA) 2005 conference in Brisbane (Nov 2005).
Imagine being able to record a smell and play it back later, just as you can with sounds or images. Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of doing just that. Simply point the device at a freshly baked biscuit, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis. While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they have been very limited in the range of smells they can produce, says Pambuk Somboon of the Tokyo team. 
At Wharton’s 10th annual leadership conference on June 13, the theme of “Leading with Resilience: Coming Back from Challenge and Adversity” brought together speakers who had faced hardships in a number of different areas. Perhaps none of the speakers, however, had experienced as much physical danger as David Breashears, filmmaker and mountaineer, who recounted how he and his team survived one of the deadliest accidents in the history of Mt. Everest.
On Sunday, in TimesUnion.com, Catherine Hedgeman wrote a short, but insightful piece on Training and Developing Generation X (
Rumour has it that one of our BOOMER sales people enjoyed the opening music of our newest presentation, PRIME TIME.
TomorrowToday.biz keeps warning Boomers about the oncoming issues related to their retirement. Its going to be a tough one, and many Boomers are likely to keep their heads in the sand for too long. The problem is that Boomers are an idealistic bunch. And, they’ve largely been working to a script throughout their lives: “Get a good job in a big company (or make a big company yourself), keep your head down, work hard (mortgage your family and your work life balance), and when you hit your 60s, there will be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy the ‘Golden Years’”. 
When three prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay Camp X-ray – America’s much maligned detention camp for “enemy combatants” that has kept prisoners of “war on terror” in a legal limbo for over 3 years – committed suicide earlier this month, the US Administration fumbled over its response. The first official statement was the one quoted in this post’s title. Colleen Graffy, America’s deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy called it a “good PR move”. The commander of Guantánamo,said that by committing suicide they had committed an act of “asymmetrical warfare” against the United States.
A Reuters report indicates something that most Africans already know: “Africa, an increasing supplier of global energy, may be unable to expand its output as fast as expected in coming years due to a shortage of industry skills. Inadequate schools and relative poverty mean Africa is badly placed to compete for the expertise it will need to develop new fields, a situation only made worse by a wider international shortage of oil and gas engineers and geologists…. Nobody’s talking about it in Africa. What they’re talking about is creating jobs generally. But creating something like a petroleum engineer takes 10 years. As they start developing the big fields, you don’t just go create a petroleum engineer job.”
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