Best of the week

Here are the articles and resources that I found most interesting this week.

Knowledge nomads. The article "High Turnover: Should You Care?" from Harvard Business School discusses "knowledge nomads," people in the knowledge economy who move around frequently from company to company. Drawing from an article in American Behavioral Scientist, the HBS article's author says companies should focus less on trying to retain employees with money or perks and more on "re-recruiting" them with challenges and learning opportunities. Retention will then follow. (Thanks to the e-learningpost for this link.)

Positive organizational scholarship. The Michigan Business School is exploring this arena, which their Website defines as a "movement in organizational studies that...focuses on the dynamics that lead to developing human strength, producing resilience and restoration, fostering vitality, and cultivating extraordinary individuals, units and organizations." This movement parallels a similar movement in psychology, termed "positive psychology," that focuses on what makes people mentally healthy rather than unhealthy.

More on reputation. In last week's best of the week, I wrote about some resources on reputation. The Smart Mobs Weblog offers links to two additional resources: a review of the book Reputation in Artificial Societies: Social Beliefs for Social Order and a presentation on gossip and reputation by a professor of sociology and strategy at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Dominant and submissive body language "tells." From Dave Pollard's blog "How to Save the World" comes this intriguing entry on dominant and submissive body language cues. Find out which "tells" show someone is dominant and which submissive, the six different types of dominant and submissive signals, usual submissive responses to specific dominant signals and vice versa, and the meaning of various other signals.

"Online Social Networks Go to Work." I proposed some business uses for online social networks like LinkedIn in my "We Learning part II" article. This article from MSNBC interviews some users and researchers of these applications and talks about how people are putting them to work.