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Pay Unfairly is chapter 10 of Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! Ever provocative this book shares the thinking behind Google’s people strategy. What is remarkable is that it is 24 times harder to get a job at Google than to get a place at Harvard University. And three million people a year apply for jobs there. Bock is Google’s senior vice president of people operations. The most important rule is to hire great people and people who are better at your job than you are. He devotes two chapters to this subject. Later on we get to the Pay Unfairly chapter where Bock offers four pieces of advice: -          Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay the reflect the power law distribution of performance -          Celebrate accomplishment not compensation -          Make it easy to spread the love -          Rew...

"How we interact at a local level is really important to us, and that's why we've launched these local Facebook pages," Stephen Quinn, chief marketing officer of Wal-Mart US, tells Fortune magazine. The full article http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/14/news/companies/walmart_stephen_quinn_leadership.fortune/index.htm  is well worth a read. Mr Quinn explains that retailing is fundamentally a local business. His marketing team has to work out how to build local communities around its 3,500 US stores. For local shopkeepers the challenge is clear. In 2012 you need to think about how you represent your shop on Facebook and similar social media and through the internet. As an exercise, go to Google and enter the word groceries and the name of your town or village. I did it for my village and One Stop came top. I did it for where I work and Sainsbury Local came top. "Our goal is to integrate into the things that are happening in a local commun...

In Time magazine's review of the first decade of the current century it followed up on the software pirates who threatened to undermine the publishing industry by creating file sharing software. One bullet point was particularly interesting - the way to compete with free on the internet was to make something easy. This is partly why the pirates did not win. Free is not enough. Today, Google has launched its book store on line. On the front page is a great list of benefits of its web reader: Unlimited storage of ebooks 2-page reading mode Search within book Adjust text size, typeface, line space, justification Free samples of books Information about book Worry-free archive The last bullet is particularly compelling as so many people worry about shopping on the internet or storing stuff on the internet. In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin writes about Marissa Mayer, who works for Google. Her job is to make interfaces work. She makes sure that the start page has the smallest...