Assembling an effective team requires taking advantage of each member's talents and experience. But in many cases, helping your people cope with the pressures of balancing the job with children, aging parents, and other personal responsibilities means finding a more flexible approach than the traditional "nine-to-five" schedule. Job-sharing, where two people fill one full-time position, can help. But lest you think job-sharing is a panacea, this piece from Entrepreneur.com discusses its advantages and disadvantages.

Calisthenics in the morning. Brainstorming sessions. Sensitivity training. Retreats. We've all heard of unconventional ways to meld disparate people into an effective team. But cooking? In the latest innovation, cooking schools across the country are catering to corporate clients who divide into teams and compete in old-fashioned cook-offs.

Engineering projects tend to generate their own levels of stress, causing illness, lost productivity, and other negative effects on job performance. Yet stress is such an intangible condition, how can you establish standards for managing it? Well, the UK government has given it a shot. This Web site describes recognized aspects of work-related stress and the proposed standards for reducing it.

Oftentimes the cacophony of complementary and conflicting standards appears daunting, at best. The number of standards organizations has exploded in the past few years. The Rutgers University Library has provided a comprehensive guide to these sites, along with brief explanations and appropriate hyperlinks. This resource allows threading through the complexities to find the information you need.

A new report out of the Harvard Business School suggests that the competitive position of companies in the U.S. isn't as dire as some of the cynics would believe. Still, to maintain a competitive edge, entrepreneurs will need access to capital and managers will have to encourage innovation and creative thinking.

An increasing number of software suppliers are offering their products for a monthly fee, rather than a single purchase price. For project management software, that approach can prove considerably less expensive, especially for smaller companies with intermittent or inconsistent requirements. This article from NetworkWorld tells of one vendor trying to take advantage of this new trend.

Many IT organizations spend their lives finding ways to reduce costs. That is, they are looking to do the same tasks in the same way for less money. In this report, the editors at Information Week suggest this "play-it-safe" approach to technology management is stifling creativity by suppressing innovative ways to approach IT problems.

An old industry adage states that adding engineers to a late software project will invariably make it later. The release of Microsoft Vista has implications beyond its status as a new Windows version. It enters a different IT world from the one that Windows 95 entered more than 10 years ago. This report from the Washington Post examines Vista's bumpy road to release and its implications for the future of "big box" software.

Small and Not Like Us

When skeletons of the so-called "Hobbit" people were found on an island in Indonesia a couple of years ago, the scientific community erupted in a controversy, debating whether they were only small humans who suffered from microcephaly (unusually small brains) or actually a separate species. The latest studies comparing their skulls with skulls from microcephalics, normal humans, and a dwarf seem to favor the separate species theory. Scientists have named it homo floresiensis.