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Here are five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms to start off your work week. I'm pointing you to articles about GM, privacy, new HR career paths, the challenges of telework, and a thoughtful piece on executive compensation.

From Bloomberg Business Week: Ed Whitacre's Battle to Save GM from Itself
"Brought in by Obama's car czar to help revive the automaker after bankruptcy, "Big Ed" fired CEO Fritz Henderson and took the wheel himself. GM's sales are bouncing back, but Whitacre's redesign is just beginning."

Wally's Comment: There's no doubt that Ed Whitacre is an effective manager. This fanboy piece will give you insight into some of the things that he does that you may want to try.

The article devotes only one sentence to the "repayment" of the taxpayers that I blogged about in "Mirror, Mirror on Big Ed's Wall," last week. Since then, Gretchen Morgenson of the NY Times has written an article that tells me things are worse than I thought. The title, "Repaying Taxpayers With Their Own Cash " pretty much says it all.

As a side note, it's clear that the change from Business Week to Bloomberg Business Week is going to be interesting . One casualty has been the once-excellent weekly podcast. Under John Byrne, the podcast was both entertaining and informative. Those days are gone. Now it's an over-scripted promotional piece that's plagued by serious-to-the-point-of-funny editing gaffs.

From the NY Times: Shoppers Who Can’t Have Secrets
"These and other surveillance techniques are also reminders that advances in data collection are far outpacing personal data protection. Enter the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and, yes, how much money they are making from them."

Wally's Comment: It's been more than a decade since Scott McNealy informed us that we have no privacy and that we should "get over it." You may not have thought it was true back then, but you'll think differently today if you read this piece. A good companion read is Steve Lohr's article from March 2010: "How Privacy Vanishes Online ."

From Wharton: Today's HR Executives: How Career Paths Have Changed -- and Stayed the Same
"Step into the office of the head of corporate human resources today and the odds are you will find a 53-year-old man with a bachelor's degree who has been with his current employer for 15 years. He has spent about half his work life in HR roles, most often in workforce development. And he would not be that much different from the man holding the job a generation earlier."

Wally's Comment: This article is based on a new research report titled: "Who Gets the Top Job? Changes in the Attributes of Human Resource Heads and Implications for the Future" by Peter Cappelli and Yang Yang. For companion reading, try a post from Dan McCarthy titled, "10 Things I learned from working in HR," as well as "Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR" from CFO, and "HR strategy: How HR can make a difference " From Personnel Today.

From HR Exec Online: Telework Trend Offers HR Quandaries
"Whatever stats or studies you're following these days, the consensus seems to be the same: The telework trend is growing rapidly."

Wally's Comment: Significant telecommuting is a relatively new phenomenon. This article points out some of the issues from an HR perspective and supplies some recent data. For companion reading, check out "Study Says Telecommuting May Harm Workers Left Behind in the Office ." That article reports on research from faculty at RPI that looked at the effect of telecommuting on work/family issues.

From Harvard Magazine: The Pay Problem
"Concerns about the compensation of chief executive officers and other top executives of American public companies have reached fever pitch since the financial crisis and the economic meltdown of 2009. Some observers blame the recent recession in part on the flawed compensation arrangements for the top management of major financial institutions. Nor are such concerns new. For almost 20 years, a growing chorus of voices—including some shareholders, the business media, policymakers, and academics—have been criticizing the way top managers are paid. The criticisms focus particularly on CEOs not only because they are the highest paid, but also because their compensation sets the pattern for executives beneath them."

Wally's Comment: In my working lifetime, we've gone from top executives making a small multiple of the average worker to CEOs who make hundreds of times what the average worker in their company makes. We've gone to "guaranteed bonuses" and pay packages that rival the entire budget of developing countries. We've passed through anger and moved to increasing rage that there are people who make millions of dollars while screwing up the works and dragging the rest of us down.

What to do? What to do? Jay Lorsch and Rakesh Khurana take a knowledgeable and reasoned look at the whole mess. There's a lot to think about here.

For companion reading, try "For CEO Pay, a Single Number Never Tells the Whole Story" and Henry Mintzberg's excellent piece: "No More Executive Bonuses!" both from the Wall Street Journal.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.