Three goodies recently in Business Week’s BTW section.

The first turns you on to just how much money meetings and other time-users/wasters are costing via

Meeting Miser, a widget just launched at PayScale.com, uses the Web site’s database of 10 million income profiles from 4,000 companies to estimate meeting participants’ salaries. A user enters attendees’ job titles and the company’s regional location, and the electronic meter calculates (roughly) the cost per second. The widget can be loaded onto a laptop or mobile device, with results exported to a spreadsheet. As it ticks, the meter can also be projected alongside PowerPoint slides–an element sure to startle some life into a ho-hum presentation.

Try running it the next time you log on to Second Life, Facebook or the myriad of other time-eating social media apps.

Number two ranks managerial skill across 4,000 midsize companies in 12 countries.

The U.S., partly because a mobile labor market makes such a skill necessary, says John Van Reenen, director of the center. Japan, birthplace of “lean,” led in the performance area. And Swedes were the top operations managers, thanks, probably, to a skilled workforce, Van Reenen says. The researchers’ advice to managers? Be self-critical. Some 85% of those surveyed rated their own firm’s management above average.

No surprise in the final sentence considering research done in 2000 by Cornell psych professor David A. Dunning who says, “most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent. On the contrary. People who do things badly are usually supremely confident of their abilities…”

The third is new research done on evaluating handshakes. We’ve all been told to “shake hands firmly,” but what does it convey to the shakee?

The firmer it is, the more socially dominant he’s likely to be, concludes a small study led by psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany. The study, which analyzed the handshakes–and the sexual, social, and physical histories–of 140 college students, found no correlation for females between a strong grip and behavioral competitiveness or body type. (As with men, there was a link to good health.) But males with firm grips reported more aggressive behavior and were more likely to have broad shoulders and narrow hips. (They were also about 10% more promiscuous.) Gallup says a grip’s strength is 35% environmental, 65% genetic–and that a strong clasp may have evolved from humans’ deep past, when tree-swinging monkeys with weak grips fell to earth more often. — Catherine Arnst

Heh, heh, why am I sooooo not surprised.

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