Be Nice to EVERYONE

It always baffles me to see someone unnecessarily treating someone else bad. Sure, people sometimes really do deserve it, but what I’m talking about is when people let their ego take over.

Take this example:

A mid-level manager at a medium-sized company (700 employees) asks his MIS department to upgrade his word processor on his laptop. An hour later, an intern drops off the laptop, but the spreadsheet was updated instead. The manager, a perfectionist and a hot head, blasts the intern: “Can’t you read! The request clearly states to upgrade the word processor!”  Read more... (550 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)

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Great networking site

I came across an interesting blog about business networking called BusinessNetworkingAdvice.com. The blog author, Josh Hinds, has interviewed several people to get their thoughts on Business Networking so it’s a good read. Josh asks two questions:

1. How do you define Business Networking and why do you feel it is important?
2. Can you share a few ideas that someone could put into practice that would help them to improve their business networking skills?

The answers vary but some key elements include:  Read more... (434 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

  • Networking is more than just trying to see what you can get from someone else.
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A different perspective on Michael Richards

I liked Seinfeld and Kramer was my favorite character so I found Michael Richards’ recent reaction to a heckler at the Laugh Factory to be very disturbing. In fact, I would say he handled it as poorly as he possibly could have. Even if the heckler was out of line, Michael turned the rest of the crowd against him with his diatribe of racial slurs.

One stand-up comedian tried to defend Michael’s behavior by attributing it to a lack of experience in stand-up where heckling is common. They’re not used to an audience except for talk shows and theater where heckling is rare.  Read more... (562 words, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)

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The difference between clients and customers

There’s a great book by Jay Abraham called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve GotThe difference between clients and customers. Jay is a marketing expert and one of the things he discusses is how customers should be referred to as clients. This is because he believes that Customers are people who buy from you but clients are people that you provide some guidance to or who are under your protection.  Read more... (283 words, 4 images, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

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Keep others interests in mind

I subscribe to the This Is True mailing list. They ran an article a while back about someone giving Vice President Dick Cheney “a piece of their mind” and getting talked to by the secret service for doing so (the secret service accused the person of “harassing” and “threatening” Cheney). I’ve been trying to dig up the details on the story for those interested, but the details are actually irrelevant for the purpose of this article. In any case, it re-enforced one of my keys of good communication: always present an idea or opinion with the other person’s interests in mind.  Read more... (673 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

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Quick Tip #3: Stagetime

If you want to quickly improve your public speaking skills, you need to get up in front of an audience as much as you possibly can. Each time you speak, you gain experience and expand your comfort zone. If you ask for and receive feedback, then you’ll improve even faster.

Toastmasters is good for this as it provides you with opportunities to speak. I recommend joining or visiting multiple clubs because you’ll address different audiences. You may get comfortable after speaking multiple times to the same audience so it’s good to mix things up. Also, different audiences will provide you with different feedback.  Read more... (175 words, estimated 42 secs reading time)

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Avoiding Conflicting Goals

Do any of your goals conflict with each other? A classic example of this is the work-life balance dilemma where you have the following two goals:

Goal 1: Spend more quality time with my spouse and family.

Goal 2: Get promoted two levels within the next year.

Obviously, both of these goals require a substantial amount of the same resource: your time. Knowing that forgetting about sleeping and spending 12 hours per day with your family and 12 hours per day at work is unrealistic, you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated. And you’d have plenty of company as there are probably thousands of so-called experts who make their living preaching about work-life balance. I’ll give you my short course and this one’s on the house.  Read more... (499 words, estimated 2:0 mins reading time)

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