Crackers « Don't Compromise!

Crackers

Like most blogs, we have a “blog roll” of Other blogs that we think you might enjoy or gain from – you’ll find it in the right-hand column.

But as we wander through the blogosphere and the unmarked territories of Web 2.0, we also stumble across individual posts that strike a chord, inspire a reaction and just generally inform, inspire or entertain. This page will endeavour to list at least some of them and please – let us have your own suggestions for inclusion.

Don’t Fall Victim to Your P-Ness: Mike Shoemakes not just making a good point about personality types, preferences and working styles, but demonstrating a real talent for the arresting headline. Just because we’ve passed judgment doesn’t mean we have P-Ness Envy issues, Mike, we just like your style …

12 Simple Ways To Impress Your Boss (And Everyone Else): considerably less brown-tongued that it might sound from it’s title, simply a great post in the ‘ways to go through life more positively and constructively’ category. There are enough people making the world a worse place, and Nate offers 12 guidelines that might just make a small but valuable difference. For which he is to be applauded.

Intranet offers bright future for internal communicators: Gerry McGovern has been an interesting commentator of the impact of the Internet on our lives since 1994. As an Irishman, his is also a rare European voice in this arena. As a web commentator, he has also stressed the importance of content, usability and users – this post is no exception.

Career Gifts: Meg Bear’s post covers more than one ‘gift’ she has received in herworking life, but we liked the concept of ‘micro-coaching’ – a few brief words from someone else that can sometimes carry more beneficial weight than a whole shelf of self-improvement books.

Education vs Training: Using Twitter as a Research Tool: Brandon Hall’s Gary Woodill asked his Twitter followers to define the difference between education and training. Out outlooks depend on our vantage points, but the range is fascinating, informative and provocative. Why not add your own comment?

Best advice I ever got: 22 people answer a simple question, combining their opportunity for personal reflection with our opportunity to receive 22 nuggets of wisdom – and even secondhand daylight illuminates. As well as “Be nice to people” – we agree - we also liked “Buy a coach”.

Will Social Networks Trump Traditional Networks In The Future? Joanna Pineda at The Matrix Group looks at how she is using Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn and how that compares with her more traditional networking activities. So, are these media becoming the ‘new way’, or are they more like nightclub bouncers – a handy way of filtering who gets to get closer?

Fortune 100 CEOs are Social Media Laggards: however it was that today’s Fortune 100 leaders got where they are today, it looks like using social media wasn’t their chosen route. But will they change – maybe getting someone to e-socialise on their behalf (social media requires time, although it carries an expectation of authenticity) and should they? Business Week ponders.

Size isn’t everything for today’s recruits: Management Today report on the 2009 Angela Mortimer Blue Book Salary Survey, which shows disparity between the outlooks of organisations and potential recruits. While 62% of employers think that being a market leader is attractive to potential recruits, only 23% of candidates agreed. Given that 78% of organisations anticipate attracting the right staff will be tough, some clearer thought and effort on talent management might be called for, even in a ‘buyers’ market’.

The Performance Review & Some Ugly Truths: Gwyn Teatro’s ‘You’re Not The Boss Of Me’ blog is one of our favourites anyway, but this post deserves special mention. Performance Review is often almost counter-productive as an activity, every organisation, line manager, and line managee should read this one. While you do that, we’re off to add a comment …

Use the Five Whys to Get Comfortable with New Ideas: elsewhere we looked at the importance of ‘why’. Here’s another reason for asking – although the implication is that you’ll need to persevere with the questions. Patience is a virtue.

Ambassadors of Harmony: this may well be a matter of taste, but for a 4 min 47 sec demonstration of not just presentation skills but also tight team-working this may take a little beating. But please turn down your speakers before clicking the link.

Bear shaving: solving the problem starts with naming – if not shaming – the problem. As Seth Godin implies, the longer you keep ‘shaving the bear’ (read the article, it will make more sense), the bigger the elephant in the corner will get.

Work as Play: Stephen Stills once sang above loving the one you’re with. Leo Babauta, writer of the zenhabits blog, thinks we might try the same approach to work and that ‘fun is forbidden’ isn’t a mindset that improves the workplace. We’re wondering if he has any vacancies …

Reclaiming ‘leadership’ from the elite: Louise Teboul on leading with authority in a multi-agency environment, the importance of “earning legitimacy with ideas that resonate”, and our need to recognise that leadership is something that you do rather than something you might have on your business card.

windosill.com: a lesson not only in creative problem solving – welcome to an online world with lots of challenges and no signposts – but also in creating a memorable (ok, we admit it, addictive) experience. We hope you’ll enjoy this as much as some of us!

Engagement Soup: a veritable storm in a soup bowl by Bret Simons, wondering aloud how anyone can confuse optimism with engagement – and fail to distinguish between effect indicators and causal indicators. And, more importantly, questioning what engagement in isolation proves- or do I mean indicates. We’re sorry about the illustration, by the way (not our work).

The Age of Commodified Intelligence: while George Balgobin is writing for the online edition of the Economist’s Intelligent Life about culture and our consumption of it in a broader sense, there is an important point about learning and self-development here too. As he writes “But if we fail to distinguish between attendance and appreciation, we may end up poorer for it, left with a corporate caricature of our cultural richness. The “intelligent” masses will work hard mining the store of culture artefacts, but will they read the texts and learn from them, or only use them as objects for trade?”. And there’s a big difference between reading and turning the pages.

Re-Visioning Visionary Leaders: Dan Oestreich on the kind of visionary leader who can transform workplace culture – or, in his words, “folks who simply love to work in the garden of helping themselves and others grow”, rather than “operating in their own shadows”.

The Third Grade Teacher Model of Leadership: the school model of learning – preparation, homework, project-based, ongoing assessment, curricula and syllabi – has a lot going for it. But, as Wally Bock points out, as preparation for life – and leadership – goes, your geography teacher might not be the most flexible or appropriate model.

Who’s Passion is Greater?: the good people at Brains on Fire – who’s passion for communicating inspired us to have our own blog – make a great point or two about passion. As Graham Parker once sang, “it’s no ordinary word”. Passion creates passion, but it needs to be mutual.

Can you teach ethics to students? The Financial Times’ Judgement Call column explores the issue of teaching ethics at business school (which reminds us of The MBA Oath project, started by students at Harvard). You can get the leopard into the classroom, but can you change it’s spots.

Ensuring Employees ignore you: A Leader’s guide: proof that Americans do understand irony. The modern business leader’s time is valuable: engage people and you’ll only have to waste more of it in a dialogue, right? (Ok, we’re kidding too.)

Free E-book on Employee Engagement: search on Twitter for ‘employee engagement’ and it’s hard to miss David Zinger. Now you can download a free 44 page PDF e-book, containing one sentence inspirations on engagement from a huge variety of contributors. Better engaged than vacant, so start downloading

HRZone poll: if you need more encouraging, go to HRZone, who are currently running an online poll asking HR personnel which issues are most important to them. Front runner at the time of writing – and on every previous occasion that I’ve checked – is … employee engagment. Whether you agree or disagree, voting is free, so speak up.

Finding yourself: finally, for those in need of 10 seconds of humour … Our recent post Streams of Consciousness looked at self-awareness. Technophiles and those who are struggling to find themselves may find salvation in this snippet from Newsbiscuit. (More sombre readers might wish to skip this link.)

Let Me Entertain You: you may have read our earlier Q&A session with Peter Cook, author of Sex, Leadership and Rock’n’Roll. If you’d like to hear more about how his ideas can influence business leaders’ thinking, tune in to Radio 4 at 20.30 on 17 Dec, catch the repeat on 20 Dec at 21.30, or catch it on iPlayer for the following seven days.

Sweet Georgia Brown med traktorkomp: our favourite YouTube clip of recent times, and an exercise lesson in how to improvise your way out of an unexpected human resources crisis. (But do bear in mind that, although tractors don’t drink, smoke, run off with other musicians’ wives or throw tantrums, you can’t rely on them to make valuable creative contributions in their own right.)

Thinking Both/And: we’ve highlighted her contributions in ‘Crackers’ before, but Sharlyn Lauby’s recent post at The Hr Bartender is truly a cracker. Constructive, positive and challenging – and the concept of ‘Both/And’ is one that deserves greater consideration in many, many aspects of working life. Sharlyn, we will putting pen to paper shortly, and thank you for the inspiration.

What is Engagement, and is it really just about employees?: as contribution Mike Klein points out, ‘engagement’ may be a hot topic, but discussion suffers from a lack of agreed definition. His post – which has attracted much comment already – particularly struck my attention after reading Richard Donkin’s “The Future of Work” – review to follow – and Donkin’s concern that it is becoming “the one trick pony of modern management”.

Why do we take ourselves so seriously?: Robbin from Brains on Fire, musing on the importance of creating trust in terms not just what it enables to achieve, but also in terms of the widening of the range of approaches it enables us to take. We suspect that, if were challenged to draw her, we’d let her see the picture. We hope we’d both laugh too – a good beginning (and further proof of the importance of phatic communication too)

Seniority ain’t what it used to be: over at Flipchart Fairytales, Rick shows us the expectations we’re encouraged to have can turn into frustrations. (Remember Alain de Botton’s lesson about what Seneca could still teach us?) Read it in terms in employee value propositions and their value in helping to retain talent and increase engagement, and it may lose it’s comic value – don’t say you weren’t warned.

Secret Diary of an Entrepreneur: The evils of self-improvement: Secret Diary keeps his or her identity close to his or her chest, but it seems we’re not the only one with some qualms about at least some of the self-help tomes on the market. If your most recent self-help guide hasn’t brought you an improved relationship with your line manager, or doesn’t cover being sensitive to the impact you make on others, you might want to read this. And maybe treat yourself to a self-review session. You know you’re worth it.

Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility: a post we might, with hindsight (always an elusive quality) have noticed earlier), where Common Purposes’ Una Farrell reports on listening to a talk by Will Marre, arguing for the advent of Personal Social Responsibility – “where employees are offered a chance to make their own unique contribution to their organisation’s success”. (Although I reckon Una miscounted: apart from ‘our future’ and ‘our bottom lines’, this might also increase engagement and create meaning for employees – I make that three, possibly even four, birds with one stone.)

Recruit for a Cause Not a Role: Gautam Ghosh looks not only at the disengagement that can occur between job offer and actual arrival, but how employer attitudes can shape employee attitudes. Are we offering a contract, or a role? Or, as he puts it, “The vast majority of organizations don’t think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can connect with that innately human desire – you will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and they in turn will treat you as a mercenary would.”

Creativity is a competitive advantage: Janet Clary asks the simple question “Are innovation and creativity taking a back seat to survival in this fragile economy?” and, by implication, if we are acting in our longer-term best interests. So, are winning the battle but losing the war?

The evolution of training: Verity Gough explores the development of training in response to social and organisational change, and provides rich food for thought. How evolved is your organisation and its relationship to learning?