Communication

Creating a simple but profitable profile on LinkedIn

October 15, 2010

For business people, LinkedIn is the most important social media tool. Think of it as a business mixer where everyone displays their critical information on their chests. Like everything else in life, I will form an opinion of you and how seriously you regard this tool in about five seconds. For now, focus on these most influential parts of your profile:

Innovative leadership: Manage lightly, produce precisely

September 13, 2010

The secret to new product innovation? Keep the boss away. A study by The Nielsen Company of 30 large consumer packaged-goods companies found that those whose managers kept a light touch generated 80% more new-product revenue, compared to those with heavy management involvement.

New leaders: Hire right and delegate

September 13, 2010

Melissa Dyrdahl, a former executive at Adobe, sums up pretty well the essence of taking on a leadership role: You get rewarded in a company by doing your job really well. But when you get promoted into management, you have to stop being the doer and start being the leader. For some people, that is a difficult transition …

2-way presentation

September 13, 2010
When making a presentation, ward off audience boredom by making it interactive. Here are four ways to deliver, according to “5 Tips for Making Your Presentations More Social”:

Lesson in diplomacy

September 13, 2010
John Street learned something about leadership one day in 1981, when he was a member of the Philadelphia City Council. When the council president barred his bill aimed at helping the city’s financially troubled school district, Street seized the stenotype machine, setting off a melee that made national news. He said he learned a lesson that day about diplomacy:

Give people their moment in the sun

September 13, 2010

Astrophysicist Jesse Greenstein was the first to correctly describe the nature of quasars, co-discovered cosmic radio noise emanating from our galaxy and proved that stars in globular clusters have fewer heavy elements and thus predate the sun. As a boss, though, Greenstein was perhaps even more stellar.

Fighting the good fight

September 13, 2010

Good bosses fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong—and teach their people to do the same. Pixar director Brad Bird—who worked on “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille”—could serve as a poster child for that sentiment. He understood that a big part of his job was to create enough trust so people could fight over decisions.

First, get others on board

September 13, 2010
Before you try turning your organization around, make sure leaders throughout the ranks are fully on board. Without their support, you may not achieve the performance goals you seek.

Keep them ‘on task’

September 13, 2010

An expert on study habits offers the P-Q-R-S-T method you can use to help your employees concentrate on a task. Start by acting as though you’ve got a box of parts from an office supply store to assemble. The right way to go about it is methodically, not intuitively.

Is the age of profanity over?

September 13, 2010
Goldman Sachs now prohibits employees from swearing in e-mails, and uses screening software to spot and remove profanity. The impetus for change was the company’s embarrassment over profanity-littered e-mails that were repeatedly trotted out during congressional hearings. But is there ever a good cause for profanity in the workplace?