June recommended reading

Some Prefer No Sex to Bad PowerPoint

From Talking Leadership: “A new survey by online presentation company, SlideRocket, confirms what we already know – nobody wants to sit through another bad PowerPoint presentation. What caught my eye was just how badly people were turned off by PowerPoint.”

Read why Some Prefer No Sex to Bad PowerPoint and what to do about it

Perfect is the enemy of good

From Business Leaders Learning: “Voltaire wrote ‘Perfect is the enemy of good.’
Many of us have done it. Spend too long on that email, ‘improve’ that agenda, re-write that proposal. Of course it must be right, but in many cases, it is right already. And it must be on time too.”

Read the rest of Perfect is the enemy of good

Don’t Try to Change Things You Can’t

From Steve Tobak: “You stress over things you shouldn’t, don’t focus on things you should, and maybe even end up screwing up your job, career, or organization in the process.

Don’t believe me? Here are a few examples of how you stress over things and try to change people you have no control over…”

Continue reading Don’t Try to Change Things You Can’t

10 Reasons Your Team Hates You

From thoughtLEADERS: “Your team hates you. Really. They do. They hate their boss (you) but they just won’t say so because they like getting paid. But when they go home at night, they spill their bile about their taskmaster of a boss who does nothing but drive them crazy (isn’t that what you do too?).”

Read the 10 Reasons Your Team Hates You

 

May Recommended Reading

Effective leadership depends on emotional intelligence

From Harvey Schachter: “Much attention has been paid to the emotional intelligence of managers. But in an era of teams, what about folks who take a leadership roles in groups, often because they are a technical whiz?”

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How to Seriously Motivate People

From The Corner Office by Steve Tobak: “The vast majority of workplace problems are actually management problems. While that statement was meant to be about improving quality, to me, it’s always had a broader meaning.  I’ve always thought of it as an axiom for improving all kinds of management and organizational systems… including how to motivate employees.”

Read more about How to Seriously Motivate People

10 Online To Do List Manager Solutions to Get Things Done

From Work Awesome: “Cloud-based task managers are becoming more compelling and practical every day. It’s not uncommon for employees to spend their professional and personal time between three computers: a laptop, work desktop and home desktop. Throw an iPhone or Blackberry into the mix, and synchronization across all of these devices becomes an unwieldy engineering project. There has to be a better way.”

See the 10 Online To Do List Manager Solutions to Get Things Done

How to Improve Your Public Speaking by Practicing Out Loud

From Michael Hyatt: “I came away from the Dynamic Communicators Workshop with numerous action items. However, the one that had the single biggest immediate impact was this:  Before you give a speech, practice it out loud, on your feet, as though you were in front of a live audience.  I know, that probably doesn’t sound too revolutionary. But for some reason, I had unconsciously come to the conclusion that I didn’t need to do this. Boy, was I wrong.”

Read the rest of How to Improve Your Public Speaking by Practicing Out Loud

 

March recommended reading

How to Hate Your Job (or 16 Things Not to Do)

From Reading For Your Success: “I didn’t know what to do so I listened to everyone else. I found a ‘good job’ at what I later discovered was ‘a big dumb company‘. I was ecstatic. A real job that everyone could be proud of. Awesome. The excitement lasted all of about 16 days.”

Read the rest of How to Hate Your Job (or 16 Things Not to Do)

Drawing in PowerPoint 101

From PowerPoint Ninja: “I view drawing in PowerPoint as a last resort when you can’t find an appropriate photo or clip art graphic. If I can customize an existing clip art image, I’m going to go that route before I embark down the path of drawing something in PowerPoint for a couple of reasons.”

Continue reading Drawing in PowerPoint 101

Your Emails are Too Long

From Zen Habits: “One of the worst problems I’ve seen when people send me emails is amazingly common: they’re way too long.

Here’s a rule: a long email is never necessary. Never.”

Read the rest of Your Emails are Too Long

80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day

From OPEN Forum: “We’re all too busy. We’re living and working in an age with countless online and offline inputs, leaving little time for us. If you’re anything like me, you wish there were another couple of hours in every work day. Or at least a few clones of myself to do things like email and laundry.

I’ve asked some of the top small business and productivity bloggers and consultants to share some of their best tips on how they add more time to their days. They’ve got some excellent advice, and each unique to their industry and talents.”

Read 80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day

 

February recommended reading

Recommended reading for February

How to Be a Great Storyteller and Win Over Any Audience

From The Corner Office by Steve Tobak: “It’s hard to imagine your career going anywhere if you can’t tell a story. Whether it’s an investor pitch to a VC, an ‘about us’ to a potential customer, justifying your group’s existence to management, or an ‘about me’ in an interview, your success in business is all about effective storytelling.”

Learn How to Be a Great Storyteller and Win Over Any Audience

Bridging the Trust Gap within a Group

From Leadership Strategies: “When it comes to teams, there is one thing that can change everything.  It’s a necessary ingredient for transitioning a group of individuals into a genuine team.  It’s trust.”

Read the rest of Bridging the Trust Gap within a Group

Motivation Made Simple

From The Management Experts: “If you’re a manager then you’ve been told at least once that you have to ‘motivate your people.’ But how do you do that? Start by making a change in your head.”

Read the rest of Motivation Made Simple

Don’t Collaborate?

From Leadership Freak: “Most organizations bow down to the value of collaboration. Today, I’m shooting the sacred cow. Collaboration isn’t always useful or necessary. Furthermore, collaboration can be cumbersome and ineffective.”

Read the rest of Don’t Collaborate?

 

December recommended reading

Photo by eloquentlight

The Good News About Good Bosses

From Bob Sutton’s Work Matters: “A recent poll by StrategyOne of over 500 American workers finds that over 80% of employees feel respected by their supervisors and believe their supervisors value their work.”

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What I Learned from Oprah and Marcus Buckingham

From Escape from Corporate America: “The bottom line, according to Oprah and Marcus, is that your real job in life is to find out why you are here. In order to make any kind of lasting contribution, your job must “feed” you in some way.”

Read the rest of What I Learned from Oprah and Marcus Buckingham

Inspirational Quotes Blog

This inspirational quotes blog posts at least one quote every day; sometimes two or three.  If that’s not enough, you can follow him on Twitter to get even more quotes.

Start reading Inspirational Quotes Blog

Civility at Work

From Daniel Goleman: “People at work in any organization face a panoply of forces that easily overpower the urge to be civil: stress, multi-tasking, too much to do with too little time, or too little support. Stress and distractedness – not meanspiritness – are the most common enemies of civility at work.”

Read how to stay civil at work

Set up Outlook 2007/2010 to Master Your Now (MYN)

From Master Your (Workday) Now: “This video teaches you a subset of the complete MYN Outlook system; just enough so that you’ll be using the core of the Outlook MYN system in only a few minutes. You’ll have a system to get your long list of tasks for the new year organized, and then a way to stay ahead of too-many e-mails and too many to-do’s.”

Watch how to Master Your Now with Outlook 2007/2010

Winners of the 2010 World’s Best Presentation Contest

From SlideShare: Late each year, people are encouraged to enter presentation slides or videos in SlideShare’s Best Presentation Contest.  Then SlideShare members vote, and expert judges select the final winners in a variety of categories.

See the World’s Best Presentations for 2010

 

Do you make these four mistakes when presenting with PowerPoint?

Do you give or attend presentations at work?  We all do.  We even talk about “Death by PowerPoint.”

I hope you give great presentations.  If you do, and you have ever suffered through someone else’s presentation, please email them a link to this article.

It doesn’t matter whether you use PowerPoint, Keynote, or something else to create your slides.  Here are four mistakes to avoid during your presentation.