Why praise is the most important skill a manager or leader can develop

Just a link post today, but it's a damn good one from Wally Bock:

In praise of praise

Devour it if there's even a possibility you'll manage people.

What's really in a name?

Here's a bit of frivolous fun from the BBC that might help you find out:

Apparently, I'm Mr Successful...

My site

Things are moving at pace with my planned consulting website. The domain is all signed and sealed and the new site will definitely be living at jamesparronline.com (my preferred location, jamesparr.com, was already taken unfortunately - if you don't own 'yourname'.com then go buy it immediately before someone else does). Hosting is sorted too, I'm using LaughingSquid.

So things should be up and running within the next week and I'll post about it here when I launch officially. When it's all sorted it will also free up my time to blog a bit more hopefully.

If you're interested in blogging, read this...

There's a blog that I haven't flagged up before and that's bad form, because I devour every word written there. It's called Dosh Dosh and it's written by Maki (that link is to his Twitter profile).

His blog is so good because he really puts the hours in (seriously; hours and hours) to write damn good stuff. Thousands of subscribers, mucho respect in the blogosphere, tonnes of link love and general worship are the prizes that land at his feet pretty much daily. If that's what you aspire to, you should have a read. If not, it's still worth a look...

Click here for the wonderful Dosh Dosh

Delete everything and reboot your brain

Too much information can be really bad for you so delete it all and start again. A blank canvas to work on is worth the pain of giving up your precious information streams. In short, freedom rocks.

I’ve just got back online at home. As mentioned previously, having moved flats I had problems with a new ISP and the phone company. I went to my girlfriend’s to steal her wifi regularly. I went to the library and wifi enabled coffee shops too, but I couldn’t keep up. My email was overflowing, my feed reader was jammed and the blog went quiet. It was getting pretty stressful and I was relieved to get everything sorted today.

First thing I did? I opened 2 tabs for my email accounts and another for my blog feeds. 36 emails in one account. 42 emails in the other. 1500+ new items from the 100 or so feeds I follow. Gulp!

Had I read everything it would have taken me days to get through. All the time new items would have piled up too. I was even more stressed than when I didn’t have the internet! So I deleted it all. I declared email and feed bankruptcy and now I’m starting again with a blank canvas.

[Note: The emails were mostly subscriptions I have, not personal emails. Anyone who emailed me personally knew I was having web trouble and so spoke to me about important stuff directly]

It was a scary thing to do I’ll admit. I love information and feel down if I go a couple of days without learning something new or reading something interesting. I’m addicted to blogs for that reason; tonnes of content delivered to me fresh everyday. But it’s debilitating too. Sometimes I can’t get a new idea of my own going for all the good stuff out there. And I often give up on a half-formed idea because I read someone else’s work on a similar topic.

Now though, I’m free. I’m now thinking about ideas for my marketing consultancy business rather than reading the (doubtless interesting and entertaining) thoughts of Seth Godin. I’ve even got time to write this post.

I’m not worried about what I missed, because the blogosphere is such a damn wonderful place I reckon any interesting stuff will crop up again anyway. And I’m not worried about the conversations I missed either because I’m planning to be around for a while, so I’ll get the chance to join in another time.

If anyone reading this is in the same position I was, delete, reboot and start again. I know you won’t regret it.

How to keep quiet

I'm not usually good at being quiet. In fact some people (my girlfriend, friends, family etc) might go as far as to say I'm actually totally crap at keeping quiet. I'm one of those people who talks a lot, about a lot of things. I've got opinions on most topics and can fake an opinion on any topics I'm not familiar with. Verbosity is my friend.

And yet here I am, keeping quiet with no effort at all on the blog!

I feel like all I do at the moment is apologise for not posting regularly enough and you guys must be getting bored of it by now because I sure am. I still don't have the internet at home, although I do now have a fully operational phone line. I've been promised the internet should be up and running next weekend. I live in hope.

If that doesn't happen I'll have to think of a new excuse or just admit to myself that I'm incapable of doing many things at once (i.e. setting up the new business, visiting the library to use the internet, consuming blogs, writing posts, maintaining my sanity etc). It's kind of ok to admit that though, because of the common notion that men can't multi-task (how on earth did we convince women of that one guys? What a 'get out of jail free' card, eh?)

I hope to get noisy again as soon as possible everybody. You'll be thankful of this quiet period if I manage it...