As told by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, these 5 things are essential to all presentations: a headline, a bad guy, a simple visual, a demonstration, and a memorable moment. And don't forget to sell dreams,  not products. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2009/sb2009106_706829.htm

Tags: presentation, public speaking, speech

Categories: Books | TechKnowledge

A few days ago, a copy of the latest book in the Ultimate series, Ultimate Basic Business Skills: Training an Effective Workforce, landed on my desk. Like all the books in this new series, it follows a similar format as the ASTD Trainer's WorkShop series, providing everything you could possibly ask for to quickly put together a training program. It includes guidelines for designing programs, agendas, learning activities, tools, assessments, and PowerPoint slides that can be customized as well as printed for use as class handouts.

The topics of the book are the basic business skills that everyone needs to function succesfully, effectively, and efficiently in the business environment, such as customer service, basic communication, presentations, networking, conflict management, writing, problem solving, decision making, and much more. These are foundational skills that newcomers to the business environment need, but the rest of us could also use some polish on. To learn more about the book and what it provides, check out the Ultimate Basic Business Skills webpage and download the sample chapter.

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Categories: Books

I had a productive day setting up webpages for some of our forthcoming books. One of those is Brian Lambert's 10 Steps to Successful Sales. Brian is our in-house guru of all things sales related (earlier this year his book World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies with its competency model for sales training was launched at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition in Washington, DC), and his latest book really delivers. He presents 10 steps for successful sales. To learn more about the book, check out the new 10 Steps to Successful Sales web page, which includes a sample chapter as a download, as well as Brian's own webpage devoted to the topic.

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Categories: Books

(From NYT.com, By JON PICOULT) IMAGINE a workplace where all the plum assignments, all the bonuses and all the promotions are steered to relatives, friends and other members of an executive’s inner circle. In any self-respecting organization, such a practice wouldn’t be tolerated.

Most companies purport to be meritocracies, claiming to reward, recognize and promote employees based on workplace achievements, rather than on educational pedigree, political connections or other criteria not based on merit. In a meritocracy, advancement doesn’t hinge on who you know; it’s based on what you’ve accomplished.

Whether or not the companies that fly the meritocracy flag are really meritocracies is a commentary for another day. But one thing is clear: meritocracies are good. When promotions and big bonuses are awarded based on connections and relationships, without regard to individual merit, companies lose credibility and set the stage for an exodus of real talent.

Read more.

Tags: workplace, retention, reward

Categories: Books | News

Even though I do my job pretty well and I have a great relationship with my manager, I dread that annual performance review. It just gives me an icky feeling: now it's time to talk about stuff that's not going well, or to listen to feedback about how I can do better. Even positive feedback makes me feel a little squirmy and embarrassed. So it's not something I look forward to. In terms of how I improve as a performer, it frequently leads to a lot of short-term activity surrounding the review (sort of like that short-term activity surrounding those New Year's resolutions), which then tapers off until work settles down to the usual. (Basically this sort of curve is true for a lot of activities that we do to improve performance; think about training: you attend a training event, when you are done you do lots of things to try to apply it, and then things slowly settle down again. Maybe a few things stick, but a lot goes by the wayside and isn't that frustrating?)

Anyway, back to the performance review: I guess that I am not alone in feeling pretty uncomfortable about the annual review. I certainly know that Jeffrey and Linda Russell, authors of Ultimate Performance Management, a new book that addresses just this topic, do. So they came up with a solution, a new way to approach to managing performance that goes way beyond the annual check-the-box performance review. They came up with the Great Performance Management Cycle and the concept of performance coaching conversations. These are ongoing processes that enable employees like me to get better and better at their jobs and allow managers like my awesome boss (I know, I am totally sucking up, aren't I?) to get better and better results from their people.

I am not going to explain this cycle though, I am going to let the authors do it themselves in the sample chapter that's available on their book webpage. Now, this sample chapter is unusually long and I argued with myself a while before putting it up there, but I think the contents are really interesting while the real value of the book is in the application. Ultimate Performance Management provides everything you need to know to assess, implement, and train people on this way of improving people's performance. You get all you need to be able to put on five workshops, including learning activities, tools, handouts, training instruments, as well as processes and procedures. This is a book that has real potential to improve the ways that people work, so check out the sample and see what you think.

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Categories: Books

So, Twitter. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Tweet. Tweet. Tweet. 

What do you do with it? I am still trying to figure it out. I sort of get it, but then I don't. As a member and employee of an organization that aims to lead the profession, it's part of my job to try to figure it out. Thing is, it's pretty new, so its potential is not fully explored yet. What does that mean? It means that any smart, creative, innovative (and potentially unscrupulous) person can come up with a new way to use it. That's always exciting. And it's overwhelming.

An article at Time.com lists 10 ways that businesses can use Twitter, including marketing and advertising, getting (and affecting) stock prices, providing news, getting consumer data, disseminating content, and more. Jeanne Meister has talked about several ways that companies can use Twitter on her blog, including as a recruiting tool.

One of the most enjoyable applications of Twitter that I have come across is the line-by-line retelling of the Indian epic the Mahabharata (@epicretold), which is great for geeky ancient literature lovers like myself, but also suggests other applications such as providing training tips and tools, introducing the contents of a new book, and so on.

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Categories: Books

A few days ago, I was searching around on the web for information about leadership (in relation to a new project with Elaine Biech for a Leadership Handbook, but more on that another time), when I stumbled across an article by one of ASTD Press's authors, Alexandra Levit. In the September-October issue of The Futurist, she writes about the future world of work, from her perspective as a Gen Xer. As a Gen Xer myself, I was interested in what she had to say. These are some of the trends that she sees on the horizon:

• We'll have to deal with the loss of brain power as Boomers in management start to retire in droves, and we'll have more diverse work places with Boomers who work for personal fulfillment and immigrants to make up the loss of brain power.
• The companies that we work for will get smaller, as everything that can be outsourced will be outsourced.
• Many of us won't actually be full-time employees of organizations; instead, we'll be consultants and temporary workers.
• Because we can work from various locations, we will. As a result, the work day will grow longer and more flexible.  
• The projects that we work on will change constantly, requiring that we be flexible and adaptive.

Alexandra thinks that these things sound exciting, but I am trying to decide what I think about it.... Well, I can recognize some of the excitement in it, certainly. The ability to work on the fly, to shift tactics quickly, to adapt--it all has a kind of video-game feel that's kind of fun, how fast can you go and how fast can you get out of way of the objects flying at you (for some reason, all I can picture is a roller rink with an assortment of obstacles rolling past that you have to duck). Also, the potential independence of a situation where you are your own employee, working on a project-by-project basis for an organization. That's kind of nice, too.

But there are some downsides as well. For example, I already don't like how much work creeps into home life and the work day expands, expectations of your availability change too. Also, there's a lot to be said for the value of being part of an organization, the value of contributing to something larger than yourself on an ongoing basis. So there are pluses and minuses. Anybody else have a thought?

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Categories: Books

Hi folks:

A new book project that we are working on for 2010 is a book about using social media for business success. The author for this book, Darin Hartley, just started a blog at http://soc-net-for-biz.blogspot.com/ to solicit content from you, John and Jane Q Public, to put in the book. So if you have any interesting stories, case studies, examples, etc., to share, get on over to his blog and let him know about it.

This is actually sort of a first stab at getting you, the reader, involved in co-creating ASTD content. One of the things that we are trying to do here in the Press is to forge a stronger connection with our audience and create a community, so please feel free to contact us and let us know what you are thinking, what you think that we should be covering, and so forth. Obviously, we won't be able to cover everything, but it does gives us the chance to hear more directly from you about what you would like to read about.

 

 

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Categories: Books

Now, I've been known to get bogged down in editorial details, raging on about inappropriate commas, obsessing over inconsistent numbering of tables and figures, despairing that a book published with an incorrect running head, fuming over passive voice, walking the streets wild-eyed and muttering "the gerund, the gerund!" Well, maybe not that last bit, but you get the point: I am a picky editor who at times cares too much about minutiae.

That said, here's a story I heard that made me furious. Once upon a time, there was an editor who received a typeset manuscript that was red with markups. In response to these bloody proofs, the editor said something along the lines of "Look, we are not getting into the nitty gritty here. No one is looking at those things anyway."

Well...where do I start? I have so much to say about this statement and about this attitude in general. Do I start with, "YES WE ARE PICKING NITS HERE! WE ARE EDITORS!" Probably not. Yelling isn't usually very productive.

OK, so let me start again. This statement makes me particularly steamed because it involves the failure of an editor to recognize the importance of getting details right. Rebelling against editorial and typographical rules does not result in liberation and time savings; it results in poor quality, failure to communicate, and loss of credibility. It means that we don't respect the author and we don't respect our customer, the reader, enough to convey ideas and information with clarity, precision, and elegance.

I think the statement also rankles because it suggests that those of us who do care about getting details right are slow, doddering, old fuddy-duddies who are too unhip to grasp today's need for speed. Well, I get the need for speed. Or do I? We always hear that the world keeps changing faster and faster, and we have to keep up. But speed too often trumps quality and value--and that's especially true in editorial. What if we slowed down a little and got it right? Did it well? Would we really lose so much?  

 

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Categories: Books

Elaine's newest book (which will be available for purchase from ASTD Press on July 25!) is at the printer, and the proofs looked good, so we are pretty excited to see that come in. In the meantime, you can get a sneak preview of a sample chapter from the book here.

 

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Categories: Books