Summer time, summer time. Happy Memorial Day. Eons ago, I vacationed in Malaga, Spain with my dad and my sister. We had a blast. My dad's beach book was a phenomenal compendium of Frederick Forsyth's short stories called No Comebacks... Harry Joiner

I am in NYC with no money. This used to happen all the time. When my company was running out of money, I would go to San Diego to give a speech and stay at a four-star hotel and not have a cent. And no credit card, of course. I would fly first class, stash all the extra treats they offered, and eat them until I could charge room service to the organization I was speaking to.

I am an ace at traveling without any money, but I’m sick of it. I thought it would never happen again. After all, I have a company credit card.

But I think Ryan Healy canceled my card. Or put a hold on it. I think this is maybe because I charged a ton of garden supplies on the card last weekend. I couldn’t find my own card, so I thought I’d just charge a few things and then write the company a check. But then I charged a bunch of roses. Twenty. I mean, the farmer can just dump a bunch of dirt in a pile and dump a bunch of stones around the pile, and voila – I have a huge garden plot. So now I have a sun garden that needs a little more spunk.

I discovered the credit card problem while innocently buying a Bluetooth headset in NYC so I could do the gazillion conference calls we do at Brazen Careerist with a CEO in DC and me on a farm and Ryan and Ryan in Madison. I mean, every meeting is a conference call and I’m getting a neck ache.

Also, I’m getting fat. The conference calls are hard for me. They bore me. I like big ideas, I like hypothesizing and predicting and synthesizing. The job of actually getting stuff done is not that interesting to me. But we are in execution mode at the company, and I need to stay focused. So I eat when I'm on the conference calls. On a good day, I eat ten apples. Cut into halves, then quarters, then cookie cutter shapes like stars. On a bad day it's one apple and ten apple pies.

So I am needlepointing, to stay focused on execution instead of food.

I remembered about needlepointing from when I was a kid, bored out of my mind in Miami with my grandma, when I spent summers at the Doral, where every evening was black tie, and kids ate dinner alone, in pajamas. I learned to needlepoint there. In between getting sunburned and getting spanked. And the needlepoint was the highlight of my trips. Well that, and my diary, featuring entries like, “Granma hayts me. I hayt Auntie. I want to dye.”

So I thought, maybe I should needlepoint to calm myself down now, so I don’t have outbursts on the phone. I am trying to be a more amicable co-worker. I am not sure if it’s possible, but I know that to achieve my goal of amicability, I have to stop getting angry on the phone, which comes not out of passion but rather out of boredom.

So now I needlepoint. And then it was so effective that I started needlepointing everywhere. I did it while I had dinner with my mom. She told me I was crazy. I did not say pot calling the kettle black.

I stopped following the color pattern exactly by the time I was so addicted that I was needlepointing while getting a Brazilian. And by the time I was doing needlepoint in the board meeting, I was disregarding the whole pattern in favor of a completely free-form approach, (which, by the way, strikes me as the future of all needlepoint — less rigidity).

Now I’m convinced I need beads for my needlepoint, and I’m actually super happy thinking of spending my days threading beads. The problem is that I don’t have any beads. There is a bead store near the farm, but they are not interesting beads, and I knew I was going to New York City, which must be home to many amazing beads. I was thinking that even though I don’t know where my bank card is, I have the company card. And now that I’ve charged garden stuff, the beads won’t get anyone any more annoyed.

But now I’m cut off from the credit card. I’m going to have to ask Ryan Healy, or even Ed, our CEO, why. They will say, “Have you been using it for anything weird?” They will ask innocently maybe, although they constantly worry about me and weird. They worry that weird will overshadow all the good about me.

But just because I am not able to charge beads while I’m in NYC with no money does not mean that I am out of good ideas. Don’t underestimate my workplace trends genius.

Like, I’m thinking that the future of all writing is short, twitter-like stuff, based on traits we see in Generation Z. This group only uses phones, and very few use phones for email. For Generation Z, email is for diatribes and texting is for communication. There are few laptops in our future. Laptops will be for dorks, and keyboards will be too small for big typing sessions, so only dorks will write long form.

Here’s another idea: The future of human resources is death. Good managers will do their own recruiting by having their own great network. (Great article from ERE about how Brazen Careerist will be a part of this revolution.) And RPO companies will take over the legal part of HR. So there won’t be a reason for HR. Which is good because it’s a cost center, which means there are no line manager positions in HR, so  it’s a dangerous career move for everyone.

One more trend. This one is for all the investors that my CEO will be worrying about when they read this post. Bloggers will rule the world. They will own advertising, because it’s so effective to target audiences through blogs. And blogs have the best content, because if someone writes great content, why would they do it for someone else? They should build their own brand.

Okay. So, look. My career as a workplace genius is not over. And anyway, my career was never built on me being conventional. I think my company is going to have a fit over the gardening charges. I wish I were scared about what will happen. But I am feeling fearless, thinking that if I am simply honest about what’s happening, I’ll be fine. Or, at least I’ll have a blog post.

Tomorrow is the U.S. holiday Memorial Day.  The purpose of the holiday is to pay homage to the people who have served in the armed forces.  I’d like to think that most every country has their own version of Memorial Day, whether it’s Remembrance Day or Veterans Day or something else, even if they don’t recognize it this weekend.

So as you’re grilling, watching basketball or spending time at the beach, take a moment to thank a veteran for the sacrifices they’ve made. And think about the challenges facing them as they return to the civilian workforce.  I found a great resource called Military.com that shares practical information about making a professional transition.

This week also marks the start of hurricane season.  This might not be big news for everyone but, where I live, hurricane season is important and it’s essential to get prepared.  Even if you aren’t subject to hurricanes, there’s probably some other kind of natural disaster you need to prepare for.  Make sure you’re familiar with your company’s disaster plan and you have a family plan as well.

Lastly, I’m doing a bit of celebrating and wanted to share the news.  HR Bartender was listed on Fistful of Talent and HR Capitalist’s Talent Management Blog Power Rankings and Evan Carmichael’s Top 50 Human Resources Blogs to Watch in 2010.  Lots of terrific blogs are on mentioned.  Be sure to check it out.  You might find some new reading along the way.  (Oh and P.S. There’s a caricature of me on the Evan Carmichael site!  At least I think it’s me…haha)

I can’t really think of an eloquent way to wrap up these random thoughts except to say thanks.  Thank you to the people who keep me safe and to the folks who recognize the work I do.  I’m one very lucky Bartender.  Cheers!

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The “2010 Global IBM CEO Study” was recently published, it’s one of the largest one-on-one CEO interview studies, surveying 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and across 33 industries. The four primary findings of this year’s survey are as follows:

• Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
• Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
• The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.

After reviewing the findings it becomes clear the extent to which the economic downturn has affected customers, business and society. We will not simply go back to “business as usual” once we recover from this economic downturn. The world has undergone a significant paradigm shift and we will never be the same.

As we move towards a recovery in the world economy, global leaders are experiencing high levels of complexity and uncertainty, “eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully.” This environment creates an urgent need for leadership. Given this, the survey explored what CEOs consider  the most important leadership qualities required over the next five years, the results are illustrated below.

CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality over the next five years…

Creativity is essential when uncertainty is high and where the future is expected to be a significant departure from what we’ve known in the past. When uncertainty is high you cannot just repeat the successful practices of the past and expect similar results. You will need to find new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and new ways of behaving. The IBM survey puts it this way…

“Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for ‘disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,’ a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. In addition this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation… It’s not that CEOs are just now becoming aware of the importance of creativity they have long been aware of the need to innovate their products, their processes and their customers’ experiences. Even in 2004, CEOs were telling us that ‘CEOs the world over were refocused on growth and they viewed innovation as the way to get there.’ But today, creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style. Traditional approaches to managing organisations need fresh ideas, ideas that are intended to disrupt the status quo.”

It seems that we are entering a period in our history that places a premium on effective leadership. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to re-invent how we choose to approach our life and work. These are exciting times indeed…!

• What are you doing in response to this increased demand for leadership?
• Are you re-examining your existing leadership practices?
• Are you experimenting with new approaches, new paradigms, new ways of working? If not, why?

 

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Photo by Jaako

A recent post “Developing future leaders” by Mitch McCrimmon provides and interesting perspective on the importance of leading by example as follows…

“Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had a one-off leadership impact on their respective governments without being members of those governments and having no authority within them. Similarly, when knowledge workers promote new products to management, they have a one-off leadership impact with no managerial authority over their bosses.

Leading by example is not restricted to those in managerial roles. Employees can show leadership by example to their colleagues. And companies can show leadership by example with innovative products despite having no managerial authority over their markets… Pure leadership means showing the way for others, either by example or by explicitly promoting a new direction.”

We all intuitively know that leading by example is the most powerful form of leadership, but ironically it’s often the most overlooked. As Mahatma Gandhi once said “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The insight from Mitch, is that leading by example is something that we can all do, no matter our role, no matter our position. We can all make the choice and take responsibility to be the change we want to see. We can all take initiative, we can all make the decision to “show the way for others”.

• Are you leading by example?
• Have you chosen to be the change?
• Have you chosen to show the way?

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This video by Dan Pink provides a really insightful overview as to what motivates people. As leaders motivation is a critical leadership consideration as motivation lead to committment or complacency. Unless we can inspire and motivate people to follow and engage with the vision – leadership fails!

As was so effectively illustrated in this video, we tend to over-rely on monetary reward as the primary means to motivate people. Which can be a very blunt instrument. This is especially true of how we reward and motivate our leaders. High levels of monetary reward does not produce leadership! The best leaders are primarily motivated by purpose and mastery, rather than money.

• What are your thoughts?
• Can leadership be bought?

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Why is the essence of leadership so hard to grasp? In The Leadership Illusion, authors Tony Hall and Karen Janman attribute it to the way in which we view leaders. We tend to over-emphasize character and underplay context. This gets to the heart of the leadership illusion: seeing leaders and leadership in one dimension. We ignore the context. When we evaluate the causes of the success or failure of leaders, we tend to “focus predominantly on the individual (sometimes the context), but very rarely both at the same time. The need to see someone as “fabulously successful or woefully inadequate” is strong. This causes us to underestimate the importance of context and connections when thinking about leaders and leadership. Leadership is not a solo performance.

The leadership illusion also influences how we predict leaders and train for leadership. When examining what makes for successful leadership we search for personal attributes and tend to ignore their context and connections. This caused Harvard professor Richard Chait to refer to some leadership researchers as organizational meteorologists. “His view being that we have as much a chance of predicting whether it will rain or shine three weeks hence as we have of reliably finding ourselves a suitable leader.” They write, “There are some aspects, some attributes, of an individual that make them successful as a leader. But we need to evaluate the person and the context in order to be clearer about whether what we perceive is real or illusory.”

Additionally, leaders should not be developed not in a vacuum but in the context within which they are to lead and in an environment that is fully supportive of that. “It doesn’t matter how effective a development technique may be in improving individual skills, if the organizational context is not supportive or consistent with the skills you have developed, the learning is likely to have little impact….There are far too many organizations that invest significant time and money in developing their people, but forget to develop or change the organization in tandem.” Do we develop strengths or weaknesses? “Our view is that you work on the skills and abilities that you need in order to perform effectively in your context….the end result being that development may encompass both strengths and weaknesses, as long as they are relevant to performance.”

The demand placed on us by living in such a connected world, has lead Hall and Janman to the concept of network leadership. Relationships matter. Developing the right kind of social capital is an increasingly important function for effective leaders. What kind of social capital to develop is context dependent.

Network leaders “bridge and they bond. They exhibit a balanced form of leadership that mixes the old with the new; combine radical approaches with received wisdom; and develop both breadth and depth of relationships.”

Leaders are not independent entities. Leaders do not exist by themselves in organizational space, but are spatially extended (through their networks). In this way the concept “individual leader” loses its meaning. … The network thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description.

Take a look at the new Carnival of Human Resources.

You'll enjoy trying out the posts of a variety of HR, management, and business writers.

This week's Carnival: Be Inspired, is hosted ...

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Another week another collection of posts!  Please contain your enthusiasm :). 

I thought I would start posting each Sunday the summary of the week's posts in Tabbloid format. As you might recall from an earlier post, Tabbloid is a free service that lets you create a custom PDF format 'newspaper' from your selected blogs and other sites RSS feeds, and have that newspaper delivered via email on whatever schedule you choose.

Here is this week's collection of posts, in handy PDF format - Steve's Blog : May 24-30, 2010.

I hope making content accessible in this way is a help to someone out there, I will continue to post these collections on Sundays for the time being.  I hope that if you find them useful, or actually download the PDF and give/send it to someone that otherwise would have never seen these posts, you would take a second and let me know in the comments. 

This is one way to try to break out of the echo chamber, but it is certainly not the only way, and if you have other and better thoughts on how to do this, I would love to hear them.

Some other highlights from all the great posts and articles I read this week that I recommend:

Handmade Hoops put the Clang into New York Courts - From the New York Times - a look at the blacksmiths that still hand craft the famous and unforgiving New York City playground basketball hoops. Nothing like an unforgiving solid steel rim to make you take it to the rack.

Use What You Have to Get What You Need - From Jason Seiden - a great piece about taking smaller and more direct steps to better take control of outcomes .

Handy New Gmail Labs Feature Shifts Attachment Icons to the Left - From Web Worker Daily.  A simple and effective way to put Gmail attachment icons in a more prominent and convenient position on the left hand side of the display.

Culture is Hard to Define - Do it Anyway - From Jason Lauritsen - just because something like culture, leadership, or attitude are 'hard' to define, doesn't mean we can simply shrug our shoulders and give up.

What's the Deal With Not Following People Back On Twitter - from Clue Wagon - Kerry asks and the commenters discuss some of the reasons why like minded people seem to think the 'return follow' is a big deal.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend, give thanks to the men and women of the military who made the ultimate sacrifice.

 

 

Every author should be involved with the front and back covers of their books. This is true whether you self-publish your book, or you’re working with a trade publisher.

Authors who fail to be involved with the content and design of the book’s front and rear covers are usually disappointed with the way their covers turn out.

Book covers are point of purchase marketing materials that prospective buyers view at the point of sale, i.e., in a bookstore or online using the popular Search Inside or Look Inside features that allow visitors to view front and back covers at comfortable size online.

But, I’m not a designer!

Contrary to what your printer or publisher may tell you, there’s no mystery to effective book cover design. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to make a significant contribution to your book cover.

It’s important to remember you don’t need to know how to do something in order to be able to evaluate whether or not the contents and design of your book cover are appropriate for your book and your market.

Even if you can’t draw a straight line, there are numerous things you can do to ensure your book gets the best cover possible.

Playing a proactive role in your book’s cover

Here are some real world tips for making sure your book gets the best cover possible, based on some of the hard lessons I’ve learned during my writing career as well as talking to other authors (most of whom have had their share of cover frustrations).

1. Get it in writing. Your involvement with your book cover should start at the contract stage. If you’re dealing with a trade publisher, it’s essential that your publishing contract guarantees you the right of approval for your book’s cover. Often, publishers will say they routinely “work with their authors,” but this often doesn’t work out in practice. Protect yourself by insisting on your right to approve not only the cover artwork, but also the working comps, or rough layouts, of early versions of the cover.
2. Get an early start. Whether you’re self-publishing or working with a trade publisher, you should get involved with your book’s cover as early as possible. This involves obtaining the names and contact information of the individuals who will be working on your cover, (i.e., the publisher’s publicist, their in-house art director or creative director, etc.) and establishing communication with them.
3. Analyze the covers of competing books. Search online for the covers of competing books. You can search at Amazon.com and the websites of the various authors. Or, save time by searching at Google Images. Search for “(Name-of-Title)+Cover.” Use a screen capture program like TechSmith’s Snagit to assemble the images side by side at consistent size in a Word document or PowerPoint file. Create a PDF and share it with your editor and others who will be involved with your book’s cover.
4. Learn what to look for. Educate yourself about the basics of book cover design by visiting the blogs and web sites of book designers. Learn the building blocks of book covers, and analyze book covers from the basis of logic and function, rather than aesthetics. Ask yourself questions like, Do the text and graphics work together to communicate what the book’s about? and Are the title and subtitle easy to read? Does the cover project an appropriate mood?
5. Pay as much attention to the back cover as the front cover. Avoid over-emphasizing the front cover at the expense of the back cover. The front cover of a book is a “billboard” intended to attract the attention of prospective bookstore buyers or web visitors skimming a page, but the back cover does the heavy lifting by building upon the promise of the title by providing more information about the benefits the book offers readers, the author’s qualifications, and testimonials from early readers.
6. Prepare your own back cover copy. Locate two or three back covers that you feel do an exceptional job of selling the book’s contents. To find out how many words were used on your “ideal” back covers, recreate the back cover in Word using Text Boxes as containers for entering the headline, paragraph, list of bullet points, testimonials, and other text elements. Format the text as close in size as possible.  Save your work. Then, make a Save As… copy. Replace the original text with words appropriate for your book. This will keep you from writing more text than can fit on the cover. Offer this as starting point for the designers to work with.
7. Refuse to be intimidated. As an outside author, your involvement may not be initially welcomed with open arms. But, if you provide proactive input, like studies of competing titles and sample well-written marketing copy for the back cover, it will become obvious that you’re not competing with the designers because your comments and suggestions are strategic and marketing oriented not aesthetic or opinion. Soon, your ideas will be sought and your copy suggestions appreciated.

Your involvement in the design of your book cover will go much smoother when your actions reflect empathy to the publisher’s overworked graphic design staff. In the beginning, as an author and non-designer, you obviously be viewed as an “outsider.” However, as you convince them you’re interested in helping them by providing marketing oriented input, you can soon find your self on their team…and your book cover will benefit!

Book publishing is a team sport. Unfortunately, often the “publishing team” views the author as an opponent–a member of the opposing team. Your challenge is to get asked to join their team so your knowledge of your book, your market, and your competition can be matched with their knowledge of design and today’s advanced software programs.

Author:

Roger C. Parker shares ideas for planning, writing, promoting, & profiting from branding building books in his daily writing tips blog. His latest book is #BOOK TITLE Tweet: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Article, Book, & Event Titles.

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