How to Give a Briefing that Impresses the Boss

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Let’s say you have to brief the boss on the status of a project. How can you do it best? Here’s a five-step process you can use for a meeting, an email message or a stopped-in-the-hallway request for an update. This process will help you make it obvious to the boss that you’re on top of the project. You’ll also show you’re a clear and crisp communicator who values the boss’s time.

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About the Author

Bill Rosenthal is the Chief Executive Officer of Communispond Inc., an organization that has taught business communications skills to more than 600,000 persons. Bill is responsible all aspects of the business including sales, marketing, content development, and the delivery of Communispond courses by certified faculty. Prior to joining Communispond, Bill was CEO of Digi-Block Inc., a K-12 education publisher focusing on mathematics. He also served as President of Kaplan College, a division of Kaplan Inc., the well-known test preparation company, where he developed and launched the online college that offers Associates and Bachelors degrees and certificates in Business, Information Technology, Nursing, and Law. In a previous role as President of Ziff-Davis Education (now called Element K), Bill oversaw the leading supplier of computer training products worldwide and supervised the operations of ZD University, the leading web-based computer skills site.

Your Personal Path to Better Leadership

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What You Can’t See
There are innumerable resources on how to be a more effective leader, but what if you asked the people you work with – what advice would they give you?

Would they tell you to take your greatest strengths and run with them?
Or
Would they suggest some areas to work on?

Would their advice make you nod your head?
Or
Would their insights surprise you?

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About the Author

Emma WilhelmEmma Wilhelm, M.S., is senior writer and product developer at Inscape Publishing, where she helps to develop innovative training and development products. Along with Jeffrey Sugerman, Ph.D., and Mark Scullard, Ph.D., she is coauthor of The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader. To read Emma’s complete biography, click here.

Have You Earned the Right to Lead? Ten Deeply Destructive Mistakes That Suggest the Answer Is No (and How to Stop Making Them)

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There are people in every organization you know whose titles indicate they are leaders. Often, and unfortunately, their employees beg to differ. Oh, they don’t say it directly, not to the boss’s face, anyway. They say it with their ho-hum performance, their games of avoidance, their dearth of enthusiasm. Leaders – real leaders who have mastered their craft – don’t preside over such lackluster followers. If reading this makes you squirm with recognition, you may have a problem lurking.

You’re really just masquerading. You haven’t yet earned the right to lead.

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About the Author

John HammJohn Hamm is one of the top leadership experts in Silicon Valley. He was named one of the country’s Top 100 venture capitalists in 2009 by AlwaysOn and has led investments in many successful high-growth companies as a partner at several Bay Area VC firms. Hamm has also been a CEO, a board member at over thirty companies, and a CEO adviser and executive coach to senior leaders at companies such as Documentum, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and McAfee. John teaches leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

Recruiter-IZE Your Resume and Finally Get some Interviews

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A friend of mine was angry. After a decade of writing screenplays with no success, after reading books on writing and submitting and formatting, her mantle was not only Oscar less, she had no mantle. But what got her mad was meeting a woman in her SPIN class who worked for a household name film studio and told her the truth.

“They not only don’t read most of the scripts,” my friend reported, umbrage front and center, but the ones they do read are read by entry level kids, who, get this, are trying to get their own scripts read, so of course they reject mine. What an insane system!”

Not really, I thought to myself. The system works fine. No shortage of movies on my On Demand system. And more on the way. I know this because my success has been in the recruiting world, and I know that resume writing drives people as crazy as the movie writing business does for my friend.

Because most of what you have been told is either not true or no longer true about resumes.

And why would you know this? I ran a Google search about ‘resume writing’ and found 26 million items! And they all offer the same old bromides. ‘Make it pleasing to the eye’, ‘your goal is to avoid being at the bottom of the pile of resumes in Personnel!’ Seriously? When were these books written? Who was President? There are no ‘Piles’ of resumes in a digital world, and ‘personnel’ has been renamed Human Resources about a generation or two ago. And you can’t be ‘pleasing to the eye’ when everyone is sending the resume via the same Outlook format. These books, no doubt relevant in their day, are fecklessly reprinted every time there is a recession because we know people will be dusting off resumes and looking for an edge. But to give the same well worn advice now that technology has changed both the purpose of resumes and the delivery system, is to literally cost people interviews rather than help them acquire them.

Submitting resumes is my lifeblood as recruiter. If I am out of touch with how it’s done, I starve. And that just isn’t going to happen! So let me help you RecruiterIZE your resume:

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About the Author

Danny Cahill is the author of Harper’s Rules: A Recruiter’s Guide to Finding a Dream Job and the Right Relationship. A popular keynote speaker and recruiter, he is the owner of Hobson Associates, one of America’s largest search firms. He is also the founder of www.AccordingtoDanny.com, an online training and mentoring company dedicated to enhancing the skills and jumpstarting the spirits of recruiters worldwide. For more information, please visit www.harpersrules.com or www.hobsonassoc.com. To read Danny’s complete biography, click here.

How to Think like a Visionary

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I was riding in an airplane a few years ago when Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin, plopped down in the seat next to mine. Imagine that! We talked for a while, and then Branson hurried off to visit a few of his friends on the other side of the plane. I should mention, by the way, that Branson had invited me on this particular outing – and it was in his brand new Boeing 747 (bound for the Virgin fleet). He wanted to show off his new toy.

In 30 years as a business journalist, I’ve met quite a few business visionaries: Steve Jobs of Apple, Fred Smith of FedEx, Intel’s Andy Grove, Motown’s Barry Gordy Jr., and many more.

What do they have in common? Business visionaries find ideas that the rest of us miss. They learn to picture things from different perspectives. They employ intuition. They know how to drum up support for their dreams.

So how can you think like a visionary? Here are some tips:

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About the Author

Erik Calonius, author of Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us, is a former reporter, editor and London-based foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, a staff writer for Fortune magazine and Miami bureau chief for Newsweek. In addition to this work, he has authored several other well-regarded publications as well as works of fiction.