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One hack I find useful is to keep people’s extensions next to their names in my IM client.

Sometimes a call is required and I find it useful to have number right there to hand if I need to explain by phone.

Jerry Weinberg is a legend in Project Management and Consulting circles. Here are his 10 Laws of Trust:

1. Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
2. Trust takes years to win, moments to lose.
3. People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.
4. The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
5. People are never liars—in their own eyes.
6. Always trust your client—and cut the cards.
7. Never be dishonest, even if the client requests it.
8. Never promise anything.
9. Always keep your promise.
10. Get it in writing, but depend on trust.

Conferences That Work | Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust

I am enjoying the podcasts from the American Management Associations (AMA) podcast series Edgwise.

Today I listed to an interesting interview with  Dr. Graham Jones, an world expert on Mental Toughness. Well worth a listen.

What does Lebron James have in common with Warren Buffet? Whether we’re getting ready for the big game or the big meeting, we all deal with high pressure situations; it’s natural to everyone on the job and a reality of the workforce. In his new book Thriving on Pressure: Mental Toughness for Real Leaders, Dr. Graham Jones encourages us to channel that pressure and make the hard decisions.

Dr. Jones is formerly professor of Elite Performance Psychology at the University of Wales in Bangor. An author of 150 White Papers in publications on the subject of high level performance. He is the Founding Director of Lane4 Management Group Limited, which is a leading performance in consultancy that has offices in the U.S. and around the world.

Dr.
Graham Jones on Mental Toughness » AMA Edgewise

[Originally published at Limbicnutrition.com]

Alex Moskalyuk has distilled the entirely of the book “Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” by Cialdini et al into a single blog post.

It really does get in the best of them, including tips I recognise from recent the persuasion best-seller “Nudge” by  Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Read on for this superb list:  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk

YouTube – A Guy In a Cube

Vital Smarts, the people who brought out the fantastic “Crucial Conversations” a few years ago, have a great ad for their consulting business.

There is a great excerpt from “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die ” in Slacker Manager which deal with the tough question of how to unstick an idead:

“How do I unstick a sticky idea?” They want to unstick a rumor about their company or a false perception of a particular product. They want to unstick whispered mistruths about political candidates. Once, we were even asked, “How would you unstick Paris Hilton?”

They discuss world war two Nazi  propaganda (“Those yanks are sleeping with your wives”) , the McDonald worms used for burger meat urban legend and others.

Read on: Unsticking An Idea Excerpt : Slacker Manager

Dilbert.com

“One of the most important group decisions made by a bee colony is where to locate the hive. Bees use a kind of “idea market” to guide their discovery: The colony sends out a small number of scouts to survey the environment. Returning scouts that have found promising sites signal their discoveries with a vigorous dance, thus recruiting more scouts to the better sites. The cycle of exploration and signalling continues until so many scouts are signaling in favor of the best site that a tipping point is reached.

The bees’ decision making highlights both information discovery and information integration, two processes that are crucial to every organization but that have different requirements. A centralized structure works well for discovery, because the individual’s role is to find information and report it back. In contrast, a richly connected network works best for integration and decision making, because it allows the individual to hear everyone else’s opinion about the expected return from each of the alternatives. The bees’ process suggests that organizations that alternate as needed between the centralized structure and the richly connected network can shape information fl ow to optimize both discovery and integration.”

From: The HBR List 2009 – How Social Networks Network Best

I have noticed a massive upsurge in interest in Visual Thinking and Information Design.

Whilst Edward Tufte is no doubt the prime mover in this field, I think Dan Roam’s 2008 bestseller “The Back of the Napkin” (website) has given a huge boost to the field by popularising Visual Thinking and giving people simple tools to apply it to the problems in their lives.

Here are some good links on Visual Design and Information Design

Visual Design

http://www.vizthink.com/blog/

http://flowingdata.com

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ ( see and use this guy’s brilliant work via Flickr)

http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/ ( book on Amazon)

Information Design

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language