Hal Macomber on listening skills

Developing the Master Skill of the Leader

I prepared this top ten list of listening skills with an eye towards developing mastery. Not that I have mastered the skill of listening, but because it is a skill worth mastering. I am sharing it here due to the enthusiasm readers have shown for the topic.

…

[Reforming Project Management]

Hal Macomber has a long, but excellent, post on listening as a core leadership skill. Full of good advice and pointers to more.

Good listening starts with genuine curiosity. But in a leader it also requires the strength to set aside any assumptions that you might already know the answer and be willing to be surprised.

Take 10 Seconds to Get Soup to the Needy

Take 10 Seconds to Get Soup to the Needy. Take 10 Seconds to Get Soup to the Needy — Here is an easy way to make a difference this holiday season. Campbell's is donating a can of soup to the needy for every person that goes to their site and votes for their favorite NFL team. Their goal is 5,000,000 cans. Go here to vote. It will only take a few seconds of your time to fill some empty tummies with warm soup this winter.

Like Zach Lynch, on whose Brain Waves blog I found this bit of charity (and from whom I appropriated this text word for word), I'm not a big football fan, but this is a no brainer. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

Even if the TV commercials are stupid.

Doc Searls – It's the Story, Stupid

Seeing through slides.

Scott Rosenberg: The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Agreed. It always exasperates me to see slides used as speakers notes rather than as helpful visual aids.

Want to know how to give a good presentation with slides? Here’s what I learned from two masters. It’s more than a half-decade old, but its tips are no less useful.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

I’ve used this before as part of teaching presentation skills to consultants. Blogging it now so I can find it again later.

Storylines in a new organizational narrative

10) Tools Rule.

Jay Rosen‘s latest is Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative. Excellent, as usual. It should be required reading for candidates preparing to mix it up as the political season gets into full swing.

I wouldn’t be a techblogger if I didn’t add one more story line, without which the other nine wouldn’t mean squat.

We’ve only begun to see what can be done with tech tools as instruments of applied democracy.

More later, after I get some sleep.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

While Jay and Doc are focused on the political process, their analyses also apply to organizations more generally. Both political campaigns and organizations are instruments for acquiring and deploying power (in the sense of the ability to accomplish work) effectively. The Dean campaign is a case study in progress of what can happen if you start with different premises. That case study is worth tracking on both levels – for what it portends for our political leadership and for what it suggests for leadership and management in general.

I’d also recommend looking at Ed Cone’s excellent case study of the Dean Campaign in Base Line magazine, “The Marketing of the President 2004.”

Finally, let me suggest that all of this can be fruitfully thought of in terms of the late Donella Meadow’s advice on places to intervene in a system.

RSS channels I track

I’m curious too. Cristian Vidmar: I’m curious: how many channels do *you* aggregate? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo’s Weblog]

Here are my numbers:

214 Feeds in Radio
44 Feeds in NewsGator
plus
5 Cartoon feeds
1 comment feed from my blog
1 trackback feed from my blog
3 of my own RSS feeds to monitor them

Looking at the stats, some of those feeds look to have gone dormant long enough to warrant weeding them out. You can see my Radio subscriptions here.

ActiveRenderer 2.0 beta in progress

Marc Barrot is testing a beta of version 2 of his activeRenderer tool for “Radio” weblogs. I've been using version 1.4 for quite a while here and I'm now testing version 2. Expect to see some minor glitches in formatting here as I figure out how to take advantage of version 2's more extensive use of stylesheets.

Lots of nice new features.