Tag Archives: Management Blogs

Sarah Palin is a Quitter, and Quitters Never Win

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Quitters Never Win and Winners Never Quit

Argh! I can hear my mother misquoting Vince Lombardi in my sleep: “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.” A simple saying that forced me to keep my word throughout my life – even when it cost me money.

Why is it these simple clichés can hold such importance as to guide our every decision? (This particular phrase was so particularly annoying that it’s guided my decisions both in and out of business for over thirty years.) There are certainly others, but this mother’s saying carries special weight; as much an integrity statement as an indictment of those who would give up without a fight.

‘Quitters never win and winners never quit’ could be the primary rule dictating everything from a second grader’s soccer game to a governor’s fulfillment of her term.

Palin is a Quitter

We’ve written good things about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the past, including a post that chronicled why she was a better leader than Barack Obama. That was September 2008 and this is now.

In demonstrating the worst leadership trait possible, Palin has decided that she cannot operate as a lame duck governor. (She had previously announced that she would not seek reelection.) Palin has decided to step down on July 26, 2009. Her current term was scheduled to end next year.

“I Want to Spend More Time with My Family”

While this is not the soon-to-be-former governor’s stated reason for quitting, her actual reason might as well be as lame as all the on again/off again retirements of star athletes. All we got from Palin was a quick Tweet: “We’ll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election … this is in Alaska’s best interest, my family’s happy … it is good. Stay tuned.”

Well, as long as your family is happy…

Not so fast, Sarah. You are a quitter and we are disappointed. You were elected by the citizens of Alaska to serve them as their governor until 2010. Whether you were planning another term or not is irrelevant: they were counting on you to keep your word. When you chose to become the governor of Alaska, you agreed to serve the citizens of that frigid state and now you’re giving it up for personal reasons.

(Not to mention that you’ve passed on an extraordinary chance to shove through your agenda; an agenda you claimed was in opposition to the Washington elite. Who is going to carry your torch now? Who is going to keep your promises to the people of Alaska?)

Sarah Palin is not a Winner

News flash: True leaders don’t let personal reasons get in the way of their commitments to others. True leaders don’t let personal reasons get in the way of doing what is right. They keep their word and they never quit. True leaders are winners.

Palin is not, as we once thought, a true leader.

Much like Dan Quayle, Joe Biden and Admiral Stockdale, Palin lost more of her luster every time she opened her mouth. Her latest spat with David Letterman painted her as a died-in-the-wool Republican; someone willing to give up any sense of right for a chance to bash the Left. (Pun intended.) Every day since November 4, 2008 Palin has become more of a clown; a caricature of someone who once professed she was going to change the world of politics in Washington.

Sometime over the last eight months she stopped being a leader and became a punchline.


Good Riddance, Sarah P.

Likely, most Alaskans won’t care very much that you’re quitting. In fact, many will be relieved. Go away, Sarah Palin. Go back into the obscurity from where you were plucked and leave the future of the world to the leaders… we’ll try our best to hang on without you. (Note our tongues in our cheeks.)

The Great Necession: Leading in Tough Economic Times

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It’s not a Recession, It’s a Necession

Anyone bothering to pay attention to what’s happening with consumer spending in the current recession can note one trend: that is, even those consumers who are likely to be unaffected by the economic downturn are helping fuel the recession because they’ve gone into wallet lockdown. They’ve declared that we are in the Great Necession of 2009.

While one could argue that in a free market no job is ever really safe, 92% of Americans who want a job, have a job. Moreover, most of those same 92% are likely to have little disruption to their income streams over the foreseeable future.

So why does the housing market continue to tank and why are new car sales sitting at their lowest levels in decades? People have been scared into a Necession.

Forget for a moment that the credit markets have tightened; there aren’t any tire-kickers on dealer lots or looky-loos at the Sunday open houses to apply for credit. Why? Because no one in their right mind is going to buy a new car or house until they need to buy one.

How do you know we’re in a Necession?

Traditional large discretionary purchases (like cars, boats, vacation homes) are based on emotion and impulse, not on necessity. Cars, for example, are built to last for a decade or more, yet many Americans habitually traded in their cars every 18 to 36 months. This is what fueled more than 16 million new car purchases a year as recently as 2006. (Read our related post on the auto industry here.) We’re now at half that amount; and because of the Great Necession of 2009, we predict the auto industry won’t see the 16 million mark again before 2020. People just don’t need to buy a new car, regardless of the availability of credit, and now they know that.

The economic realities of today have taught those of us who’ve lost jobs and those of us with good jobs that we need to live within our means. One colleague recently told me he will never again have a monthly financial commitment (he called it his “monthly nut”) greater than he can cover working for minimum wage. I believe him. His spending paradigm has been forever shifted from one of excess to one of “necess.” He is a New Era Necessionist, helping fuel the Great Necession.

How to Lead in a Necession




The unfortunate reality of being in a Necession is that even when the credit markets relax and the layoffs subside, retail spending will not return for a very long time. Consumer confidence may return, but consumer spending – that is, spending like drunken sailors on shore leave – will not. The generation that lives through the Great Necession will be much like the one that lived through the Great Depression: they will change their habits forever for fear of a return to bad times.

The only remedy for leaders is to instill confidence. You must reek of confidence when dealing with your acquaintances, your employees and your customers. (It certainly doesn’t help when the media seeks a negative slant to every story – but great leaders know to control what they can control, and to limit the influence of that which they cannot.)

People are simply not productive when they fear their jobs are in jeopardy. Lacking confidence, otherwise sane managers can literally become paranoid – rendering them ineffective. The rumor mill – fueled by negative thoughts and doomsday predictions from the rank and file – runs rampant. Job dissatisfaction from an uncertain future begets customer dissatisfaction; while customer dissatisfaction begets even lower sales, leading to a further erosion of employee confidence.

It’s our job as leaders to keep all of this from happening. So let’s agree on few easy paradigm shifts:

  1. The times are challenging, but our future looks great. Believe this and live this, then use this as a standard reply to anyone (especially employees and customers) enquiring about your business.
  2. The best part about a recession is the thinning of the herd. You need to believe this and live this, as well. Feel free to speak to your employees in these terms and let them know you appreciate their hard work, because it is their hard work that will help them and everyone else at your company keep their jobs.
  3. We cannot wish our way back to prosperity. Too often we see managers looking for magic pills to solve a crisis. The truth is that anything worthwhile takes hard work – otherwise, everyone could do it. You need to gain a solid commitment to best practices from everyone in order to save your company.
  4. Sales cures all ills. While it was this very saying that partially got us into this mess (we didn’t realize we had bad leaders, because times were good and revenues were growing), returning our teams to a “selling culture” is one of the quickest ways to right any ship. Unfortunately, many businesses have focused too heavily on cost-cutting and not enough on the fundamentals of selling. Get your teams back to basics: focus on selling activities, not results, so that when the market turns, your team will get more than their share.

 

Top Ten Resume Tips for Managers

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The Top 10 Resume Tips for Out-of-Work Leaders

One of our loyal readers sent us an email this week that included their resume. As has likely happened to someone you know, this manager got caught up in the current economic turmoil and their position was eliminated. No notice. No severance. No clear prospects.

Since it’s too late to council our reader to adopt the absolutely necessary survival trait known as networking, we thought we’d dissect his resume (confidentially) and deliver him (and you) our Top 10 Resume Tips:

  1. Filename – Quick, take a look at the resume on your computer. Is it called “myresume.doc,” “SalesManagerResume.doc,” or simply “resume.doc?” Do you have any sense of your audience? I can guarantee that the hiring manager doesn’t want to download 50 resumes all titled “myresume.doc.” Believe it or not, it becomes hard to find the one you’re looking for when all the files are called the same thing. Additionally, when you name your resume file based on job title (like SalesManagerResume.doc), the hiring manager knows you’re probably fibbing a little because you likely have other versions that you send to other job openings (like OpsManagerResume.doc). There’s only one recommended filename structure for all resumes and here it is: Lastname.Firstname.Resume.doc. Your resume file will stand out because of its clarity to, and consideration for, the hiring manager.
  2. Software – Two words: Microsoft Word. Okay folks? While using some cheap Word knockoff is probably fine for an entry-level salesperson resume, your manager resume will look absolutely bush league if it arrives via any format other than Word. If you simply cannot afford the $80 to buy Microsoft Word, then create your resume in Word Perfect or Open Office or whatever other word processing software you can get your hands on, and “print” the document as a PDF. There are literally thousands of free PDF creators available. Start by looking here.


  3. Borrow Liberally – Why reinvent the wheel? Smart leaders are efficient and they don’t waste precious hours recreating what has already been invented elsewhere. Go online, search for resume samples, then start reading and lifting those phrases and sentences that best describe you and your abilities. Don’t lie – integrity matters – but certainly be smart enough to let someone else articulate what you really want to say about your experiences. Better yet, use your last $12 and buy a book with sample resumes and better resume tips than you’ll ever get from some crummy management blog. We highly recommend Jay Block’s 101 Best Resumes.
  4. Cover Letter – Yes, you include one. Again, if you’re applying for an entry-level gig, this is less important. The higher up you go, however, the more critical it is to have a great cover letter. Use the same tips we delivered here for your resume that you use for your cover letter. And just like that great resume, we recommend if you want a great cover letter you should invest a few bucks in a good book. Not surprisingly, we recommend Block’s 101 Best Cover Letters. If your cover letter is included in the body of an email, please remember to avoid our common email typos detailed here.
  5. Watch Your Formatting, and Check Spelling and Grammar – Yikes, we’re embarrassed to even have to write that, but we counted no less than four glaring typos and half a dozen grammatical errors in this manager’s resume. Ouch. Hard to hire someone to lead others when they appear to be unable to manage themselves. When we speak about formatting, we’re referring to how your resume lays out on a page. If you find yourself using tabs and spaces to format your paragraphs then STOP. While your resume might look great on your screen, it will likely open up as a jumbled mess on the other end. The reason this occurs is because you cannot guarantee that the hiring manager is using the same version of Word that you are using. Additionally, if you use an odd font because it looks cool, that font could be very well rendered as Courier on the other end, screwing up your beautiful formatting. The bottom line: format properly and use a standard font. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, hire a professional resume service. It might be the best $200 you ever invested.
  6. Aim High – While it’s often true that companies who are hiring leaders want to get more than they pay for, it’s especially true in a down economy. If your resume aims too low, that’s where you’ll surely end up. If you aim high, both with your resume objectives (yes, you include these) and with your description of past duties, you stand a much better chance of landing high. Be sure to make yourself and your ambitions sound as important as possible – keeping everything accurate, of course.
  7. Titles Matter More than Responsibilities – It’s sad, but true. If you were a VP at your last job, chances are you’ll be a VP on your next job. If your title was manager, you’ll likely be a manager when you land your next gig. We’re giving you this little piece of advice not to have you lie on your resume, but rather to make sure you clearly express your title in words that relay the importance of the position. Quick tip: Adding words like “division” can make a title seem more important, while allowing you to keep your integrity. For example, if you were a manager in the widgets group at ABC Company, you could list your title one of two ways: Manager, ABC Company or Widgets Division Manager, ABC Company. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hire the latter than the former.
  8. Quantify Your Accomplishments – You didn’t “grow sales” at your last job, you “improved operating revenue by 33%.” You didn’t “cut costs,” you “discovered and enacted operational efficiencies that led to a 17% decrease in year-over-year operating expenses.” Numbers are easy to understand and will help your accomplishments stand out.
  9. Use Commanding Language – As you can read in Tip #8, there are both weak and strong ways to say anything. Use a thesaurus (quick tip: In Microsoft Word you can right-click on any word and see synonyms) to ensure you use the most powerful terms you can to describe your accomplishments. (We’re not going to bore you with a list of weak and strong words – you are a leader, after all.)
  10. References Available Upon Request – Never, ever include references on your resume if you are vying for a leadership position. Lists of references unnecessarily lengthen your resume. Additionally, you stand the chance of alienating your audience if one of your references is disliked by the hiring manager. In case you do happen to know Jack Welch – and he wants to vouch for you – ask him to write a brief letter (or, better yet, you write a letter on his behalf and ask him to sign it). You can always include these letters with your cover letter and resume.

While there are thousands of other great resume tips we could share, too many of them are too granular for a site like AskTheManager. If you can get these Top 10 Resume Tips down, you’ll be well on your way toward finding a great new career.

While we don’t often ask for advice from our readers, we’d love for you to share your resume tips with others by posting a comment below.

Sales Management Blogwatch – February 21, 2009

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Sales Management Blogwatch

If it feels like it’s been months since our last Blogwatch in the Sales Management series, that’s because it has. We’ve been scouring the Web for any semblance of great blog entries to help us create a decent Blogwatch and we continued to come up empty handed.

Sure, we saw some great entries from the top Sales Management Blogs like Brad Trnavsky’s Sales Management 2.0 Blog, Nesh Thompson’s stuff on SymVolli, Ian Brodie’s Sales Excellence Blog, Karl Goldfield’s Sales Evangelist nuggets, Skip Anderson’s Selling To Consumers, Tibor Shato’s The Pipeline, and Will Fultz’ Top Sales Blog, but we weren’t getting the nice, tight posts we normally see from the unwashed masses of the Sales Management Blogosphere. We expect great things from the Sales Gurus, we just want to see what the rest of the world is writing.

Where were the amateurish posts from those who just had something to say about Sales Management? They were, for the most part, missing. Other than the gold you can always find at the blogs we mentioned above, here are the best of the Sales Management Blogs from the past several weeks:

Managing expectations: Maturity at work – Revenue Journal®
Managing your client’s expectations is one of the most important aspects in any commercial relationship, and yet it is almost universally ignored in sales training – and sales management. If you were selling this type of complex product …

Tips for Sales Managers: 7 Sales Team Meeting Ideas for 2009
Books for Sales Managers. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig · ProActive Sales Management by William “Skip” Miller. Resources for Sales Managers. ES Research – Sales Training Intelligence · Sales Vault …

Total Sales Success: Raise Your Prospecting to a Whole New Level
With over 27-years of sales and sales management success, I bring a wealth of experience to the table. My goal is simple: To raise the standard for sales excellence in your company. View my complete profile …

8 Steps To Creative Sales Management : Managing Salespeople
8 Steps To Creative Sales Management was part of a recent sales management seminar we ran. The client was concerned that creativity was totally absent from his team so we ran a brief session.

Sales Training and Sales Programs for the Natural Born Seller
Sales training and sales programs can benefit even the natural born seller. Advanced sales training and sales programs get down and dirty into the specific skills that manifest excellence in sales management.

Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation? – Sales Management 2.0
It’s Friday evening, I’m cruising some of the blogs and other forums as I wind up the day. I saw a question posed on the Sales Best Practices board in LinkedIn. The question concerned the Reputation of Sales, asking about why do we see …

Identify and Overcome the Four Curses of Sales …
Peak performance author, columnist, trainer, speaker and radio show host for sales, management and leadership, Dave Anderson walks the talk as a leader. He has led some of the most successful retail automotive dealership in the …

How Do You Get Your Salespeople to Sell More?
The key to making the sale in this economy is to help your team stay focused on solving real customer problems and enabling them to add immediate …

20 Characteristics of a Superior Salesperson
Enthusiastically supports internal initiatives from his or her Sales Management team. 5. Focuses on the positive, staying away from gossip regarding other individuals or his or her company. 6. Is constantly in self-improvement mode …

Sales Training • Sales Scorecard for Success – Sales Techniques …
The job could be sales, management, finance or operations; it doesn’t matter. As Jim Collins states in his book Good to Great, it is about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats. The same thing applies to you and …

Silver Bullet Selling – A Practical Guide to Consultative Selling …
sales effectiveness sales experience sales management sales preparation sales resistance sales training scoreboarding self-esteem selling service performance silver bullet solution success system transition …

Tips for Sales Managers: Top Sales Experts 2.0
Books for Sales Managers. 100 Best Sales Books of All Time · Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig · ProActive Sales Management by William “Skip”

How to hit your sales target this Quarter | Managing the Salesforce
Filed under: Pipeline and Forecasting, Planning, Sales Management. How are your numbers looking one month into the quarter? We polled our network of VP Sales to see what is at the top of their dashboard for evaluating the health of the …

Incentive Compensation Survey—Take the Survey, Find Out Current …
Posted by Paul McCord under Sales Performance Management, Sales Technology Research, sales, sales management, selling | Tags: business, compensation, incentive compensation, management, sales, sales compensation, sales management, …

 

 

Sales – Why Do Some Salespeople Take It Personally When They Lose An Account?

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Sales: It’s Nothing Personal

A salesperson who works for one of my company’s primary vendors – someone who happens to be a former coworker and a person I considered to be a friend – just lost a bid with my company. The vendor had held this business for the past several years and we were nearing the end of the latest multi-year agreement.

While the successful bidder’s price was a 20% discount to what we were paying (and a 35% discount to the incumbent’s best and final offer for the proposed agreement), the primary reason we decided to make a change was the deteriorating level of support and innovation the incumbent has been providing over the course of this latest contract.

It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

By rejecting the incumbent’s bid, we were not rejecting the salesperson (we’ll call him Rich). Interestingly, Rich is taking it personally. In fact, he’s become an invisible man since the day we made our decision. Why is he taking it so personally? I ran into Rich a couple of days ago (we live in the same town) and even though it’s been a month since we chose his competitor, Rich was short and cold with me. What happened to the warm friendship we had as coworkers and as buyer/seller?

Why I Became a Sales Manager

When I was a commissioned salesperson, I rocked. Not to brag, but I routinely sold double what the second best salesperson at my company sold. I sold like crazy and I made a whole bunch of money… and I was miserable. I was miserable, because even if I had a 50% closing ratio, which I generally did not, half of all my prospects told me “no.”




I took it personally. I’ve always believed in my product so much that when someone rejected it, it must mean that I had done a lousy job of explaining it to them. “How could anyone not buy this?” I would wonder. I decided that if I was going to stay in sales, I would have to move to management.

It takes a special kind of person to be a happy and successful salesperson. You have to be smart, quick-witted (not the same as smart), ballsy, lack a certain amount of pride and be willing to taste defeat more often than victory. Most importantly, you cannot take it personally when someone tells you “no.”

I assume it will take a few months, but eventually this former friend will become a friend again. I’ll have to set a reminder in my calendar to be sure and tell Rich what an ass he was back when he lost our business, and how he shouldn’t take it personally – it’s just business.

 

Management Training Blogwatch – January 5, 2009

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Management Training Blogwatch – Best of the Blogs

We scoured and we scrubbed and we were left with just few posts and articles worthy of making it into your reading rotation for all things Management Training.

Perhaps it was the holidays and everyone was taking off between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, but we simply struggled to find more than just a handful of very good posts from the past five weeks. (The pickings were so slim we even had to include two of our posts into the mix.)

Although not from a traditional Management Training Blog, we recommend the first post below: excerpts from a great interview with Dilbert creator Scott Adams. A worthy read.


We’re Dilbert Fans
That inspired him to join a management training program. Adams left banking when his then-boss “told me the company already had too many generic white guys in senior management, and promoting me would only make things worse. …

Leadership Management Training
Corporate executives often book leadership management training courses for their employees in order to boost the workers’ skill sets and effectiveness when dealing with subordinates.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
A strong understanding of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs should be incorporated into any management training program. Understanding the hierarchy will help managers to understand the behaviors of their employees as they move through life. …

Management and Ethical Responsibility
Think about what you can do the next day to improve yourself. Are you setting a positive example for your employees?…

Epic Living – Leadership Development Career Management Training …
In times of crisis (economic or otherwise) organizations begin to think about leadership. Actually, they think of it often. What they do about it is another thing. I feel for those organizations that neglected growing leaders when …

Real Estate Blog – Lessons in Management – Lesson II
Here is the second installment of 6 of the Management Training. Read Lesson I before reading this one. This is an important one, so don’t miss a word. Lesson #2 A priest offered a Nun a lift. She got in and crossed her legs, …

Great Leadership: Successful Succession Management
EffortlessHR Blog · Time to vote – Bloggers Choice Awards 2009. 1 week ago. Epic Living – Leadership Development Career Management Training Executive Life Coaching Author …

Delta Airlines – Not Sweating the Small Stuff – Leadership Lessons …
Leadership Development & Management Training Resources and Topics. More Leadership Lessons from the Airline Industry – Delta Stubs Their Toe (Again) · TheManager

Brett “Cuatro” Favre and the Leadership Lesson of Humility
Leadership Development & Management Training Resources and Topics. An Update to our Leadership Lessons from Brett Favre · TheManager…

Secret Tips For Delivering a Persuasive Sales Speech …
Business Management, Training. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Delivering a persuasive sales speech is not really as difficult as it seems once you …

 

Catch Your Limit: Management Consultancy, Leadership Blog and Fish Cleaning Service

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Great Leadership Blog Worthy of Special Mention – CatchYourLimit.com

As our regular readers know, we produce four semi-regular Blogwatch series covering Time Management, Sales Management, Management Training and Leadership Development. In these series we attempt to help you cut through the clutter and discover great writing and great advice.

While we think we do a pretty good job of culling the crud, we sometimes overlook great blogs. When we do, we’re excited when readers bring these wonderful sites to our attention.

One of our readers turned us on to a great Leadership Development website that had not been a part of our Blogwatch series, called CatchYourLimit.com. This site and its accompanying blog are the brainchild of an innovative leadership consulting company known as Catch Your Limit.

What makes Catch Your Limit so innovative is their approach to management and leadership consulting that moves away from the starched shirts and toward what really matters: coaching; accountability; consistency and cleaning fish. (Long story, you have to read their About Us page to understand.)




Based on what we learned about this innovative consultancy and their great blog, we hereby amend yesterday’s Leadership Development Blogwatch and add the following post:

Transparency is to Employee Engagement as Failure is to Innovation

Leaders will never gain the trust of their employees, especially in uncertain times without a significant level of transparency. As innovation needs experimentation and failure, employees need transparency from leadership for engagement to take place.

One of the difficulties many organizations are facing is transitioning from a “corporate memo” top down communication culture to having honest and candid conversations with their employees. The former creates an environment of rumors, gossip and anxiety while the latter allows employees to feel a certain level of security remaining engaged and productive.

Like improving the economy it’s easier said than done. It isn’t easy to tell people they may lose their job. It isn’t easy to discuss a negative financial outlook…

(To read the rest of this article and other great posts on CatchYourLimit.com, please follow this link.)

 

Most Popular Leadership (and Other) Posts of 2008

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The Best of AskTheManager.com – 2008

One of our regular readers sent us a nice email last night wishing us, among other things, a Happy New Year. We know it wasn’t just a mass email sent to everyone in his address book because he requested we write this post today.

Specifically, he asked us to list the Top Ten Articles on AskTheManager.com for 2008 based on page views. No wanting to disappoint, we dove into our Google Analytics and found some surprising articles at the top of the list.

Looking back on our first six and a half months of providing leadership advice and general business wisdom to the masses, we occasionally used this blog to vent about or introduce issues and topics that only barely related to leadership development – though we always tried to tie these back to the leadership, where possible.

Sometimes we were successful, and sometimes it was clear we were just using AskTheManager.com as our own personal soap box. Of course, it is our soap box to use as we wish…

Today’s article speaks more to what you, the readers, wish. Based on what you read when you visited, here are the Top Ten AskTheManager Articles for 2008:

  1. The Best and Worst Presidential Leaders in History – This was the second article in a three-part series that proved to be the most popular posts on our site last year. Published in September, all three articles in this series drew an enormous amount of attention, with the second in the series being our most visited page in 2008. The AskTheManager editors spent months analyzing the leadership records of all forty-two US Presidents to name our best and worst.
  2. So You’re the New Sales Manager – How Are You Going To Get Their Attention? – The first in a three-part series, this article detailed how one sales manager who took over an underperforming team and turned them around in very short order. We highly recommend all three posts in this series for any new sales manager.
  3. Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Freakonomics, The Movie – The incredible popularity of Freakonomics (the book) must have spilled over to posts about the upcoming movie, as this was the only ATM December article to make the Top Ten and our most popular post that wasn’t part of a series. This article provides insight into the 2009 release of the much-anticipated Freakonomics documentary via a Q&A with the film’s producer, Chad Troutwine.
  4. The Top Ten Leadership Books of All Time – Originally published in June, this July version of the list included more explanation about each of our choices and proved to be a more popular read than the original. In case you’re wondering: more than six months later, we stand by our rankings.
  5. TheManager Digresses – The Paparazzi Must Die! – Our first attempt to use this blog purely for our own selfish purposes, this post detailing the “dangers” of the celebrity-chasing paparazzi and how to combat them proved to be very popular with the hoards seeking more information about Jennifer Aniston’s latest love. Go figure.




  6. The 25 Most Annoying Business Phrases – It was either our out-of-the-box thinking or the 800-Pound Gorilla that compelled us to select among the thousands of annoying phrases we hear in everyday business life and take a 30,000-foot view to come up with the most annoying twenty-five.
  7. The Six Worst Business Email Etiquette Mistakes Ever – Although we absolutely hate when businesspeople employ the use of stationery in their emails, that faux pas only made Number 4 on our list of twelve in this popular second post in a two-post series.
  8. Damn the Voters, Bloomberg Believes He is NYC’s Only Choice – Emperor Bloomberg’s successful push to bypass the electorate and change the law to benefit him still steams us almost beyond words. It seems many of you were likewise affected, making this post one of the Top Ten of 2008.
  9. Knowledge Hoarders & The Mack Truck Theory – While the topic of knowledge hoarding can be a real yawner when compared to Emperor Bloomberg, Jennifer Aniston or Freakonomics, this post still ranked in the Top Ten largely on the strength of those looking for ways to combat this practice in their own workplace.
  10. Managing Up When Your Boss Refuses to Lead – We clearly struck a nerve with this post detailing the epidemic of ineptness plaguing business “leaders” today as it received nearly 500 unique page views in just two short months. We were compelled to write this article after witnessing more than a dozen instances (in just one week) of intelligent middle managers dumbing-down their approach and acting like victims because their respective supervisors happen to be complete buffoons. (We never know where our muse will come from.)

As we look ahead to 2009 and beyond, we’re hopeful that our posts, articles and opinions can help managers become leaders and leaders become more effective stewards of their businesses. The editors of AskTheManager thank you for your continued support.