How Do You Deal With a New Boss? One of our regular readers – and someone who asked our advice very early on in the legacy that has become AskTheManager.com – AngelCakes from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan recently provided us with both an update on her management career and a new dilemma. When we first heard from […]
Sometimes You Have to be a Prick to Those Outside of Your Company I just received the March 2009 purchase report from one of our company’s 50+ vendors who provide such recaps. This particular vendor chose to name the file MyCompanyMarch.xls. By “MyCompanyMarch,” I mean he put the name of my company and […]
TheManager’s Leadership Book Review In what may become a regular feature of AskTheManager.com, we tackle the sometimes thankless task of reviewing the work of a published author. While you could argue that we’ve provided book reviews in the past with our Ten Best Leadership Books or our Ten Best Decision Making Books lists, this time […]
Too Much Technology… When working to help an underperforming business unit (in my real job) grow their revenues, I always discover instances where the unit has purchased some widget, gadget or other magic bullet designed to help them sell more. Although well-meaning, the manager who made this purchase generally believed against all his or her […]
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 […]
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 […]
Questions… we get Questions One of our readers, Anant, posted the following after reading our article from August 2008 titled The First Time Manager Dilemma, How Do You Gain Respect?: hi, i am facing a similar problem as mentioned above with one of my older employees, the only difference is that i am the […]
Why Does My Industry Refuse to Use Data? True story – of course, whenever anyone says or writes this it generally means that everything else they’ve ever told you is BS – anyway, true story: a highly compensated colleague wrote to a group of fellow highly compensated colleagues and asked “does anyone have any data […]
Brett “Cuatro” Favre and the Leadership Lesson of Humility When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. The best thing to do is admit it. We are certainly humble enough to admit it. At the beginning of the 2008 NFL season we predicted that the New York Jets would finish the season no better than 8-8… we were […]
2008: A Lesson in Recession and Leadership The axiom “sales cure all ills” rings more true today than ever. More than anything it teaches us an inarguable lesson: that is, we learn more about leadership in bad times than we do in good times. To prove this theory to yourself, imagine your company just 18 […]
Old Sayings are Often Gold Sayings Yes, that hackneyed phrase was as hard to type as it is to read, but I used it to illustrate a point: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; you do reap what you sow; and actions do speak louder than words. Is it just […]
Phil Savage, Cleveland Browns GM, Responds too Quickly While email etiquette in business has long been an important topic to the editors of AskTheManager.com, we’ve never pontificated on the importance of responding expeditiously. We’ve posted articles and opinions about email typos, email signatures, and we even ranked the worst email etiquette mistakes of all […]
It’s the Leadership, Stupid These past few months have seen the greatest turmoil in the worldwide credit and stock markets most of us have ever experienced. With depression-like drops in equities and recession-like layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies, nearly everyone has been too busy bailing water to blame the Captain… until now. While much of the […]
Proper Email Etiquette for Business Signatures In response to numerous requests to a recent series of posts covering proper email etiquette, the editors of AskTheManager.com decided it was time to put to rest the question on what should be included in a business email signature. For those of you not familiar enough with Outlook […]
The Best of Warren Buffett With the recession looming, the stock market in the tank, and worldwide economic uncertainty, it’s nice to know America has a man like billionaire Warren Buffett to turn to for investment advice. Buffett is to the stock market what Tiger Woods is to golf. He’s the best and second place […]
Leadership Means Knowing When Not To Act Remember that great little restaurant you frequented a few years ago? You know the one; they had that terrifically tasty dish that kept you coming back again and again. Remember when they changed ownership and the new proprietors altered the recipes? The way I remember it, the new […]
Managing Up – Overcoming the Fear of Leading the Dullards Above You Explaining to your boss or your boss’ boss that he/she is an idiot is never a good idea, though everyday in American business we are faced with substandard leadership and a mission at hand. How can we help move the business forward […]
Leadership and Impartiality Of all the leadership development lessons we can learn from the 2008 Presidential Elections, there is probably none so clear as how the lack of impartiality equates to poor leadership. Interestingly, these lessons are not learned so much from the candidates –Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin most certainly lost their ability to […]
Forgetting The Goal – A Leadership Dilemma Everywhere consumers turn today they see examples of poor leadership. They may not recognize these little inconveniences as leadership voids, but they are voids nonetheless. While the lack of true leadership in American business spells trouble for employees and middle managers, a byproduct of this missing leadership […]
Leadership Lessons from Fantasy Football Tonight kicks off another season of NFL Football. To many, this is the most anticipated day of the year – especially to the millions of fantasy football players. The editors of AskTheManager are fantasy football fanatics and we spent most of our draft last week discussing how fantasy football intersects […]