Great advice from the SmartCompany agony aunt to a small business owner who lost a tender because his company was not big enough.

My take: Just be who you are. It is too hard to pretend otherwise.

If a client discriminates against you because of your size, do you think they would understand and value what you have to contribute anyway? What does that say about their primary …

If I were looking for an SUV today. I totally love their Save the Rhino TV commercial.

It still showed the product doing its thing - and actually in aid of a genuine worthwhile cause. (Suzuki is donating part proceeds from each sale to save the black rhino and the tassie devil.)

How refreshing it was not to see yet another super-preened yuppy dude in his super-clean, super-polished, …

Moral Intelligence - Enhancing business performance and leadership success.
By Dough Lennick and Fred Kiel PhD, ISBN 0 13 149050 8

Some highlights:

Moral intelligence – the mental capacity to determine how universal human principles should be applied to out values, goals and actions.

We are hardwired to be moral but often stray from the path.

Cultural relativism – everyone has their own morality based on their situation and culture.

Without a high degree …

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the originator of TQM (Total Quality Management), put forth 14 points of organisation behaviour change towards better performance.

Stilgherrian’s post on being real on the web brought to mind Deming’s eighth point: Drive out fear.

Point 8: Fear is a barrier to improvement so drive out fear by encouraging effective two-way communication and other mechanisms that will enable everybody to be …

“Lost in the rush towards technical innovation are the human dimensions of the relationship between people.”

On Being a therapist, Kottler J A, 1993

See my previous post and comments on this annoying phone spammer.

Had another call from them again! I couldn’t believe it.

Once again, the first line was an adamant insistence that they are a Sydney registered company. Again, this just sounded fishy. As does the whole “we are giving you something you have to pay for” line…

Here be a great visual example of the importance of context in communications. Thanks for sharing Andrew!

Glenn Kelman said on Guy Kawasaki’s blog on entrepreneurship:
“It’ll always be hard work. Most start-ups find an interesting problem to solve, then just keep working on it. At a recent awards ceremony, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to think of the secret to Microsoft’s success and could only come up with “hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, work.” This is an obvious cliche, but most entrepreneurs remain …

I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the word “consulting” lately…
I wonder what the alternatives are?

Consultant: “I am the expert. I will tell you the right answers. I will implement for you the right solutions. You hand me the responsibility to fix it.”

Coach: “I will guide, advice, support and motivate you to achieve your goals. I have the framework to help you making things happen .I have suggestions and …

The ecoIron blog post Black Google inspired Blackle (ie Black Google).

The premise is interesting. In summary:
It takes less power (especially on CRTs) to display a predominantly black screen. Google, which has a predominantly white interface, is estimated to be running 550,000 hours daily worldwide. Making Google black could save 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day worldwide!

Check out the full details in the full post …