Learning Leader

This Blog is Five Years Old!

My first post was on August 5th 2004.

I'd like to think that five years is a respectable vintage for a blog. Does this mean I was an early adopter?

Early on, some of my colleagues and associates were pretty sceptical about my blogging. You know, that tedious thing of pronouncing 'blogging' as if it were something crude and slightly disreputable.

I've persevered because I enjoy it so much.

Over the last five years I've found I settled into a certain style, but also a sense of when I should post and when I should not. Received wisdom is that you should blog frequently. I've taken the line of only posting when I feel I have something to say.

However, I have a growing sense that my opinions on this are secondary. It is more important what you, dear Reader, would appreciate. So do let me know. I feel this will continue to evolve in style and content.

Finally, thank you for reading this blog. Your attention matters.

Helpful Resources for Presenters and Speakers

Is there a high-performing leader who has not bothered to hone and develop their presentation skills? I can't think of one.

So how do we do that? How do we develop our presentation skills? I believe there are three priorities:

1. Practice it. Actively seek opportunities to speak in public, to give presentations. My early presentations were definitely not good; in fact, I cringe when I remember them, but they were experiences to learn from.
2. Study it. Watch good communicators, live and in the flesh is better. I find watching people give messages week after week in my local church is a great way of reflecting on presentation techniques.
3. Practice it some more. Experiment. We never stop learning to improve.

I've compiled a number of resources:

Power Presenting Squidoo Lens
I created this lens as my own aggregated collection of sources and resources, which you might find helpful.

Power Presenting Book List
Compiled with the help of Amazon, this is my list of top references for influencing others through presentations.

Power Presentation Skills
John Edmonds and I coach corporate clients with this two-day programme providing the best coaching we know to help people to improve their influence through presentations.

Alltop Speaking
This is a branch of Guy Kawasaki's most useful aggregator site, Alltop, listing some the best blogs by top practitioners in the subject.

"Leaders need to present well."

Is there a high-performing leader who hasn't honed and developed their presentation skills? No. To be effective, leaders need to present well, if not powerfully.

Presenting, stakeholder engagement

Two Examples of Good Customer Service

One of the emergent values of blogging is that it can improve the experience we all have as consumers. Blogging about bad service has had the power to bring about huge dissent and negative PR. Blogging about good service has driven traffic to good suppliers and has encouraged them to keep up those high standards. The power of open comment like this is fast and sometimes influential.

So I'm inclined to do my bit from time to time on the side of the angels. We can all whine, and God knows we Brits are Olympic Champions at complaining! However, blogging about good customer service is a cause I'm taking up and I'll write about it as and when organisations I deal with give me the excuse. Here's my first two nominees, both from this week:

TypePad (Six Apart)

Some loyal readers of this blog may have noticed that it caused your browser to hang from time to time - my sincere apologies for this. I couldn't figure out why. So I raised a help ticket. The friendly response (and resolution) came within the same day identifying a dodgy widget. Once removed, all was sweetness and light. I'd recommend the TypePad platform to any aspiring blogger any day. It just gets better and better.

The Book Depository Ltd

This company consistently undercuts amazon.co.uk and always provides free delivery, with delivery times to match Amazon's.

I've come to believe that excellent service is demonstrated sometimes when a customer makes a complaint. I had to make one this week when a paperback I'd purchased came through the post damaged by the Royal Mail. An email to the Book Depository gave me again a quick response thus:

Dear Patrick,
I am very sorry that your order arrived in an unacceptable condition. We can either reorder the title, or refund you in full - whichever you prefer.
There is no need to return the damaged copy.
Thank you,

May

Brilliant. (I've opted for a replacement book. I just need the Royal Mail to perform this time.) I'll go on using the Book Depository because they have taken ownership of the supply chain risk for me.

A Goldmine for Self-Directed Learners

Jane Hart publishes an excellent blog - E-Learning Pick of the Day - and once again she is calling readers to submit their top ten tools. Here's mine.

Jane has compiled these into a very interesting Top 100 tools. Many of these tools are free; for example, in my list is Windows Live Writer and Google Reader.

I think this a gold mine for self-directed learners.

 

Technorati Tags: e-learning,self-directedlearning,learning,tools,JaneHart

del.icio.us Tags: e-learning,learning,self-directedlearning,tools,JaneHart

Yet another pearcemayfield blogger

Recently I wrote about my colleague, John Edmonds, starting his own blog, 'the Opsimath'. Now he and I have been joined by Tony Watts, also from pearcemayfield, who has launched his own blog, 'Training to Perform'.

 

Train-To-Perform via kwout

Last week I supported Tony in delivering his MSP Practitioner course and very much enjoyed working with him. Tony's blogging style is different again He is passionate about making training effective - hence the title of his blog.

Technorati Tags: Trainer,blogging

del.icio.us Tags: blogging,training,trainer,MSP,PRINCE2,pearcemayfield

John Edmonds: the Opsimath

My colleague John Edmonds has now launched his new blog.

The Opsimath via kwout

 

He's called it 'The Opsimath' after we were ruminating what he might call it. Over Christmas I picked up a copy of Stephen Fry's An Ode Less Travelled, where he encourages the reader to try attempt poetry-writing, even if they are getting on in years. He then refreshes the work Opsimath, which John defines in his blog. Do check it out.

Technorati Tags: John Edmonds,blogging,learning,opsimath

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Since moving to Office 2007 I've been experimenting with authoring these posts from OneNote 2007 and Word 2007. One problem I did find was that I needed to retrofit Technorati tags.

Now Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has been launched, and it provides a much more flexible interface. Also I was pleased to see a rich set of plug-ins including ... 

You can read more about Windows Live Writer and download it on the Windows Live Writer blog. So I'm migrating back to this tool now.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Windows Live Writer, Tablet PC

It's a slow news day in the blogosphere

We live in the age of the 24-hour news channels, and all that goes with them. As a consequence, the media have a voracious appetite to fill their programmes. Any news will do, it seems. Bandwidth is to blah with.

So we see the paparazzi rewarded handsomely for invading a young woman's privacy because she is guilty of nothing more heinous than dating a prince. Service men and women returning from a high-profile hostage ordeal are persuaded to sell their stories for significant sums to an industry that is not ready for the story to die. This same hypocritical industry is then quick to contrast the fate of those killed in action the next day - 'They will not be paid for their stories' one headline reads.

In contrast, I like the blogosphere in that it has the potential to be deeply counter-cultural. You subscribe to the blogroll you deserve. If I have nothing to write about, I don't write.

Thus I am concerned when fellow bloggers set themselves goals to publish so many times a week, or even a day ... even on a slow ideas day.

Friends, don't. You don't need to. Keep your counsel until you have something to say. Otherwise people will vote with their blogrolls and unsubscribe. 

Technorati tags: media, blogs, blogosphere, blogrolls, news

The Catalyst of Constraints

A deadline approaches and we feel somehow it is not helping us be creative.

Two blogs I subscribe to - and recommend - recently came at the  'problem' of constraints very positively, but from slightly different angles.

The first was Roger von Oech's article called Set A Deadline to Goad Your Creative Juices. Roger writes:

When I assign specific open-ended problems to groups in my seminars, I've found that those groups that have less time to generate ideas (e.g., 15 minutes vs. 25 minutes on the same problem) often have better and more creative solutions than the groups with more time. That's because they seem to get right to the point, have less self-censorship, and are less concerned with proper protocol.

The second was from Joyce Wycoff on paradoxically deciding what the constraints are before embarking on a brainstorming exercise. In her article called Criteria .. or Not? she advocates establishing the evaluation criteria at the beginning of an innovation process. I think Joyce is talking about something rather more specific and particular than Roger von Oech here. She concludes:

Knowing and working with the critical constraints seems to help people think far more strategically and creatively as they thread their way through the maze that leads to concepts that create new value for customers and for the organization.  Life and the market impose criteria on us, why should we act as if anything goes?

Also, this seems to fly in the face of conventional 'brainstorming' or 'brainblooming' techniques, where the emphasis on the early iterations is on 'no censorship' of ideas. What Joyce says has the ring of truth, and I plan to try this approach.

All this talk of constrains reminds me of the work of Eliyahu Goldratt. I value and respect the work of Goldratt and other on the Theory of Constraints (TOC), as illustrated in such works as Critical Chain, but this is different. The gist of TOC is to identify the most limiting constraint, manage around it, and seek to relax or remove it, if at all possible. The genius of Roger and Joyce's approaches are to treat a constraint as an opportunity, or a catalyst.

What stories do you have where constraints have enabled you rather than have limited you?

 

Technorati tags: Creativity, Innovation, Brainstorming, Deadlines, Constraints

Bishop's Blog Makes Regional News

I wrote yesterday about my friend and colleague, Mike Hill, who is also Bishop of Bristol. Apparently the use of the blog I wrote about is gathering some attention.  Head over to http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/ where, if you are quick you can see a news video of this phenomenon. You will find it under 'Points West' as 'Latest Bulletin' . According to the BBC, Mike's site already has had 10,000 hits.

 

Technorati tags: blogs, stakeholder engagement, communications