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With many thanks to friends and clients, we’ve made the top 25 list our 1st month out of the gate!

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources, compiles a monthly list of best-selling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. Here are the best sellers for October 2008:

23. “Relationship Economics: Transform Your Most Valuable Business Contacts Into Personal and Professional Success” by David Nour; Wiley.

You can read about the others here…

In the New York Times business section last Sunday, October 26th, I read with great interest an article about Jenny Hourihan Bailin who lost her Wall Street investment banking job in a restructuring earlier this year. The article focused on how she’s found her “true north” compass heading – that which really makes her happy. She’s decided to retool and transfer her skills into the non-profit world. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Thursday, October 16, 2008, is National Boss Day.  As I thought through the significance of the day, I reflected on the state of our current workforce. We all know and understand there is a continued increase in the unemployment rate of US workers, and I believe that if people within America’s organizations turned inward for improvement on relationships, they may find more productivity and in the long run a reason to maintain current workforce levels.

This prompted me to create and share with you a systematic approach to implementing five fundamentals that nurture more effective relationships within any organization:

Read the rest of this entry »

There are three types of relationships:

• Personal – These are your friends (golf buddies, neighbors, parents at kid’s school, etc.); they like your warts and all and you choose them, making them rather safe.
• Functional – These are people you work with to perform your job or realm of responsibilities.  You build relationships with them, often because you have to (colleagues, customers, suppliers, etc.). You don’t necessarily choose all of them, but because of the context of your relationship, likewise they feel fairly safe.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spend a couple of hours each day following hyperlinks from various posts on Twitter, and a dozen or so interesting blogs I keep up with.  With the absolute information overload and 200+ emails / day that I receive, it really has become a “pruning” job – don’t keep up with it and whether in the inbox or on the Blackberry, it gets overwhelming quickly.

As such, a couple of years ago, I immersed myself into Macros and Rules in MSFT Outlook – this subject line, goes into that folder; emails from this address go into here; any of these words in the subject or body of the email, DELETE!

So, when I came across this article on Best Practices in Writing Email Subject Lines, I couldn’t help but to not only be intrigued, but wanted to share it as well.

Three tips for you on your Digital Etiquette:

1. Let’s use email for facts, not opinions!
2. If I have to scroll your email, please pick up the phone and call me!
3. Let’s stop cc’ing 15 people and then reply with “Thanks!”; no, “Thank You”; no, I insist “Thank You!”

What have you found to be effective in your email communication?