“Let me use our company as a case-study here. I own a presentation firm, our clients are big corporate companies, in theory they just come to us for presentations i.e. we’re not a ‘creative’ company as such. However when they come, we have a rule, and every employee knows it: When someone visits our office we have to make such an impression that people talk about us at home later, not just at their office.”

“Procrastination is a complex psychological behavior that affects everyone to some degree or another. With some it can be a minor problem; with others it is a source of considerable stress and anxiety. Procrastination is only remotely related to time management, (procrastinators often know exactly what they should be doing, even if they cannot do it), which is why very detailed schedules usually are no help.” (Thanks The Enlightened Entrepreneur!)

“Business literature is packed with advice about worker motivation — but sometimes managers are the problem, not the inspiration. Here are seven practices to fire up the troops. From Harvard Management Update.”

Blatant self-promotion: Attention St. Louisans — your humble bBlog and xBlog editor (that would be me, Bill Keaggy) is having an exhibit at the Center of Contemporary Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. The opening is tonight, Friday, April 14 from 6-8 p.m., for Junk Science | Projects by Bill Keaggy: Found objects, trash photography, strange collections and accidental art. If you are able, please stop by and say hi. COCA is at 524 Trinity in the U City area. There will be free wine and you can even enter for a chance to win a free piece from the exhibit, or a cool poster. Hope to see some of you local bBlog readers and friends of XPLANE there!

“In the old days, I’d lug my book around and do a dog and pony show with my work meticulously mounted to 16″x20″ black boards. It’s how they taught me to do it in art school. What they didn’t teach me was how to whip up a proper proposal.”

“Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, collected these gems of wisdom over a number of years from various unidentified sources. Rod Stewart of Mobile Data Services in Huntsville, Alabama edited and updated them. I found and kept a copy of these during the early nineties. Over time, the NASA link disappeared, so this version of the rules was posted to make sure that it stayed available.”

“Most organizations claim they value creative, innovative people; yet many operate in ways guaranteed to limit, block or destroy whatever creativity their people have. The culprit is the fashionable, hard-driving, ‘results are all that matters’ style of leadership. Here’s how–and why–it happens.”

“The Apple CEO is well known for his electrifying presentations. Here are five tips to make your next talk just as mesmerizing — or close.”

“Several people have asked me for a blog entry about executive summaries. My colleague at Garage, Bill Reichert, wrote this explanation, and it’s as good as it gets.”

“Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.”

“As part of my research for my book The Natural Enterprise, I had the chance this weekend to speak informally with a group of young people (in their 20s and 30s) about whether they would ever consider starting their own business. Most of them like the idea of doing so, but confess to being afraid to do so, to the point most would never even seriously consider it. Here are the ten reasons they gave for this, along with my thoughts on how a Natural Enterprise could overcome these fears.”

“It’s a funny thing. After almost twenty years of drawing a paycheque for creating software, people generally want to hire me because they want me to duplicate the successes I’ve had. The model seems to be ‘do the things you’ve done successfully before, and you’ll be successful now.’ My experience is that this has never worked on its own. Success in software development is at least as much about avoiding failure modes as it is about ‘best practices.’”

“Who is your ideal boss? I firmly believe that a good boss is one of the factors shaping your decision on whether to accept a job offer… Sometimes this factor is the only decisive factor in making such a decision especially if you have worked with the boss in the past and he ‘proved’ himself as a trusted lead and ‘demonstrated’ understanding and care.”