“The Home Depot board has awarded [CEO Robert L. Nardelli] $245 million in his five years there. Yet during that time, the company’s stock has slid 12 percent while shares of its archrival, Lowe’s, have climbed 173 percent. Why would a company award a chief executive that much money at a time when the company’s shareholders are arguably faring far less well? Some of the former Home Depot managers think they know the reason, and compensation experts and shareholder advocates agree: the clubbiness of the six-member committee of the company’s board that recommends Mr. Nardelli’s pay.”

“Here are ten tips I’ve found extremely useful. Poker players would call them ‘tells,’ psychologists would term them manifestations of our subconscious minds trying to communicate what we believe to be the truth. Behaviorists would say they are learned actions which have given us desired results in the past. The truth is probably a Venn diagram blending the three.”

“The starting point for getting better at anything, including knowledge work, is to increase your capacity for learning from experience. In organizational settings, this need for learning capacity is increased because organizational work rarely leaves time for practice and rehearsal. You need to develop the capacity to learn while you are engaged in performance and in those little moments of downtime. Here is where I would suggest you start.”

“How search engines index and value content is also changing quickly. It is imperative that you understand The New Rules of Marketing. Failing to embrace The New Rules could negatively impact your online sales, lead generation, demand generation, online visibility, search engine rankings and brand perception.”

“This is a story about how 2 enterprising web developers quit their jobs at CNET Networks and built an enterprise level community driven site (boompa.com) complete with all the modern ‘web 2.0′ bells and whistles in almost exactly two months on the smallest possible budget with open source software. It covers the planning, technology, accounting and business decisions we made along the way and is meant to be an honest portrayal of the realities of opening up your own shop and what you will need to do.”

“Do statistics tell the entire story? Managers must make effective use of the numbers they generate. Here are five tips to help ensure that you can rely on the numbers.”

“A good Web experience is rarely simple. It takes time, skill, effort and more to get right. It takes passion and a solid commitment from all parties involved. Again, for many the Web site is the first and primary touch-point as far as their brand goes. Even more traditional businesses know this. Still, it amazes me at how little some are willing to invest into their Web experience.”

“Giving presentations can be a complete and utter thrill. Too bad attending them can be a complete and utter bore. If you are on the giving side, I want to offer you up a collection of my best presentation tricks to date.”

“The problem with advertising press online and offline is that they report on advertising. It’s a fundamental flaw. Advertising is not where the game is at anymore. Advertising has become a tactic while client side marketers look at how companies act as a brand as a whole — and communications is just one of many tools. You can’t completely fault the ad press totally — they feed off an industry committed to making one way communications rather than valuable brand-customer dialog.”

“Yi-Tan means conversations about change. On Monday, May 14th, [XPLANE founder and CEO Dave Gray] will join Jerry Michalski on his weekly Yi-Tan call to discuss how visual thinking is changing the way interact and communicate. The topic: how to build shared visual meaning inside a company. We’ll discuss…”

“Bill Westerman has joined the back-to-paper movement. Here are a couple of Bill’s ingenous methods for managing his time and to-do lists in his notebook.”

“peterme readers sent in a few pointers following my last post where I asked about alternative corporate structures to encourage team coherence and creative output.” (Previous post: “Adaptive Path is feeling a few growing pains, which has lead me to look around for alternative models for organizational structure that lead to successful, creative, empowered teams. I found myself returning to W.L. Gore and Associates set up, most famously reported in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.”)

“If you are anything like me, you spend a substantial part of your day in meetings. Between meeting with clients, subordinates, various committees, and other stakeholders, meetings can take up time, energy, and motivation. A major time-waster is to spend time in meetings, agreeing to timelines and tasks, only to fail to meet those obligations due to poor meeting practices.”

“Decisions are at the heart of leader success, and at times there are critical moments when they can be difficult, perplexing, and nerve-racking. However, the boldest decisions are the safest. This source provides useful and practical guidance for making efficient and effective decisions in both public and private life.”

“The following individuals were profiled in the book 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators, by Carmine Gallo. Our slide show features contemporary business execs considered among the top speakers in Corporate America. These men and women have leveraged their powerful communications skills to build such companies as General Electric, Starbucks, and Apple.”