“This is the bad science on the back of a package of Pomodoro pasta. Marketers have nightmares about this… about screwing up and having it show up on a million packages. ‘Boy are you stupid.’ What a wasted nightmare.”

“I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.”

“Whether you call them conference calls or telecons or excruciatingly dull time-wasters, multi-participant phone conversations are as important to most web workers as email. If you can’t meet face to face or arrange video conferencing, the conference call is the next best thing. But just as with email and instant messaging, people don’t always agree on how to use them as effectively as possible as a tool for collaboration. Try these tips for your next telecon whether you’re the leader of the call or just a participant. And share your own ideas for making conference calls worthwhile and productive in the comments.”

“Steve Jobs’ blockbuster keynote at last week’s Macworld was brilliantly and powerfully delivered — one of his best ever. It was also a colossal mistake.”

“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.” I conjecture it’s because software development on a commercial scale is so hard that almost any mistake will sink a project if left uncorrected or even worse, actively encouraged.”

“The heartbeat of Coudal Partners is its influential blog, which has generated its own community of like-minded followers and pumped energy into side projects that support the firm. Has playing around ever been this lucrative?”

“Distributing work is never easy. Taking on a new job generally finds few takers, especially if the task is demanding and the time available is short. Not surprisingly, we often run into problems while allocating work. Ranging from a simple goof-up by a colleague to ultimately having to do things yourself in order to get it done correctly and on time, we have all experienced the perils of delegation… As usual, this can be analysed down to a simple list of easily avoidable mistakes.”

“The daily stand-up meeting (also known as a ‘daily scrum’, a ‘daily huddle’, a ‘morning roll-call’, etc.) is simple to describe: the whole team meets every day for a quick status update. We stand up to keep the meeting short. That’s it. But this short definition does not really tell you the subtle details that distinguish a good stand-up from a bad one. Given the apparent simplicity of stand-ups, I was quite surprised the first time I saw one that wasn’t working. It was immediately obvious to me what was wrong but I realised that it was not obvious to the team. I realised that my team was not aware of the underlying principles and details that would allowed them to diagnose and solve problems with stand-ups.”

“I’ve actually found that suits can have a negative effect on my perception of some business people—especially salespeople. When you sound sharp you sound sharp no matter what you wear, but when you don’t know what you’re talking about you sound worse with a suit on. It has something to do with expectations. The suit magnifies missed expectations. It’s like wearing a first place medal around your neck before the race and then finishing 7th.”

“Even the most jaded observer of American corporate culture had to blink when, earlier this month, Home Depot’s board of directors handed the company’s C.E.O., Bob Nardelli, more than two hundred million dollars after pushing him out of his job. Nardelli had not delivered for shareholders Home Depot’s stock price went down about six percent during his tenure. And, while his operating performance was actually quite good, he would have made a lot of money even if it hadn’t been: most of his contract was guaranteed, and, when he had a hard time meeting a particular target for his bonus, the board generously substituted an easier one.”

“As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam’s idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc.”

I killed the infrequently-updated ROI category and moved the Venture Capital posts into the Finance/VC category. Also added a Meetings category. I’ll probably finesse a few other things category-wise in the next few weeks.

“We all want to be confident, don’t we? It’s a word that crops up fairly often in coaching sessions, even with people who are very talented and successful. We’re all human, and for most of us there are times, places, audiences and situations where we feel we’d like to be a little more confident. For creative professionals, these typically include high-pressure performance situations, such as presentations, pitches, interviews, auditions and stage shows. Of course we want to perform at our best in these situations, but I think the word ‘confidence’ creates more problems than it solves. I usually advise clients to change the word to ‘enthusiasm’. Here’s why…”

“Roger Ebert once said, ‘A movie is not what it is about, but how it is about it.’ Riffing off this, Tom Asacker writes, ‘If your business is struggling with disengaged employees, fickle customers and razor thin margins, it’s because you believe that your brand is what it is about instead of how it is about it.’”

“About a month ago, Fortune’s Jeffrey O’Brien interviewed Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, and pulled the conversation’s most memorable quote for the headline: ‘Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap — and watch porn.’ Predictably, the honestly and entertainment value of the quote got Watkins hailed as a hero by those tired of the usual platitudes for the press. So what comes next? The requisite apology…”