“After nearly 14 months of researching, writing, editing, and rewriting, ‘The Cubicle Survival Guide: Keeping Your Cool in the Least Hospitable Environment on Earth’ is set to debut. The book is officially on sale Tuesday, February 27, 2007, which means if you order it online it should ship out then. The publication date, one week later, is Tuesday, March 6, 2007; this is when ‘The Cubicle Survival Guide: Keeping Your Cool in the Least Hospitable Environment on Earth’ should be available in bookstores.”

“Welcome to our experiment. It’s a new way to tap the collective knowledge of our community about the internal network of any company–so new that we are introducing it not only in beta form but in early beta. We know it’s a work in progress, and we want your help to make it better. Wiki away and let us know how we’re doing. This is an experiment in collaborative problem solving, where our goal is to create something of great value to the whole web community.”

“I’m writing this article on the flight back from a week-long trip to Istanbul, Turkey. My wife Kirsten is an amateur rug collector and we decided to celebrate her birthday in Istanbul where the 11th International Conference On Oriental Carpets was being held… Loving husband that I am, I accompanied Kirsten during her visits to a variety of rug dealers in Sultanhamet (the old district of Istanbul which is the carpet capital of the world). This is where The Grand Bazaar is located. If you’ve never been to Istanbul, I highly recommend it. It’s a great city. In any case, here are some of the insights I gained from my experience.”

“Today’s random topic is Professionalism in the Workplace. I’m not in a position where I can quit my day job and work on SportsNode full time. So I work in an office. In said office I sometimes see some things that inspired this post (regardless of how “common sense” some of these items are). Some of these rules (presented in an unordered list) have been broken by new folks for which this happens to be their first job and they just don’t know any better. Some however are perpetrated by people that should really know better…”

“Management and Leadership are not interchangeable words for me. We need both of them, for in part, management tends to be more internally focused (within a company, within an industry, within a person) whereas leadership is more externally focused on the future-forward actions you will take in the greater context of industry, community, or society. They have commonality to be sure, for instance, both are about capitalizing on human capacity, however they are defined by the differences we value in them: Management tends to be about systems and processes, whereas Leadership is more about ideas and experiments.

I believe there is both art and discipline in each, and I think of these rules as the discipline which helps reveal the great capacity of the art. Thus last time, twelve suggestions to help you self-manage, with a more disciplined you newly able to reveal your art. Now, twelve to help you self-lead, so a more disciplined you is newly able to reveal the art in others, those who choose you to lead them.”

“Here are twelve quick tips for organizing your desk. These are things that have worked well for me. Most of them are probably applicable to others as well.”

“A business unit manager may fret over a $50 million decision. If you’re Jeffrey Immelt, CEO at GE, that’s not a stressful decision, the big decisions are about billions of dollars. So Immelt spends time coaching managers through the $50 million situations. In short, I find the bigger the picture one considers, the less one sweats the small stuff.”

“For some time now, Crispin Porter & Bogusky has been the hottest ad agency in the country. It’s won massive accounts like Burger King and Volkswagen. It’s been “Agency of the Year” at the Clio Awards for two years running. And I sort of hate it.”

“We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.”

“If you are running a small business, you know that to be successful you need to be a jack-of-all-trades. The smart way to manage everything from company finances, to client relations, to marketing, is to use the right tools – tools that are simple enough that they won’t require you to spend a lot of time and money you don’t have setting them up. In this guide we cover the 25 best web2.0 applications for entrepreneurs who are looking for simple, cheap, and effective solutions to solving some of the tasks facing their small business or startup.”

“What should my local chiropractor do? Or the acupuncturist? Or the pet store? What about that small church or mosque? The web has changed the game for a lot of organizations, but for the local business, it’s more of a threat and a quandary than an asset. My doctor went to a seminar yesterday ($100+) where the ‘expert’ was busy selling her on buying a domain name, hiring a designer, using web development software, understanding site maps and navigation and keywords and metatags and servers…”

“Possibly, your boss is a truly fine person—wise, kind, perceptive, capable, understanding, the all-seeing director of the office sitcom, the sort of individual one might like to have, in an ideal world, as a parent or a confidant. Or not. In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. According to one report, 60 to 75 percent of employees—it doesn’t matter the organization—say the worst aspect of their job is their boss. It’s not difficult to believe, as one office expert concludes, that ‘every employed adult will have to work for a bad boss for some significant period.’”

“1. World of Warcraft account now expensable
2. College dropout programmer buddy needed a job
3. Bought a domain with lots of x’s in it
4. Wanted to get in Fast Company
5. Dad had nothing else to invest in
6. If all else fails, you get to keep the chairs
7. Developing a taste for beef ramen
8. Found hot venue for a launch party
9. While coding drunk, accidentally mashed up two apps…”

“Research at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia, claims the human brain processes & retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time… ‘It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.’”

“The Big Rocks are the major things you want to get done this week. A report, launching a new website, going to the gym, spending time with your spouse and kids, achieving your dreams. These Big Rocks get pushed back from week to week because we never have time to do them — our days fill up too quickly, and before we know it, weeks have passed and the Big Rocks are still sitting on the side, untouched.”