Get on ScobleShow, get fired

“Last night one of the people who’ve been on the ScobleShow (my video show) wrote me and told me he was fired for appearing on my show without PR permission. I won’t tell you who that was since he’s interviewing for a new position now, but it made me realize that when I aim my camera at someone that there are real consequences for doing so. Now, the guy in question should have known that would have pissed someone off. Most big companies, in their employment agreements, have in there that you aren’t allowed to talk with the press unless given permission by the PR departments.”

How David Allen mastered getting things done

“David Allen sits in his small office in a cottage behind his house in Ojai, Calif., talking business with a visitor. Suddenly he stops. “That reminds me,” he says. He scribbles the words ‘bird feed’ on a piece of blank notebook paper and tosses it into his inbox. It’s an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. But for Allen and his legion of followers, it holds the key to salvation. He has emptied his mind of a nagging task, placed it into a trusted system for processing, and casually returned to his conversation.”

Life at Google: The Microsoftie Perspective

“The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

Many of you were asking for the feedback I received from my interview with the former Google employee I hired into ABC Development as a Sr.SDE. Here it is. This candidate is also a former MS employee who left the company and founded a “Start-up” called XYZ. XYZ was purchased by Google and he was hired on as a Senior Software Engineer II / Technical Lead. Here is his take on Google’s environment as well as areas Microsoft should consider improving in order to be more competitive.”

10 Mistakes Managers Make During Job Interviews

“Career advice from BNET: Hiring is one of the hardest parts of managing a team. A lot is riding on the initial meeting, and if you’re nervous or ill-prepared — or both — it can make you do strange things. The following mistakes are all too common, but they’re easy to avoid with some advance preparation.”

The Civilized Workplace: No Jerks Allowed

“An obnoxious coworker, a malicious manager, a bullying boss — there’s no getting around it: today’s workplace is beset with jerks. These people deliberately make coworkers and subordinates feel bad about themselves in our day-to-day working environment, and the human and financial toll is high. They poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and, therefore, are detrimental to business, regardless of their individual effectiveness. Author Robert I. Sutton makes the solution plain: these toxic workers have to go.”

Looking at the best-of-breed blogs

“I typically use this column to look at future trends, but this month I want to recognize some businesses that are simply doing a great job leveraging corporate weblogs, which are the most mature social media tools. While only a handful of corporations are blogging, the ranks are growing steadily. The leaders below all take different approaches to the craft, but it’s working for their businesses. With one exception, I’ve screened out tech companies, where blogs are now mainstream and different rules apply.”

Still failing, still learning

“This post officially announces that my side project (originally named cause & effect and later named certitude) is over. For those of you who weren’t subjected to one of my enthusiastic rants, here was my Graham Question: Can we predict the outcome of a software development project with objective observation? …So I set out to write a piece of software that, pure and simple, would look at a software development project and show you a traffic light: a green light would mean that the project looks like it’s on track, a yellow light would mean that the project needed help, and a red light would mean that there is no hope… So how and why did I fail?”

How to Be a Good Boss

“You’re the boss. But it’s no fun (and very difficult) being a boss that is not respected, or is even actively disliked. How do you get your staff to be the best thing that ever happened to you? By being the best boss that ever happened to them.”

How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

Solid advice from Marc Andreessen on the hiring process: “I define drive as self-motivation — people who will walk right through brick walls, on their own power, without having to be asked, to achieve whatever goal is in front of them. People with drive push and push and push and push and push until they succeed… Finally, although this goes without saying: value the hell out of the great people you do have on your team. Given all of the above, they are incredibly special people.”

Product loyalty: consumers mistake familiarity with superiority

“Anyone who has followed consumer electronics and online services knows that once a product reaches dominance, it becomes very hard for it to be dethroned (hello, iPod, Google, and Windows). Economists have argued for years regarding the costs involved in finding and adopting alternatives, but the psychologists will point out that familiarity and comfort play major roles in keeping consumers loyal to an incumbent.”