7 Simple Tips That Will Turn You Into a Powerful Leader

“You don’t have to be in a position of authority to be a leader. Conversely, just because you have authority doesn’t mean that people will follow you. You must be a leader to get others to follow you.

There are many books on leadership. They can have lots of great examples and in-depth explanations, but sometimes you just need something simple to help you focus on the essentials. This article intends to do just that. These are the habits that will help you and your team achieve great things if you focus on them.”

Wide vs. Deep

“I’ve got this theory about what it’s like to be a manager and what it’s like to be a developer and which role suits a particular individual best, and I think it explains pretty well why I deeply, profoundly hate the former and dearly, truly love the latter.”

The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time

“Some things were just never meant to be, but that doesn’t mean that investors won’t pile millions of dollars upon a bad idea — or even a good idea gone bad. Whether they crashed and burned or sucked investors dry, these ventures just didn’t work out. Check out our graveyard of dreams and money to get a look at VC (venture-capital) investments that just weren’t wise.”

Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School

“I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and was inspired to get it done by Merlin Mann’s recent piece about improving his use of PowerPoint.

I do a lot of presentations. Each time I give a talk, I try to improve on something. I have a good base on which to build thanks to an unlikely education. Despite my career in technology, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Theatre.

I learned a lot of good public speaking practices from theatre school. They come in two flavours–content and technique…”

Dashboard Recap: Recent Screenshots

“Faced with a lack of resources in the areas of dashboard design and best practices, The Dashboard Spy set out a few years ago to collect examples of the budding new business intelligence technology known as the Digital Dashboard. After asking his many fellow UI designers, information architects, project managers, IT experts and business users for example screenshots, he decided to post the examples on the web. Well, that started a site that has since grown to be the largest collection of BI interfaces available.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book on the workplace of the future

“A few days ago, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell noted that he’s almost finished with his third book. I’ve learned that the subject of this book is the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius.”

Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong With a Little Free Time

“Since my days are set to the sleeping patterns of a toddler and the biorhythms of a dog, I have to squeeze my ‘work,’ i.e. writing, interviews, blogging, etc, into naptime and the few hours after the boy goes to bed and before I collapse. I’m pretty good about getting the important, bill-paying stuff done, but unfortunately that means what suffers is Me Time, things like reading books or watching a ballgame on TV without a computer in my lap. When I just spent most of my day stressing out about what I wasn’t getting done because I was at the playground or reading Richard Scarry books 49 consecutive times, I can’t very well justify not doing my stuff when I’m back home and books are put away.”

No, Enterprise Software Doesn’t *Have* To Suck

“Every so often, we get some great feedback from our community that’s thought-provoking and challenges our assumptions in a good way. And then sometimes, we get blog posts from otherwise-clueful folks who’ve, well, missed the mark. Fortunately, people with a lot of talent are usually pretty good at taking criticism, and that’s certainly true of Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com and author of the popular Subtraction blog, and Jason Fried, a principal of 37Signals and one of the key voices of their Signal vs. Noise blog.

The conversation got started in earnest last week — Khoi posted ‘If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software’ on his Movable Type-powered blog. The title’s a playful jab at an odd little Lotus Notes ad campaign, but overall the essay does a great job of showing what’s traditionally been wrong with enterprise software.”

The Long Wow

“The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring loyalty, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it.”