“Natural disasters, revolutionary technology, pro-athlete scandals and national calamities marked 2007 as an unforgettable year.

Yet, amid these major happenings arose stories that were overlooked, unseen or ignored altogether: tales of our nation’s work force. Understandably, these pieces weren’t as newsworthy as Michael Vick’s dog fighting charges or Paris Hilton going to jail. But these stories held an angle unlike any other: They were just plain weird.

Here are 15 headlines that exemplify the strange happenings that took place in the workplace in 2007.”

“Bringing together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location, the VizThink ‘08 Conference (http://www.vizthink.com) is an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine. The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel from January 27-29. Registration (http://www.vizthink.com/reg.html) is open now.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“Managers always get cautious during recessions. The only ideas that appeal are how to cut costs. Gone is the interest in innovation and building the top line. Of course, this is an attitude that prolongs the downturn for the overall economy, and it slows the rate at which particular companies emerge from the fiscal funk. The best companies, like General Electric and McKinsey, accelerate innovation during recessions. They know that their people have a little more time to think, and they encourage them to think boldly and creatively.”

Ben Stein: “About a week ago, I was swimming in my pool when I had serious difficulty breathing. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said to myself, ‘now I am about to die.’ My wife was upstairs reading, way out of earshot and, anyway, if I were about to have a lethal heart attack, I wouldn’t be able to scream. It turned out to be a nasty but short-lived bronchitis, and as I was lying in bed recovering, I thought, ‘I will die someday, and before I do, I would like to share with you the best possible thoughts I can, in gratitude for the many insightful letters I have received over the years from my readers.’”

“…out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free. The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances — lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also….” (Thanks Signal vs. Noise!)