If you’re like me, you like to win free stuff!

So, here’s a chance to win a free book. Blogging for Business is giving away a free book (Blogging for Business) to the top three posts about blogging for business. As you are already aware, businesses are taking to blogging seriously. Entrepreneurs, consultants, even big businesses are blogging about their work, their products and services.

When I was at Convergence this year, the annual Microsoft User Conference, I hear them talk about blogs with great enthusiasm. There those blogs that were discussing trends and events at the conference and there were also blogs that had been created specifically for the conference. Since then, I have seen an increase in the number of blogs that were talking about the latest in Microsoft technology.

It makes sense, because as someone else has said, the marketplace is a conversation. Sounds like the bigger we get, the smaller we become. In any case, if you are interested, put together your business blogging posts and submit it to Blogging for Business so you can snag yourself a prize!

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Technorati Tags: blogging, win, prize, business, business blogging

I have just added the latest book by Tom Morris, If Harry Potter Ran General Electric to my LibraryThing catalog. Morris is an erswhile philosophy professor extraordinarire turned business success and achievement coach and guru who also wrote the acclaimed If Aristotle Ran General Motors (which is also part of my LT catalog). I mentioned LibraryThing the other day, and it is not just a cool catalog that you can create to keep track of your books. You can also use it to track books you have read that your like (or dislike) and find others who may have read or who own the same books.

Just looking at my profile, I can see that I share many books with quite a number of seminarians and other academics. So, what does this tell about me? I am neither, and work in corporate world as a sales guy! The thing is I love my job and I also love to read what I read! I guess you can say that I am an enigma!

Anyway, this latest addition to my catalog is quite an interesting read. I have just begun reading it, and already I like it. So, how do you fancy Harry Potter as CEO?

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In the classic scene in A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Jessep shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!” when grilled about the extent of military coverups, secrets and leadership knowledge about wrongdoings in a military base. The unspoken understanding, apparently, is that leaders have privileged access to the truth, so they have a responsibility to guard it, to act (or not act) upon it and only they are appropriately situated to appreciate it.

Leaving aside the questionability of this seemingly widespread assumption, I would like to ask a related question: what happens when leaders do not know the whole truth? What happens, that is, when the system fails them and they have lack of access to the information, or when those “in the know” hide the truth from them? Read the rest of this entry »

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Technorati Tags: truth, misrepresentation, leaders, knowledge, enron, awb, corruption, food-for-oil iraq, alexander downer, transparency, accountability

Recently I received a comment at my old blogsite to a post in which I highlighted the popularity of Sun Tzu’s Art of War as a business manual. I cast doubts on the use of this ancient manual for wholesale and uncritical application to contemporary business because I think fundamentally the dynamics in war (or military conflicts) are diametrically opposed to those in business. In that post, I ended with the following thoughts:

If we approach business as we approach all of life, with a view that everyone we touch should come out of that experience a better person, that they derive some value from the relationship, then it would make for a better world. No, methinks, business is more than merely warfare, in which there can be no real winners, but in which there are only losers in more ways than one. Business is more like a long-term love affair, where there can only be winners.

My commenter, however did not agree with my post and here is what he has got to say: Read the rest of this entry »

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Technorati Tags: business, art of war, sun tzu

A speaker at a business seminar that I attended today was advocating the virtues of servant leadership as a contemporary business management philosophy. During the discussion we had a couple of exchanges about the fact that the concept of servant leadership does not have to mean that the leader adopt a position or attitude of weakness.

In other words, a leader who adopts an servant leader approach does not do so by renouncing his authority or command of the organization. Nor does he do it in a subservient manner, pandering to the interests of all and sundry. However, it is an attitude that is inclusive, empowering and prioritizes the needs and interests of not just his followers, but also that of his consituents. This includes taking the needs and interests of the organization and the community into account in his tasks and objectives as leader.

What surprised me was that the seminar leader went on to say Read the rest of this entry »

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In corporate America today, servant leadership is tauted as the key to revolutionizing the way American corporations manage their people. Specifically, servant leadership is taught as the way the new manager needs to learn to relate to their reports. No longer are they to structure the organization heirarchically in the traditional manner, but they are encouraged to collaborate, to involve, to engage, and to serve their consituencies, their stakeholders. This new way of relating to each other in the corporation will ensure that everyone buys into the corporate vision, and that the corporation will be faster able to achieve its goals.

Several times in the gospels, Jesus also admonished His followers that those who would lead are to be the servants of all. Often I hear that this means that a leader must first be the servant. One is first a servant, says one consultant, and then he or she is chosen to lead. Somehow, I think that is not exactly what the Master Servant said. Nor is it what Robert K. Greenleaf, the father of the contemporary Servant Leadership movement had in mind when he penned the words of the seminal article, “The Servant as Leader.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I had all sorts of problems with my site that was eventually traced to a resource-hungry plugin. If you remember, they unceremoniously shut down my site. When I finally discovered the blackout, obviously I sent frantic emails asking for an explanation.

My host had the audacity to tell me off saying that they had attempted to contact me numerous times without a reply. What really irks me was the fact that I had contacted their support time and again about the issue with slowness in my blog, with spam, etc. They should have in their support system a history of my initiating their research on why the server is so slow. And, when they found out that it was without a doubt my site that was doing the slow-down, they cut me off without warning. To say it was a rude awakening is to understate the pain!

Thankfully, I had done some research before and I sort of guess it was the offending plugin. Even so, it took numerous emails before my support people would respond, and when they did they were defensive and unrepentant. The problem is not so much that they made a customer service mistake in acting so rudely, but that they refused to apologize, and did not offer any compensation for my inconvenience.

Read the rest of this entry »

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In a previous post, I suggested that companies like Walmart could be acting unethically in their pursuit of the almighty bottom-line-dollar-profit margins. Is it always wrong to strive for profit? Much earlier on, I commented briefly on the two main theories of the corporation.

One champions the drive towards profitability. In fact, according to Milton Friedman, there is no other obligation for the corporation but to make money for its owners (shareholders). But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have any social agenda, as long as it is only a means to increase its profitability. If acting in a humanitarian or charitable manner allows it to increase its profile in the community so as to win more business ultimately, it is fulfilling its role as a wealth-making machine for its shareholders

Read the rest of this entry »

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