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Management Week in Review for March 18, 2011

Every week, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond. This week’s selections feature content on why you need to know more about Baldrige, rethinking your ideas on measuring marketing ROI and the powerful impact of Social Business on your firm’s reputation and ultimate success.

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Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 4: Improve Your Estimating and Forecasting Effectiveness

Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. In this segment, I focus on the issues surrounding forecasting and estimating errors, and I offer a number of ideas to improve performance for these important activities.

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Leadership Caffeine™-The Artful and Effective Workplace Apology

The apology is an often over-looked and widely misunderstood tool for keeping smoldering bridges from burning out of control and for repairing relationships that were dented somewhere in the chaos of daily battle. It’s also a tool easily misused by people uncomfortable in their roles and seeking to buy compliance by apologizing their way forward.

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Management Week in Review for March 12, 2011

Every week, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. This week’s selections feature content on the joy of work as a craft, responding to failure and exploring the latest thoughts from leading bloggers at the March Leadership Development Carnival.

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Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 3: How to Frame Your Decisions for Success

Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. In this 3rd Part of an on-going series, we tackle the issue of properly framing issues to improve idea generation and decision development.

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Leadership Caffeine™: When Leading is an Unnatural Act

One of the interesting outcomes I’ve observed when engaging truly thoughtful people in the process of understanding the role of a leader and the commitment required for success, is that some people decide it’s not a good fit. However, we don’t make it easy for them to reach this conclusion.

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In the Battle for Change, Attacking the Culture Usually Proves Fatal

Jody Weis relinquished his role as “Top Cop” here in Chicago, after what was a tumultuous and a productive three-year run in this thankless job. Weis was a controversial appointment by Mayor Daley. He was an outsider…a product of the FBI, and someone who hadn’t earned any street cred with the powerful cultural force that is the rank and file of the Chicago Police Department. He drove change, improved key measures and alienated himself from the entire organization in the process. His situation offers a number of valuable lessons for all of us.

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4 Key Skills Leaders Must Develop to Succeed in Today’s Workplace

With the clear disclaimer that there are no magic formulas, silver bullets or guaranteed fast-track approaches to success in the workplace, there are a number of critical steps you can take to accelerate progress and improve your odds. Here are 4 key skills you must develop to succeed in today’s workplace:

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