View from the Middle

Articles on leadership are ten a penny on the internet, so it's refreshing to find a regular columnist that looks at management from the perspective of middle managers, and Wayne Turmel's articles come with a healthy does of irreverant humour to boot.

Wayne Turmel's View from the Middle

Wayne also produces a regular podcast that takes a similar perspective which is available via iTunes or The Podcast Network.

The Cranky Middle Manager
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Learning and listening

A couple of useful podcast for you.

The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner. An informative resource for anyone who is interested in developing their project management skills.

And

Managers Tools by Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman, a weekly business podcast focused on helping business professionals become more effective managers and leaders.

Both handy additions to your iTunes library.

Academic Earth

This is an interesting idea. Six of the top US colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton & Stanford) are making videos of their lectures available on the Academic Earth website. Now under normal circumstances getting access to learning material of this quality would require you to be a student at one of the colleges and all that entails, but Academic Earth have the goal to give “…everyone on Earth access to a world-class eduction.”

They state:

"We are building a user-friendly educational eco-system that will give internet users the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

If you search under the “Entrepreneurship” section you’ll find all sorts of lectures on subjects that are really relevant to business today. I found material on leadership, coaching, finance, marketing, negotiation…. and loads more, all delivered by some of the top business names. People like Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Kaplan, Carly Fiorina, Trip Hawkins, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page will always have something interesting to say.

Naturally they also deliver more traditional academic subjects like biology, chemistry, English, physics, mathematics, etc.

Academic Earth has an ambitious goal, but I’ve always believed that this is exactly the sort of thing the internet ought to be utilised for. The capacity to deliver the very best learning materials to anyone in the world, for free and at their convenience is well within the capability of the system. All that’s needed is the content and the will of the content owners to allow that material to be distributed. Unfortunately at the moment there are some licencing issues which can affect a particular lecture if you don’t reside in a country that has permission to view it, but as far as I can tell that is the exception rather than the rule (and you could always use an anonymizer or proxy to hide your country of origin anyway).

There’s so much potential here. I really hope it achieves its ambition.

Dealing With Poor Performasnce

A useful article from Mind Tools about identiying the root cause of poor performance and the potential solutions.

Dealing with Poor Performance