Gave Ya 'Rithmatic, now here's Readin' and Writin'

More on the fundamentals of being a better manager/person in business.

Create an intention calendar from Creating Passionate Users."There is an expression, "You are what you eat." And it's true. It's also the case that "You are what you think." Every single thought in our heads is created by nerve impulses that travel between neurons."

From the Mozilla Foundation, I use the Sunbird Calendar project to keep me focused on my intentions.

"The Sunbird project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language. At the moment the Sunbird name is a project name. It is not official and may change in the future."

5 Minutes Daily = Work Life Reinvention, "The Daily Five Minutes will reinvent and uplift the connection you have with your employees; so much so that your relationships with them will never be the same again — they will be far better." Thanks Management Craft for the link.

Anyway, I came across Windsor Media via Business Pundit. On Windsor Media they have an interview with Laurence Haughton, about his recent book, "It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do".

Smart Man Online: Laurence Haughton , "We know you're going to take some valuable business insight away with you today... read on to hear what Laurence Haughton says about following through in business:

Lip-sticking: Early on in your book, you advise managers to "Just make it a policy that when making important decisions everyone must put their thoughts in writing.” This is a powerful statement, which you go on to explain in the book, but...could you give Lip-sticking's readers a glimpse into why writing goals, decisions, and even thoughts, down on paper is so useful?"

I like the idea of writing things down - even though it is a hassle. Over time my writing gets easier and so does the clarity of my thoughts. I recently read "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, A Bullfighters Guide" and found in my own writing the typical bs that we hear every day in corporate-speak. What's fun here is that the authors developed a script that works with MS Word. You can run the script and it will flag the corp bs and offer alternatives. You can download the script from the author's site.

For more background information on bs check out 800CEOREAD "Awful lot of BS floating around".

Maybe the biggest problem is not writing things down but the basic way we communicate (too many meaningless, empty words) with each other. From Got a Good Strategy? Now Try to Implement It is a post I wrote about tying strategy to the daily work activities of employess. In others, write a strategy that makes sense and that people can understand.