If you're new around these parts, I just want to say how much I appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and you may want to subscribe to my feed. Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to ya!

Due to the tremendous response of the Let’s Be Brief contest, I had an unusually heavy pile-up in the file cabinet this month. Ah, well, there are only so many hours in the day, you know. I mean, when you work 40 hours a week, it’s hard to fit eating, sleeping and blogging into the other 40 hours.

But I’m warning you now; some of this stuff is positively prehistoric (meaning over a week old)! Let’s blow the dust off the old file cabinet and see what’s in there… (sound of squeeky drawer)
________________________

What’s a Rubric? Glad you asked! Jeffrey Phillips has some interesting insights into rubrics (no, it’s not paper money from Russia) gleaned from his twin teenage daughters. Don’t worry, Jeffrey, wasn’t it Nietzsche who said, “What does not destroy me makes me stronger”?

“Think about the work you are assigned. If you are unclear about the expectations, ask for a rubric. What would make the work complete? What research is necessary? How should the work and your conclusions or recommendations be reported? This approach will help you understand the expectations of your management team and will help you identify items you may think are unimportant or inconsequential.”

Ben Yoskovitz proposes 3 Business Rules to Live By, and this one’s a keeper! Simple, direct, and to the point. If you can abide by these, you’ll at least be in the game.

“Oftentimes, people know something but they haven’t truly learned it. That’s the case with my 3 business rules. Intrinsically I’ve known for some time these are rules I should follow, but it’s only this year that I really learned to follow them.”

What is it about Starbucks, anyway? Lewis Green tells a little about his experiences as Manager of Internal Communications at Starbucks, and there are a couple of good lessons here.

“Is it any wonder that Starbucks boasts one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and has grown from a multi-million dollar business less than a decade ago to a multi-billion dollar one today? Starbucks combines values, The Happiness Quotient and smart business sense to achieve the passion people demonstrate about its Brand.”

Are you an introvert? So am I! Congratulations, the vast marketing machine has pretty much missed us, at least up till now, anyway. (Run! Run for your life!) Nedra Weinreich actually received angry emails from many introverted readers on this one for giving away our secrets!

“A post I wrote on my blog last week about marketing to introverts seems to have made a connection with many people, landing on the front page of Reddit and netting thousands of new visitors to my site. What was amazing was watching the introverts come out of the woodwork to leave comments and marvel at the fact that someone finally understands them.”

Interviews, anyone? Matthew Stibbe provides a great guide on how to interview someone. I’ve never tried it myself, but if I did, I’d first memorize these tips.

“Interviews matter. Interviews are the foundation of good reporting. They are the best way of understanding a complicated situation and seeing it from someone else’s perspective.”

If you’re afraid to admit you have reservations about a particular course of action because it might make you look weak, well, here’s a great thought from Bruce MacEwan (via Jack Vinson) that just might save the day: Why not… go ahead and admit them out loud? (insert image of beverage spewing out of your nose here)

“And, surprise, admitting things might not be perfect enlists support. You’re not omniscient, and claims to the contrary alienate rather than attract. Decision; vision; reservations; speaking each individual’s language. Leadership.”

Correcting workers who report to you can be a thorny problem for any manager, but Jeffrey Phillips (yes, him again!) provides a great set of guidelines for when this challenge comes up.

“As a manager I am frequently in situations where I hear people say things or commit to things that I am not certain are correct or in our interest. Correcting the account or the expectations of others without undercutting a person who reports to you is probably one of the most delicate jobs a manager faces.”

Surely you’ve run across this somewhere! (Yeah, and don’t call you Shirley.) Seth Godin points to a PC World article about that bane to all PC users everywhere: canceling a web service account. In this case it was a NetZero dialup account. C’mon, admit it – I bet you thought I was going to say AOL! (Are you listening AOL?)

“It took me less than 5 minutes to sign up for a NetZero dial-up Internet account. But after canceling that account, I spent a week trying in vain to reverse a charge that the service levied after my cancellation request.”

Jim Kukral has a theory about why companies like Yahoo or Google will pay obscene amounts of money for some web thingie that hasn’t yet made a dime of profit (figuratively, at least). He says the answer is as obvious as why girls always went for the Fonz: You can’t just be cool, you either are or you aren’t.

“MyBlogLog didn’t get acquired because of the money, it got acquired because Yahoo! knows cool when it sees it, and realized that no matter how much less $$$ they could spend on developing something similar, it would be extremely hard to reinvent cool.”

Was it something I said? (Why yes, as a matter of fact, it is!) Ed Brenegar mentions a great article from Harvard Business Review about courage in the workplace from the standpoint of personal and organizational risk.

“Business courage is not so much a visionary leader’s inborn characteristic as a skill acquired through decision-making processes that improve with practice. In other words, most great business leaders teach themselves to make high-risk decisions. They learn to do this well over a period of time, often decades.”

Lightweight. Just for the heck of it, I’ll wrap up today’s edition of File Cabinet with this one from Russell Seitz’s blog Adamant, where he calculates the weight of the internet. Huh? Well, at least the weight of the electrons on the internet.

Let’s see, this should be a snap: 1.49 x 10 to the 400th power, carry the two, square root of 5.98… the answer is – I’m not going to tell you! Click on the link, ya lazy bum! Not sure what value this knowledge has, but what the heck, at least I can sleep better knowing it.

Shameless Self-Promotion

In case you’re new to the site, first just let me say Welcome, and thanks for dropping by! You may have noticed this is number 7 in a series of File Cabinet posts. (Umm, you did notice, didn’t you?) If you like what you see and would like to check out the previous issues (some great links in there, I promise), then follow the links below.

File Cabinet #1
File Cabinet #2
File Cabinet #3
File Cabinet #4-A
File Cabinet #4-B
File Cabinet #5
File Cabinet #6

Happy trails!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!