Blog Entries

Good Work Is Not Enough

heather@rizers.com — Wed, 25 May 2011 05:00:00 +0100

It’s not about having talent, it’s about having scouts in the stands when you display talent.
— NameTagScott

In other words, it's not enough to do good work. Nor is it sufficient to have people who know your good work (fans). You must know people who can do something about it when opportunity knocks (talent scouts).

Build your network accordingly.

What Do You Want?

heather@rizers.com — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0100

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Most people will never know what they want. I don't know what I want. "What do you want?" is too imprecise to produce meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about.

"What are your goals?" is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork.

The better question is, "What would excite me?" Just as the opposite of love is indifference, the opposite of happiness is boredom.

The cure to boredom is excitement, and it is precisely what you shoul [...]

Never Eat Alone Book Club

heather@rizers.com — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Thirty one days in January – Thirty-one chapters in Never Eat Alone. Coincidence? I think not.

Let's kick off the new year with a refresher course on the power and practice of networking. Rizers is hosting a virtual book club for a reading through the month of Janaury. As I have written in a review of this great book, Never Eat Alone is a handbook on how and why to build a powerful professional network. Each of the thirty-one chapters is short (average 6 - 8 pages) and is packed wit [...]

Powerful Questions

heather@rizers.com — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard has an interesting post on the power of asking open questions . . . and then leaving room for people to truly share and connect. As we help Rizers to network more purposefully, I’d recommend the questions developed for this blog post. Asking several of these in the context of almost any conversation will reveal surprising answers and help you build deeper connections.

What stood out for you? (at a recent event)
What do you most [...]

Social Media Tools

heather@rizers.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0100

I have to admit that I am completely baffled by the people who are obsessed with obtaining followers on Twitter, actively seeking connections on LinkedIn, or somehow dismayed that they have been “de-friended” on Facebook. Why do you care?

The answer, I suppose, depends on how you use social networking tools. As a career tool, LinkedIn works best when it is a reflection of your real-life network. Ditto for Twitter. I reserve my LinkedIn connections for people I know well enough to [...]

Gratitude

heather@rizers.com — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0100

What does Gratitude have to do with your career?

In a word, everything. The most successful people we know, regardless of their level or role in the organization, find ways to share their wins with others. And we have seen a few who made time to regularly and physically thank those who have helped them. It's not as hard as one might think.

Try this: Set up a recurring weekly 30 minute appointment in your scheduling system and use this time to think about the people who dese [...]

Decoding Feedback In the Organization

heather@rizers.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0100

John Beeson has written a terrific article on feedback: understanding it, getting it loud and clear, and using it to focus your development efforts. The article is long, but worth the read. It makes explicit the ways in which feedback is 'coded' (or just plain confused) and must be deciphered.

We have seen this play out many times in our organizational experiences, and it is highly frustrating to those involved. This article describes some real-life scenarios and how they were resolve [...]

Winds of Change

linda@rizers.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:49:00 +0100

Nice summary of the research behind the new book Big Shift by John Hagel and John Seely Brown at Harvard Business blogs. This book outlines some longer-range metrics of business performance, and highlights some interesting trends with respect to American corporate business competitiveness.

To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial-era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial process [...]

Workforce Trends

heather@rizers.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Our favorite workforce trend analyst, Tammy Ericksen, over at the Harvard Business blogs, has just posted two terrific articles about the impact of the recession on the workplace of the future.

How the Recession Is Changing Talent Management
Reconciling Short- and Long-Term Workforce Trends

Tammy singles out the “furlough” trend in the knowledge workplace. Employees who routinely work many more than 40 hours are being told their work time is “being cut to 32 hou [...]