This week’s Tuesday Reading is from BusinessWeek’s August 25, 2009 Communications Column:  “How to Give a Lousy Presentation”. 

We all make a lot of presentations.  And, I know that you are like me and know that you are able to do better most of the time.  This piece gives you 15 excellent ways to make a lousy presentation.  It thereby gives each of us a set of solid reminders for all of us.

Today's Tuesday Reading is “The Success Trap”, from Jeffrey Pfeffer's August 25th,  BNET Column, The Corner Officer on August 25, 2009.

Pfeffer’s thesis is simple:  When we become successful, it is very easy to drop our guard, to not maintain our standards (much less build on them), and to rest on our laurals.

He argues that to maintain our successes we have to understand the basis of our success and maintain a laserlike focus, discipling ourselves to maintain, and even improve, on what made us successful to begin with.

For today’s reading, we turn to a December 2007 FastCompany article by William Taylor, The Leader of the Future.  In this piece Taylor, one of the founders of FastCompany, reports on a discussion with Ron Heifetz, director of the Leadership Education Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  You will likely remember that Heifetz is author of one of the views of leadership we studied early in the l

Much of a leader’s time is spent, formally or informally, working to influence decision makers, typically peers, cross-organizational colleagues, or those higher up in the organization.  The Tuesday Reading this week – Effectively Influencing Decision Makers:  Ensuring That Your Knowledge Makes a Difference – focuses on just this subject.