NOVEMBER 2007 LEARNING FLASH

Give Thanks for November!

Here in Indiana it is finally looking like fall.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to those of you in California who have been impacted by the horrible fires and to those of you in the south who have been impacted by tornados and torrential rain.  What strange weather we have had.  Still, we have so much to be thankful for in this amazing country.    Get out and VOTE on Tuesday to keep it that way.  In this issue, you’ll find:

• Staff Updates

• Quick! Spend the 2007 Budget

• Webinar: Your Choice

• Project Management for Trainers 2008

• What’s Up With Moms?

• Keep the Kids Busy on Thanksgiving

• Teaching Nerds to Be Leaders

• Race For the Click

• How Healthy is Your Corporate Culture?

• The Student is the Bling

• Recruiting Women in Technology

• Focus on Results

• Internet Safety for Families

• Email OOPS

• Last and This Month’s Contest

• Where in the World is Lou?

Staff Updates

I’d like to say good-bye for now and thanks to Andrea Estevez who has been a consultant with us for a little over a year.  Andrea has accepted an in-house position in Kansas City.  We’ll miss you!!  In addition, Andrea’s nephew who had a serious car accident is recovering extremely well, for those of you sending happy thoughts her way.

Vija is back in the office working on keynote speeches and book marketing.  Drop her an email at vdixon@russellmartin.com to welcome her back.  But wait until 11/9 – she’s going to Florida for a week (lucky)!

Quick! Spend the 2007 Budget!

Just in case you have money that you’d like to use before it dries up on 12/31/07, we have lots of ways we can help you spend it, for example:

Are you SURE you don’t need your staff to work more efficiently and effectively?  Do your project sponsors and stakeholders know what they are really supposed to do?  Do your HR and training have the project management capacity to help with the company challenges in 2008?  Do you need to grow your IT middle managers into IT leaders? Remember those projects that were supposed to be done by year end – need help jumpstarting some that are struggling?

Schedule 2008 consulting or workshops and pay now.

Avoid end-of-year travel and schedule webinars (workshops in small pieces).

Check out the RMA store – the 10 Steps for Successful Project Management book makes a lovely Christmas present!

Check out more ideas at www.russellmartin.com or contact Margie mbrown@russellmartin.com.

Webinar: Your Choice

Help us build the webinar schedule for next year.  Rank (1 for your favorite) some of our new  topics below, email it to us and we will send you fabulous merchandise:

________ Teaching Project Sponsors to be Great Sponsors

________ Advanced Sales: Objections, Relationships and Customer Trust

________ Effective Coaching for Leaders

________ Minimal Project Management for non-PMPs

________ Writing to Communicate

________ Building Dynamic Presentations

________ Getting Things Done: Managing Multiple Projects

________ IT Leadership

________ Developing Student-Centered Faculty and Programs

________ OTHER: ____________________________________

Did you know that RMA and L+EARN can offer any of our workshops as a ‘live’ webinar?  If your team needs to learn some new tools and techniques but you don’t have the budget or the time to bring in an instructor, consider holding the workshops as a series of 1.5 hour webinars.  Contact Margie Brown at mbrown@russellmartin.com for more information.

Project Management for Trainers 2007

ASTD will be holding a public Project Management for Trainers certificate workshops in Chicago.  This is your last chance to attend the workshop in 2007.  The training is December 10-11, 2007 and will be facilitated by Janice Daly, PMP. 

Enroll now thru ASTD.

What’s Up With Moms?

Answers given by 2nd grade school children to the following questions:

Why did God make mothers?

1. She's the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.

2. Mostly to clean the house.

3. To help us out of there when we were getting born.

What ingredients are mothers made of?

1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.

2. They had to get their start from men's bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.

What does your mom do in her spare time?

1. Mothers don't do spare time.

2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?

1. On the inside she's already perfect.  Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.

2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your mom, what would it be?

1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean.  I'd get rid of that.

2. I'd make my mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.

3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

Keep the Kids Busy on Thanksgiving

Let them make the appetizer.  They’ll even eat this one.  From www.kraftfoods.com:

1 pkg. (8 oz.) KRAFT Low-Moisture Part-Skim Mozzarella Cheese

60 RITZ Reduced Fat Crackers

1 cup spaghetti sauce, heated

PREHEAT oven to 325°F. Cut cheese crosswise into 15 slices; cut each slice crosswise in half. TOP each of 30 crackers with 1 cheese slice; cover with remaining crackers. Place in 15x10x1-inch baking pan. BAKE 8 min. or until cheese begins to melt. Serve with the spaghetti sauce.

Teaching Nerds to Be Leaders

Check out my article in Inside Indiana Business before you send me hate mail about the title:  Teaching Nerds to Be Leaders

Race For the Click

The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "donating a mammogram" for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.             http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

How Healthy is Your Corporate Culture

Consider the following questions.   How would you rate your team or organization?

• Processes
  Team members all participate appropriately. People are not suppressed or ignored, nor do individuals dominate the rest of the group.

• Relationships
  Our work together as a team gives me a personal sense of satisfaction and belonging.

• Work management
  The necessary blend of skills to accomplish the team’s mission and objectives is present in the team.

• Leadership
  The leader helps the team focus on what can be learned from all its efforts—both successes and failures.

Concerned?  Now is a great time to plan to improve your culture and drastically improve your business results next year.  Whether you need more repeatable, scalable processes, improved teamwork, better skills or inspirational leadership, contact Margie to talk about options with one of our brilliant facilitators by emailing mbrown@russellmartin.com.

The Student is the Bling

Lou will be a new contributing author to the Career College Central bi-monthly publication for the Career College sector.  Her first article, “The Student is the Bling” will appear in the November magazine.  The article discusses the Top 10 ways to improve recruitment.

1.       Headquarter Leadership

2.       School Leadership

3.       Time to Learn

4.       Real Data

5.       Hire the Best

6.       Incentives

7.       Sales Performance Tracking

8.       Quality Lead Generation

9.       A Flexible, Repeatable process

10.   Labor Freeing Tools

If you would a copy of the full article, just email Leah Colville at lcolville@lplusearn.com.

Recruiting Women in Technology

For years, we’ve been reading research about the reluctance of young women to enter technical fields.  I have not seen an improvement, in fact, now I’m hearing that fewer men and women are entering technical fields.  At the same time, technical organizations are struggling for membership.    Do you agree or not?  What are your personal experiences?  Should we be concerned?   We’d love to hear your opinions.

Until then, here are some tips for recruiting women:

• Review the job description and job postings. Make sure the functions and responsibilities are neutral and geared to attract to both women and men. Partner with the recruiting department to develop clear goals to recruit more women. Market any prominent roles played by women in the organization.

• During the interview process, give potential women candidates the opportunity to meet women in the organization who can share their views and experiences.

• Invite current women employees to accompany human resources to trade expos that attract large numbers of women.

• Launch a creative "ambassador" or employee referral program, encouraging staff to recommend women candidates for your sales jobs.

• Use company newsletters, press releases and your corporate Web site to profile the extraordinary work of women at your firm, including promotions and other success stories.

Focus on Results

From the book Smarts: Are We Hardwired for Success?: The firm queried 2,000 senior executives and managers in 47 countries to measure the level of focus, defined as the capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractions, fatigue, or boredom.  The results show that slightly more than a 22% have a high level of focus, 8% have a low level, while 70% have a medium level of the skill. Focus is important enough that no senior executives in large companies rated low in it.  It appears that great business results require focus.  If you are frustrated by your organizations ability to focus on the right work, consider checking out our processes for prioritizing and tracking projects.  Contact Margie Brown at mbrown@russellmartin.com.

Internet Safety for Families

Here are some wonderful ideas for teaching children (and parents) about Internet safety from www.edhelper.com (you will have to register at the site but it’s well worth it):

Plays:  Reader's Theater Scripts
     Netiquette Nelly Saves the Day (Grades 1-3)
Reading Comprehensions
     History Revealed (Grades 3-4)
     Last Minute Panic (Grades 3-4)
     Reply to All (Grade 5)
     Sword Wizard Crunch (Grades 5-8)
     Viruses, Trojans, and Worms, Oh My! (Grades 7-8)
     Computer Ethics (Grades 9-12)
     Plagiarism: Know Your Limits (Grades 9-12)

Email OOPS

From Upwrite Press:

A few years ago I was replying to an email which was sent out to some of my co-workers and meant to say “Sorry if this caused any inconvenience.” I used the spell checker and unfortunately it turned it into incontinence. Only one co-worker caught this but found it to be very funny and shared it with the others.

Had an embarrassing email experience?  Share it with us by sending it to info@russellmartin.com and you will win fabulous merchandise.  According to VNU learning, 57% of employees continuously tap the "F9 refresh" button to check for new e-mail, according to a survey by Intermedia of more than 1,000 workers at small and mid-sized businesses. 45% of senior managers claim to file each message neatly, with only 9% never filing any messages.

Last and This Month’s Contest

Last month we had lots of people who played our contest.  You really seem to like the word puzzles!!  Check out the RMA website to see last month’s issue… the answer is ‘the letter e is not used in the whole paragraph’ but we got lots of other wonderful answers!

This month another contest designed by our very own Carol Mason.  Just in time for Thanksgiving dinner preparation, what do the following vegetables have in common: tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, string beans? 

Send your answers to Carol at cmason@russellmartin.com to win fabulous thanksgiving merchandise.

Where in the World is Lou?

In November, drop me an email if you are going to be in the same place I am!

November 7-9    Lake Tahoe, NV

November 12     Champaign, IL

November 13     Bloomington, IL

November 28,    Reston, VA

Lou Russell 

President/CEO

www.russellmartin.com