Please help us out this year by nominating us at the Podcast Awards before the July 15th deadline. That’s Monday!

Please take a moment, click on this link , and cast a vote for us.

We’re sorry we’re getting this to you so late. Yet again, we don’t think about marketing ourselves, and a member was kind enough to remind us.

Last year, winning in the Business Category was a big boost for us, and we sure would like you to nominate us again in that category. You can only nominate once this year, and please only nominate us in Business, and the People’s Choice category, if you like. If you nominate us more than once (People’s Choice doesn’t count), it will disqualify your nomination.

We hope we’ve gotten to you soon enough that we get nominated enough to be included even at this late date. Please do nominate us by Monday, and if we do get into the running, we’ll be back to ask for your vote. (If we don’t, it’s OUR fault!)

Those of you who have already voted based on the email we sent, thank you..and no need to do so again. Only one nomination this year per person.

Thanks in advance!

This casts lays out our recommendations for an Effective Teleconference Meeting, or Conference Call.

We’ve been asked many times for this cast, and had intended to deliver it much earlier, but it kept getting pushed back. Teleconferences, or meetings conducted as conference calls, are much more widely used today than 20 years ago. Cost used to be an issue, but with costs moot, those very same savings have caused organizational dispersion that drive the teleconference’s ubiquity.

We are appalled at much of the guidance we hear. For instance: using mute while you have the speaker on. This is tantamount to encouraging Blackberry use in a face to face meeting, and laptops fully deployed and in email send/receive mode. What a waste! Somehow, because the COST of the call is free, we’ve lost sight of the VALUE of our time.

Get ready for a distinctly unique set of recommendations.

Folks, thanks to strong demand, we’ve already had (over) 100 people sign up for the Effective Manager Conference in San Antonio, September 5-6. We’re thrilled that everyone got the early registration price.

If you have still have interest, please send email to Mike to be put on the waiting list. At our last conference, we did have a couple of late cancellations due to schedule changes, and we were able to add a couple of members from the wait list.

There were also a couple of folks who had some trouble registering, but if you’ve notified us, you DO HAVE a slot, and we’re working behind the scenes for you, never fear.

The success of the last two conferences has us already planing for more Effective Manager Conferences in ‘08. We will have two more in the U.S., and are likely to have one in Europe early in the year and one in Asia/South Pacific.

This cast describes an effective way to take notes.

If you go to meetings all the time… no, wait. BECAUSE you go to meetings all the time, you need an effective way to take notes. There are certainly a LOT of different ways to do so, but if you ask a hundred or so executives, some common themes emerge about what works and why. For most of us, we write too much, and get too little value, for all the wrong reasons.

We figure, at 10 meetings a week - and we KNOW you go to more than that, it ends up being 5,000 meetings every decade… so maybe 25,000 meetings CONSERVATIVELY in your professional career.

In other words, whether you realize it or not, you need to be good at taking and using your notes.