One of the things I read last week was the story of Richard Charkin, Director of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and how he didn't get the job of CEO at Oxford University Press. It's disappointing that it's in the Harvard Business Review, which gives it legitimacy as a way to behave. http://blogs.hbr.org/silverman/2010/02/the-day-i-didnt-become-ceo.html

In my opinion, the story is not of 'quitting is enjoyable' but of unprofessionalism. He fails to communicate clearly during the interview process and then spends a friday afternoon trying to find people to resign to 'because I've been wronged'. He follows up with a sarcastic letter making a 'bridge well burnt'.

It isn't professional to quit with no notice, it isn't professional to interrupt other people's interviews so you can quit and it isn't professional to send sarcastic letters to your ex-employers. Richard Charkin may have gone on to a successful subsequent career, but that doesn't mean his behavior should be copied.

Of course, there is a podcast on how to resign professionally: http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/07/how-to-resign-part-1-of-3

A friend of mine asked last week, what is the perfect time to arrive before an interview? My answer: It’s the eight minute rule.

More than eight minutes is too early. It stresses the interviewer out because they aren’t ready and makes them feel bad for that and for making you wait. If you’re more than eight minutes early, wait in the car.

Less than eight minutes, they start to worry you’re not coming or you got lost and you’re going to be late. If they have a series of interviews in the same afternoon, they worry they’ll end up running late all afternoon, and that doesn’t put them in a positive state of mind about you.

Eight minutes gives you time to sign in at reception, and walk to the interview room if necessary without being late. It gives you time to look at the brochures and newspapers in reception – vital information! It doesn’t give you time to get even more nervous. Eight minutes is perfect.

We are proud to announce that effectively immediately, Manager Tools France (Outils du Manager) will be hosted on it's very own website - http://www.outilsdumanager.com!

To our French listeners: We believe that you deserve a site that feels more like "home" – French language forums, navigational text, etc. We hope this investment provides you more opportunities to deepen your knowledge of management and share your experiences with one another.  We also believe that poor management is not a phenomenon unique to the English-speaking world.  With this new website, we hope to bring the practices of effective management closer to it's practitioners, regardless of where they live or the language they speak.  Obviously, we have farther to travel, but we're excited to take a step in the direction of changing management the world over.

To our Manager Tools hosts, Cedric Watine and Lorry Hanne: We feel immensely honored by your friendship and association with Manager Tools.  This new site has been long overdue – we're thrilled that we can now honor you by providing you a venue for continuing to grow your unique audience and to continue to provide your contributions to the art and science of Management.

To our English-speaking audience:  We regret you won't (easily) have the opportunity to share in Cedric's and Lorry's wisdom.  To those of us who don't speak French, it's a loss.  Of course, the solution to that is easy, right?  ;-)

And to be clear, the move of Manager Tools France to it's own site is NOT to suggest that anything has changed relative to Manager Tools and our French-language podcast.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Those of you familiar with DiSC will recognize our exhortations to communicate in the language of the listener (remember, as Peter Drucker says, communication is what the LISTENER does).  Today, we quite literally take the next step in communicating to our Manager Tools France listeners in their language - French.

The problem with projects is they feel so big. The project we recently completed in creating a Manager Tools calendar has been a great idea for a long time. Thinking about it as a project made it sound really hard.

Those of you who have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done will recognize the concept of the ‘Next Action’. Just looking for some information on how to create the calendar is an easy enough action. And once that’s done, finding some instructions on how to download the calendar is easy enough. And once that’s done, entering the data for the first few months is easy enough.

To corrupt the well known saying: what gets planned gets done. But planning doesn’t need to be the end to end project. Just planning the next action is enough to get you on the road to completion.

Have you noticed how many self-development activities there are to do? Read books, read the papers, listen to podcasts, keep up with blogs, read the trade magazines, practice writing, practice technical skills, learn new software…

When I list it out, it’s quite overwhelming. As I’ve said before, we overestimate what we can in a week, and underestimate what we can do in a year. But if you spend 15 minutes a week reading your industry journal and it takes you four weeks to read it, is that a bad thing? Of course not- it probably only comes once a month anyway!

If one day a week you listened to a podcast instead of watching TV while you made dinner, would it be a bad thing that you made so little effort? Of course not! Something is better than nothing.

What other ‘stress-free’ ideas do you have for making self-development easy?

Most calendaring systems have the ability to make appointments private, but they are rarely used to maximum advantage. Private appointments make excellent places for reminders of things to do on particular days, especially if, like me, you have an idiosyncratic method of naming tasks that you don't wish to share with the world.

They’re also good for blocking out time to work on particular projects which may not be on your official to do list. For example, you might want to work on an idea you have to make some improvements that that you’re not ready to talk about. You need a block of time to work on it, and a private appointment works. You can use private appointments for working on your weekly boss updates, your monthly self-learning, reading time and other self development tasks.

Of course, booking 37 hours a week in private appointments may raise questions, so there is an upper limit to the extent you can use them. If your boss asks what you’re working on, you must tell him, and if he chooses to realign your priorities, well, that’s his prerogative.

Your resume and Linkedin (or any other online profile) are not equal. They are not the same thing and one cannot be substituted for another. Nor should they be linked.

Your resume is focused, adapted from your career management document to demonstrate your suitability for a particular role. You send your resume to someone in response to her requirements. Your Linkedin profile is your ‘shop window’. It’s a more general demonstration of the breadth of your capabilities, displayed in the hope that they will attract someone to you. Keep this in mind when you choose what to write on your resume and your profile.

Don’t include your Linkedin url on your resume because a) you can’t control how Linkedin displays your information or even if the site is up when the hiring manager looks at it and b) because the targeted information on your resume is more effective in securing you an interview.

I often get asked how I come up with something to write about three times a week. It’s a bit difficult to describe how: I have a deadline, and so I make the ideas come.

The answer to being more creative and having more ideas is easier. My favorite word is inspiration. It describes that moment when two neurons smash together to create something completely new so perfectly. That moment always seems otherwordly to me. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think.

The answer is, in fact, much more prosaic. Read a LOT. Lots of input seems to help with output. Talk (or write) a LOT. Explaining things to others helps you consolidate them in your own mind and find new ways of putting things together. Get enough rest. Ideas don’t come to tired minds. That’s it, in my experience.

That the answer is prosaic though, is a good thing. It means everyone can be more creative and have more ideas.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend clearing out my office. I’m whatever the opposite of a hoarder is and I love a good clean out. While I was clearing my bookshelves, I found the book I put together when I was first a recruiter. I made it from cutting out articles, quoting bits of training, printed things from the internet – everything I could learn from the people who had gone before me.

One consistent piece of advice is that you spend the last 30 minutes of your day planning for the next. You plan who you’re going to make initial calls to, who you’re going to follow up with, who you need to press to make a decision. The idea is that you don’t spend the first hour of the day, when you have the most energy, wondering what to do, you plan that at the end of the day when you have the least energy. You spend your morning energy on making calls, which make money. Even if you’re not a morning person, having a plan the night before will help you through the first hour when you’re waiting for the caffeine to kick in.

When I was a recruiter I found it hard to get into the habit, but when I planned the night before, I was definitely more effective. Have you tried this, and did it work for you?

Last week, my phone stopped receiving a signal. In the house, I usually get 4 bars, but suddenly, I had a half a bar if I was lucky and mostly ‘searching’. After a few hours – when it started to be a problem – I called my service provider to see if there was a tower down or some other problem they were working on.

Apparently not. ‘Take the SIM card out’, she said, ‘Rub it on your sleeve, put it back, turn the phone off and on and it’ll work again’. ‘RUBBISH!’ , I thought. ‘No way that’s going to work!!’ Since I didn’t have any other ideas though, I tried it. And, completely illogically to my mind, it worked.

Re-listening to some of our podcasts, and reading the comments we get after them, reminded me of this. Sometimes, the answer isn’t something logical, or in the case of my phone, it’s something so technical, I don’t know it and can’t understand it. Sometimes, we just have to go faith that it might work. If you have a problem, try a solution and it works 50% of the time, are you better off? Of course. And, trying and failing, as Edison taught us, teaches one more way that doesn’t work, and gets us closer to a solution.

Of course, we believe that 100% of Manager Tools and Career Tools advice will work, you’ve just got to have faith and try it.