#Chamber Executive Ongoing Education Weekly New Idea: Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.

 Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. 

 You’re up to your eyeballs answering email, returning phone calls, attending meetings, scrambling to get things done. But when did being busy become a measure of success?

Start the Great Work that Matters!

You know what Great Work is. You’ve probably had a few of these moments in your life. You’ve had times when you felt alive, passionate and powerful because you knew that you had just done something really great.

• It’s the stuff you dreamed about when you first started this career.
• It’s work you’re proud about, excited about, that means something to you
• It’s making a difference.
• It’s doing the stuff that matters.

A Practical and Fast Solution

Do More Great Work doesn’t take forever. It doesn’t suck up more of your life. It gives you back your life. So you can do Great Work. And make a difference.
In Michael Bungay Stanier’s Do More Great Work you’ll find fifteen ‘maps’, practical exercises to help you identify how to find, start and sustain more Great Work. Amongst other things you’ll learn:

• Where to find clues to your own Great Work. (They’re all around you.)
• How to locate the sweet spot between what you want to do and what your organization wants you to do.
• Tactics to best manage the overwhelm.
• How to double the likelihood you’ll do what you want to do.

There are also original contributions from leading thinkers like Seth Godin, Dave Ulrich, Michael Port, Penelope Trunk, Leo Babauta and Chris Guillebeau on how to do more of the important stuff.
To do more Great Work you need focus, you need courage and you need resilience. Do More Great Work will help you find all that and more. (See an interview with Michael where he talks about Do More Great Work, and how to find Great Work in your own professional life.)

You don’t need a coach or a support team or a two-day retreat to tackle what’s in this book.
You need pen and some paper and ten minutes.

Source: www.boxofcrayons.biz - Website Description - We help people, teams and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work

Chamber Executive Ongoing Education Idea - How to listen - Seth Godin

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How to listen

Live interaction still matters. Teachers, meetings, presentations, one on one brainstorms--they can lead to real change. The listener has nearly as big a responsibility as the speaker does, though. And yet, Google reports four times as many matches for "how to speak" as "how to listen." It's not a passive act, not if you want to do it right.

If listening better leads to better speaking, then it becomes a competitive advantage.

Ask an entrepreneur leaving the office of a great VC like Fred Wilson. She'll tell you that she gave the best pitch of her career--largely because of the audience. The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don't worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.

Pay back the person who's speaking with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

Play back what you hear but in your own words, using your own situation. Don't ask questions as much as make statements, building on what you just heard but making it your own. Take what you heard and make it the foundation for what you are trying on as your next idea.

If you disagree, wait a few beats, let the thought finish, and then explain why. Don't challenge the speaker, challenge the idea.

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.

Good listeners get what they deserve--better speakers.

more Seth at his blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/02/how-to-listen.html