Dr. Z. will be leaving this place in cyberspace and will be showing up occasionally at www.slackermanager.com.

To his 2 loyal readers (I love you mom and dad) he says thank you and hopes you follow him over to Slacker Manager.

Also, he wonders if it is okay to bring his dirty clothes over to wash when he comes for Sunday supper with the family.

Photo Credit – Sign: Dirty Laundry by http://flickr.com/photos/partsnpieces/393555174/

Dr. Z. has feared that the institute may come under attack from the Burgundian menace.

He is suggesting that we move operations to another location.

You will see Dr. Z. appear at another website near you.

Photo credit: the white flag by http://flickr.com/photos/fulminiesaette/19934989/

To be unveiled on the Vernal Equinox

2008-03-20 05:58

The Harvard Business Review has an article in the latest issue: How to teach pride in “Dirty Work.” This is not a joke!

Here is the essence of the article. Employees in stigmatized occupations can be helped with an array of techniques to cope with or even feel proud of their jobs,

• including developing an occupational ideology to confer a more positive image on the work;

• creating social buffers such as professional associations;

• and avoiding specifics in conversation with outsiders.

Trust someone in Harvard to come up with this gem of false pride.

This has left Dr. Z wondering how many sewer workers sit down to craft an occupational ideology. For example, “you know Joe if we are dwelling within the existential zeitgeist approach to sewers we are the new proletariat of the masses.”

Creating social buffers would involve more detour signs around a work-site and the professional association would meet at Moe’s bar after work for beer and lively repartee. Of course when someone outside the city sewer department walks past the workers at the bar they would stop the sewer flow of conversation and pretend to be an Amway group.

Of course remember that pride cometh before the fall…now, back to the sewer and further discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, Thus Spoke Zarathustra role in creating self-actualized workers.

Picture Credit: The Sewer’s View by http://flickr.com/photos/theotherdan/315312254/ 

Dr. Z. has given instruction to staff that it is time to rekindle the leadership metaphor madness that was launched in the spring of this year. He said it might help anyone who is 6 months from and 6 months to the NCAA March Madness Basketball. So here we go with a little love…

Leaders are like postage stamps:

• They take a licking and go on sticking.
• They sometimes are not up on the latest facebook, twitter, or social network tools to send their message.
• They deliver.

Leaders don’t forget to put their unique stamp on leadership!

Picture credit: Love by Thomas Hawk – http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/320462480/

What is your legacy as a leader?

Even if you are just starting out as an assistance manager at the local convenience store it is time to think beyond yourself, beyond the current time, to your ultimate legacy. Do you want to be remembered as the leader who put the slur in slurpee or the ho in hoagie or do you want to be remembered as the leader who courageously and religiously never let one of those scary hotdogs be skewered in the rotating oven for more than 21 days?

A lot of people are confused with legacy. Read this: “legacy” is not a pejorative. Do not use it as such. Please consult your dictionary. A legacy is something that is left to another in a will; a bequest of personal property. The word is derived from the Latin “legare”, meaning “to leave by way of a will”. That’s it. By itself, it has neither positive nor negative connotations. 

Some people confuse legacy with Emeril Lagasse which is also wrong. But his legacy of food and the word, BAM may live on.

So if your are not Emeril how do you cook up your leadership legacy. Here are the 5 key questions to create your personal big BAM:

1. Determine your defining contribution to the workplace beside the bowl of jellybeans in your cubicle (Don’t try to become Ronald Reagan, become more of who you already are — maybe try a bowl of m&ms)?
2. Ask who will miss you after you retire? If the answer is nobody then you have a legacy issue that needs to be addressed.
3. What will they say you did around the office (besides bringing donuts for your loyal followers)? Craft your legacy litany by signing all your emails with Bob: The guy who got things done. By the way, this works best if your name is Bob and you actually did something.
4. How did you make a difference? Were you courageous enough to stand out? Perhaps you wore a bowtie when all those around you dressed in drab business casual?
5. Serve the people you lead without taking credit for your service so that when you are gone people will say, “who was that masked man?”

Dr. Z. reminds you: Get a leg up on leadership by ensuring your leadership has a legacy to stand on!

Picture credit: Your actions create a legacy for others to follow by http://flickr.com/photos/wildphotons/297077257/

Dr. Z’s Leadership Institute is proud to have Mr. Eddie Cut join the faculty to teach you: Don’t Miss Manners or Miss Steak when the Stakes are High trust Mr. Eddie Cut. A bit of clever and cagey branding by Eddie to weave his own name in there. We can all learn something from this guru of greetings.

Here are 8 of Eddie’s Business Manner Maxims:

1. Public burping loses contracts and contacts: Belch in private for increased sales and networking.
2. Use cuticle power: Have clean finger nails to nail a new job.
3. Don’t fork up your future, always cut with a knife.
4. Well shined shoes add real polish to your PowerPoint presentation.
5. Sprinkle your conversation with the other person’s name to show them you know who they are and you are not afraid to say it.
6. When eating pizza with a client show pizzazz by not spitting your anchovies into the napkin. This will demonstrate to the client that you don’t mind fishy deals and you are ready to swallow just about anything.
7. Even if you work with a toxic boss never place bottles of rat poison on the conference table.
8. Develop the fine art of flossing. Never untie your shoe, take out your lace, and use it as dental floss to dislodge the hunk of steak embedded between your lower left molars. You come out looking like a real floss-loss, and this move, creative as it is, can be real deal breaker leaving you with nothing more than a small hunk of steak wedged to your shoelace.

Enroll now to achieve perfect etiquette with Mr. Eddie Cut.

Picture credit: Miss Manners by http://flickr.com/photos/turtblu/397314075/

Watch the following video by Don McMillan on how to capture your audience with PowerPoint.

Dr. Z will be taking a break and the institute will be closed for the next 3 weeks.

Picture Credit: king of the castle by http://flickr.com/photos/kellypuffs/315278592/

Dr Z.’s Leadership Institute staff have been doing extensive and exhaustive research in July and have now developed the quintessential leadership whitepaper.

Okay, we admit it wasn’t the whole month we worked. Would you believe that we put in a full week? If not, would you believe that we spent a full day on it? Okay we were golfing, drinking, and going to the beach all month, but if you look carefully you will notice the paper is all white, except for the print!

And as an added bonus we have offered the document in a Word format so that you can tweak a few words, change the attribution, and call it your own. Okay, we admit our Adobe Acrobat PDF maker wasn’t working, we couldn’t figure out how to get it to work, so we just left it as a Word document and had the clever guys in marketing come up with a rationale — “it makes the document open source,” they said. This nugget of marketing wisdom was generated at the 19th hole after half a dozen beers.

Click on the link below and to open the Word version of the white paper:

dr-z-leadership-white-paper.doc

If you take the time to read the whole paper, and this means getting to the end of the one page you will notice an additional clever marketing ploy generated by the same guy who said it was open source:

We know things that  you don’t.

We won’t tell you what they are unless you pay us a big fee!

Operators are standing by…

Call Dave at (204) 254-2130

Email Dave at dzinger@shaw.ca

Ask about the free Gerbil cage,

including a Gerbil exercise wheel, with every new contract!