Real Simple Magazine has just featured one user manual that’s worth reading – how to be plugged in without being impolite.  Hap tip to Yahoo! Shine for the highlights, which contain advice from some of the business in the tech-etiquette business: 1. You’re walking down the street and listening to your iPod when you run into someone you know. ...

  If you talk to me about the speaking arm of my career for more than five minutes, you’ll get an earful about my Powerpoint quandary.  What’s the most impactful way to deliver a speech?  Should I use slides or not?  If I don’t, should I use talking points?  How can I be entertaining while teaching, without giving in to ...

In the coming months, I’m going to be focusing some of Water Cooler Wisdom’s content around employee recruitment and retention techniques.  Let’s start with the obvious: the e-advertisements that you, as a manager or HR rep, might be perennially posting on major online job boards.  You know that these boards receive tons of traffic, but ...

I’m very pleased to share this review of my friend and colleague Jason Alba’s new book, I’m on Linked In – Now What???  I have known Jason for over a year, and I can say with all seriousness that he is one of the best networkers I know.  He knows everyone, and if he doesn’t know someone, he wants to meet them.  He’s a big advocate ...

Thanks to Steven Rothberg at CollegeRecruiter.com for sharing news of the innovative, first-ever Deloitte & Touche Film Festival. The festival invited employees in the accounting and consulting firm’s US operations to make short videos that answered the question ''What's your Deloitte?''. Teams comprised of one to seven people submitted films ...

Now that I’m a manager, I’ve found that it’s partly up to me to ensure that my reports have good work/life balance. I’ve seen other supervisors ignore this issue, expecting that work should be the only thing that matters to employees, and the department is a revolving door.  Here are some of the methods I’ve used or seen used ...

I get a lot of e-mails asking me how people should use LinkedIn for business networking.  And the truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself, which is why I’m looking forward to my friend Jason Alba’s book on the topic.  This week, though, I came across a great post from Chris Brogan at Lifehack with some tips for making it easier ...

[ImageAttachment] I adore e-mail and couldn't live without it, but at least once a week I hear a terrible story about a generally good person and employee who turned the weapon of Microsoft Outlook on himself - and fired. Just the other day, an HR manager told me about a junior level employee who decided to use e-mail to disseminate widespread ...