Jim Anderson

Every speaker would like to become a better speaker. After each speech that we give, we all think to ourselves about the things that we could have done differently that would have gotten a better reaction from our audience. The trick is that we have to remember the changes that we need to make...

Who was it that said, "It takes a village…"? They may not have been talking about being a product manager, but they might as well have been. Life has become so complex that product managers can no longer make their product a success just by their own efforts. Today it takes the help of one or...

One of my negotiating mentors told me that most negotiations are over even before they start. When I asked her what she meant, she explained that the side that prepares the best for a negotiation is the one that will probably walk away with the best deal. I've taken her advice to heart, and I...

Any manager is only as good as his or her team. I'm pretty sure that we've all heard this before. However, that leaves us in a bit of a bind - more often than not we are just handed a team and told the make the most of them. However, it turns out that over time we have the ability to reshape and...

Just in case nobody ever told you, being a school district superintendent is a tough job. You are the single person who is ultimately responsible for the academic success of a great number of students. Your every decision can have an immediate impact on principals, teachers, students, and...

All negotiations have to come to a close. When your next negotiation reaches this stage, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to walk away with the best deal possible....

The goal of any speaker is that when they give their speech their audience hangs on their every word. In order to make this happen, we need to find ways to organize our speech so that we can both capture and hold our audience's attention from start to finish. What You'll Find Inside: Back to...

Leadership is one of those things that we all think that we know what it is, but we are hard pressed to describe it to someone if they ask us. This makes picking the next generation of leaders that much harder. We want them to have the leadership skills that we know that they need, but how can...

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is....

Before we can give the perfect speech, we have to get ready to give the perfect speech. Just saying the words of our speech over and over again is a good first step, but it's nota Before we can give the perfect speech, we have to get ready to give the perfect speech. Just saying the words of our...

Virtualization can take on many different forms: virtual memory, virtual servers, and virtualized storage. In each of these cases, we've been able to move beyond the underlying physical components that make up the system and through the use of clever virtualization techniques we've been able to...

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget....

So just exactly what is innovation? It turns out that innovation is doing something new. It can be a new method, a new idea, or even a new product. In the world of IT, we have the ability to solve just about any problem. However, how we go about solving problems can become outdated quickly. What...

There are a lot of bad guys out there. For some odd reason, a lot of them seem to want to break into your company's networks and applications....

As the world has become more and more digital, the importance of the role of a CIO within a firm has increased. No longer can CIOs be content to focus exclusively on technical topics. Instead, we now have to consider what the company's goals are and how technology can be used to help the company...

As individuals we have a tendency to shy away from getting involved in arguments. We view them as being confrontational and filled with emotions. However, when it comes to negotiating....

When we enter into a negotiation, we simply don't know everything that we need to know....

When we sit down to negotiate, we are really entering into a very specialized conversation with the other side of the table. We have a set of goals and they have their own set of goals. The purpose of the negotiation conversation is to find out if there is a way that the needs of both sides of...

How your next negotiation is going to turn out will be determined by how you open the negotiation. No matter if the other side is a push-over or a tough customer, you are going to have to decide how you want the negotiation to start and then you are going to have to take steps to make it happen...

It may not always seem this way, but as speakers we do have power. We need to learn how to tap into that power use it to deliver the best speech that we can....