There are two great things about reading blogs.  First of all, you usually get a real point of view.  There's not even any pretend objectivity.  Second, when comments are posted you can see how others react to that point of view and maybe even put your own two cents in.

Here are some blog posts that caught my attention at mid-week. I'm pointing you to the Carnival of the Capitalists and posts on Andy Grove on great leadership, team building, growth by acquisition, wasting talent, and dealing with jerks at work.

Start with the most recent Carnival of the Capitalists. You'll find pointers to lots of quality posts.

From Bob Sutton's Blog: Andy Grove Tells the Truth about What Great Leaders Do
A long but lucid and excellent post about lessons to be learned from Andy Grove.

From Guerilla HR: The secret sauce of building your team - PART 3
This has been an excellent series. If you missed the first two parts, they'll be easy to find once you get to part three.

From David Maister: Strategy as Portfolio Management
"Building client relationships one at a time is a long slog, and takes persistence and patience. It’s hard to break in to new markets and locations solely by organic growth and patient investment: besides, market opportunities might move too fast to take that opportunity. How much easier to grow by bringing in people with pre-existing practices! This approach is not unique to the professional sector – it reflects what corporations have long tried to do: increase their corporate return on equity by buying their way in to profitable businesses (and dropping unprofitable ones.)"

From Edge Perspectives: Wasting Talent
"Corporations around the world face a systematic and sustained squeeze on profitability.  This squeeze comes from two different directions simultaneously – customers and talent.  Our performance measurement systems are woefully unprepared for this squeeze – indeed, the squeeze is occurring precisely because most managers are not measuring the levers that count for sustained profitability. We are saddled with accounting and measurement systems that measure last century’s drivers of profitability, not the drivers of twenty-first century profitability."

From Bob Sutton: Tips for Victims of Workplace Assholes
"I’ve talked a lot here about methods for enduring abusive bosses and co-workers.  Some of these tips come from your comments and e-mails, some from the No Asshole Rule, and some from academic research. But I have only presented these tips in bits and pieces, so I thought it would be useful to list some of the most effective methods in one place."

From Tom Peters: Tom is getting serious about excellence again
"Tom has been getting serious about Excellence again, and, of course, that focus is reflected in his Master Slides. The title of the Master for 2007 is Excellence Always, and it's grown so much that we present it now in three parts. He's also decided to get LOUD about the Women's Thing. He's been vocal on the subject for a long while, but he recently realized that vocal was not enough, and he turned up the volume. You'll find a renewed, insistent emphasis on Women as the major market for nearly everything, and Boomers and Geezers along with them."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

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