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Independent business blogs are blogs that aren't supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don't need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don't get as much publicity.

This week, I'm pointing you to posts on what's right and what's legal, navigating organizational politics, strategy, where leadership begins, and priming your brain for success.

From Michael McKinney: You Can Be Legal and Still Be Wrong
"It’s not uncommon to find a big difference between what’s legal and what’s right. Our preoccupation with “what’s legal” ensures more legal problems. If we paid more attention to what’s right, we would take our relationships to a new level. And it’s all about relationships. Legal is about what I can get away with. Ethics is about what is right."

Wally's Comment: "If it's legal, it's OK" is a bad way to run a business. This applies to accounting standards too, as I posted in "Lies, Damned Lies, and Accounting ."

From Art Petty: 4 Ideas for Navigating Organizational Politics
"Wherever humans are involved, some form of what we reference as politics will emerge and dramatically influence how work gets done, who does what work and how people advance."

Wally's Comment: Put three people together and politics will happen by spontaneous combustion. If you're going to be as successful as you can be, you need to be able to navigate the waters of politics and Art's post tells you how. It's worth learning because, as Bismarck said, "Politics is the art of the possible."

From Skip Reardon: How Relevant Is Your Company's Strategy?
"According to an ongoing study by consulting firm Booz & Company (with more than 2,350 responses so far), many business leaders seem to be losing their confidence in strategy, or at least in their own company's approach to it."

Wally's Comment: In Ruthless Focus , Tom Hall and I said that strategy was the answer to two questions. One is: "What will make us distinctive?" and the other is "How will we make money from that?" We also said that your strategy should not be something you change frequently. In fact many of the most successful companies have used the same strategy for decades.

From Gwyn Teatro: Where Leadership Begins
"I believe that leadership begins with each of us, from the inside out.  That’s why I call this blog "You’re Not the Boss of Me," because in the end, we are led by our choices and we influence others through our own behaviour."

Wally's Comment : This is a rant and it says important things.

From Irene Becker: What Brain Science Tells Us: 10 Tips to Prime Your Brain for Success
"The scientific evidence is in, and it is conclusive. If you want to be more successful you need to prime your brain to be positive."

Wally's Comment: Irene Becker shares ten recommendations for simple things you can do that set you up for both success and happiness.

Carnivals and Such

Management Improvement Carnival #134

That's it for this week's selections from independent business blogs. If you liked this piece you may enjoy my regular post on "Leadership Reading to Start Your Week" which features five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. The last issue had pointers to articles about the innovation gap at Nokia and RIM, flexible woman managers, open innovation at 3M, the management challenges of a mobile workforce, and American management as a role model.

How I Select Posts for this Midweek Review

The five posts I select to share in my Midweek Review of the Independent Business Blogs are picked from a regular review of about sixty blogs I check daily and an additional twenty-five or so that I check occasionally. Here's how I select the posts you see in this review.

They must be published within the previous week.

They must support the purpose of the blog: to help leaders at all levels do a better job and lead a better life.

They must be from an independent business blog.

As a general rule, I only select posts that stand on their own, no selections from a series.

I reserve the right to make exceptions to the above.

Here, on Three Star Leadership, I post things that will help a boss at any level do better and live a better life. At Results vs Activities, I join other bloggers with posts on talent development. My blog at the Toolbox for HR is People and the Changing Workplace .

If you're a boss, you should check out my Working Supervisor's Support Kit.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.