Copy Righted Articles

The magic that you see magicians performing today is really truly amazing. It seems like every year the bar is being raised to put the challenge on the rest of the magic community to come up with the next “big thing”. Magic shows are getting bigger; they’re getting more elaborate; they’re getting extreme. But is bigger always better?

Think about it. What would you rather see, David Copperfield on stage performing one of his unbelievable elusions with all the lights, pretty assistants, and fire and smoke or some ordinary Joe walking up to you on the street and asking you to pick a card, any card?

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Many people believe that to be a good manager you have to give orders to the people below you. They are wrong. You do not have to give orders. In fact, you should not give orders.

Don’t give orders
When you give orders, you tell someone to do something. “Put that file on my desk”, is an order. So is, “put Roger on the late shift”. When you give an order, you do not allow the other person any latitude to think about what to do or how to do it. All they can do to satisfy your order is exactly what you ordered. There are two reasons why this is bad. First, you do not allow the person to figure out the best way to do the task. Second, you do not let them learn.Sometimes it is appropriate to give orders. In the military, there are times when a leader has to give orders. When you tell a squad to “charge that hill” you don’t want them to think about it. You just want it done. However, even in the military, leaders don’t give orders unless they have to. Instead of giving orders and telling someone what to do, good managers give instructions. Instead of telling them what to do, you tell them what you want done.

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Every morning, it seems, you read an article in the paper about layoffs at another company. Those layoffs are hard on the people who get laid off, but they are also just as hard on the people left behind. There is more work to be done and fewer people to do it. There is the lingering fear that more layoffs might happen or that the company might close altogether. Here’s what you need to know to survive in this business climate, both as a manager and as an employee.

As an employee
Your employer believes that you are good at what you do. You are valuable to the company and its plans for the future. That’s why they kept you and not someone else. They believe you are capable of producing more, or better, work than others. To survive in this climate every employee must look out for the Company’s interest as well as there own.

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How can I tell if my best employees are getting ready to leave?
Why would they want to leave?
How can I keep them?

Top 10 Clues Your Best Employees are Leaving

• They start dressing better
• They take lunches at different times
• Their production drops off
• They seem “quiet” or “down”
• They request vacation one day at a time
• They are “sick” more often
• They stop championing their positions
• They stop volunteering
• They get more incoming phone calls than usual
• They ask you for a reference

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Many companies have done away with “sick leave” and “vacation” as employee benefits and have replaced them with “paid time off” (PTO).While this looks good on the surface, it can be a costly mistake.

What is Paid Time Off PTO
Paid time off is a bank of hours from which employees can draw. Employers credit additional hours to their employeess “banks”, usually every pay period. Most US employers offer their workers 10 paid holidays, 2 weeks vacation, two personal days, and 8 sick leave days per year. Under a PTO plan, the employees would be credited with 30 days paid time off instead (10+10+2+8).On a bi-weekly pay schedule (26 pay periods per year) employees would accrue an additional 1.3 days of PTO every two weeks. Where a semi-monthly pay schedule is used (pay days on the 1st and 15th of each month) employees accrue 1.25 days PTO on each of the 24 pay periods.

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Managing change means managing people’s fear. Change is natural and good, but people’s reaction to change is unpredictable and irrational. It can be managed if done right.

Change
Nothing is as upsetting to your people as change. Nothing has greater potential to cause failures, loss of production, or falling quality. Yet nothing is as important to the survival of your organization as change. History is full of examples of organizations that failed to change and that are now extinct. The secret to successfully managing change, from the perspective of the employees, is definition and understanding.Resistance to change comes from a fear of the unknown or an expectation of loss. The front-end of an individual’s resistance to change is how they perceive the change. The back-end is how well they are equipped to deal with the change they expect.

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Cross training is training an employee to do a different part of the organization’s work. Training worker A to do the task that worker B does and training B to do A’s task is cross training. Cross training is good for managers, because it provides more flexibility in managing the workforce to get the job done. However, done right, cross training is good for the employees too. It lets them learn new skills, makes them more valuable, and can combat worker boredom.

Cross Training
Cross training can be used in almost any position in almost any industry. My first cross training experience as a consultant was convincing a Customer Service Manager that some of the 13 Customer Service Reps (CSR) who handled telephone enquiries could be cross trained to handle walk-in customers as well. By using staggered lunch hours, she was able to have the telephone CSRs provide lunch relief for the walk-in CSRs and didn’t need to hire the additional person she thought she needed.I cross trained some of my design engineers to go on field installation trips and get first hand knowledge of how their designs worked, or didn’t work, in the field.

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There never seems to be enough time during the day to get everything done. You can’t spare people to go to training because there is so much work to be done, but you also can’t neglect their training and development. Lunch and Learn is a way to get more training done by making the lunch hour multi-tasking.

What Is Lunch and Learn?
At its simplest, a lunch and learn program is a training event scheduled during the lunch hour. Employees who attend bring their lunches and eat them during the training session. The training is usually less formal and less structured than normal.Typical Lunch and Learn programs include:

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At the beginning of using Google Adsense, I think when people visit my blog, they will click on my Google ads and I will earn money. I used to believe that the more viewers visit my blog, the more money I can earn. So I just pasted the ad code into my blog’s template and waited for the huge amount of money come. Later I realized that without optimization, that’s impossible. Below are some tricks to increase Google Adsense CTR that I get from my own experiences and from other bloggers’.

1. When use the ad code, you must make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content (adsense does this well). If your ads are not relevant, there’s small possibility that people will click on them.

2. Blending your ads with your website themes such as background’s color, links’ color, text display color…People often don’t click on your ads if they realize that they are going to click on an advertising link. Read the rest of this entry »

BlogRush is a popular free service for traffic exchange on the internet. If you want to drive traffic to your blog, you can spend some money on advertising networks, but sometimes doesn’t bring back good result. With BlogRush you don’t have to spend any cent in your pocket. It’s free. Using BlogRush you can exchange your blog’s traffic with other blogs’.

To use BlogRush, just sign up for an account and wait for approval. After your account has been approved, you can add a widget to your blog. This widget displays links to other blogs that have relative contents to yours. And your blog will appears on other blogs too.

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