Best posts on The Comparative Advantage for 2009 (and a little more)

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The best posts of 2009 (and the end of 2008)

This has been quite a year. A year and a quarter passed since I started writing this blog. My first post was on October 1st, 2008. However, because I did not do a “best of 2008” list, I will include the last quarter of 2008  in this post. In the last few days I have been going trough all my posts (more than 170 of them) ranking them, indexing them and choosing the best ones. So, here is the list of my 25 favorite blog posts for 2008-2009:

General thoughts (see more posts on this subject here):

• Is good enough good enough?
• How to use what is not there to improve what is there

Passion, Creativity and Personal Development (see more posts on this subject here):

• Why do we have to ignore our past success while doing our current work?
• Misguided self-perceptions and finding your strengths

Managing people:

• Bad parents, bad bosses, and the role of managers
• Conventional Wisdom
• What managers should do – a few thoughts about practical wisdom
• Are you ready?
• The leader-manager dilemma
• Taking the hurdles of employees out of the way

Teamwork (see more posts on this subject here):

• Lessons from conductors – musings about modern managers
• Which team member should get most of your managerial attention – the weakest or the strongest?
• Understanding the other side

Communication/communicating with employees and teammates (see more posts on this subject here):

• The fallacy of the all knowing General-Leader
• The forest, the trees and the process of management

Feedback, Recognition, Noticing and Motivation (see more posts on this subject here):

• Is money equals motivation a conventional wisdom we have to break?
• Did anybody notice?
• Silence, “I don’t know” and problems & solutions

Presentation & PowerPoint (see more posts on this subject here):

• Not to use PowerPoint and the taking of notes during a presentation

Business, Strategy and Decision making (see more posts on this subject here):

• Ripple effects and business decisions
• Are you always going for the average?
• Setting your priorities straight

Marketing & Customer service (see more posts on this subject here):

• If it isn’t broken – break it, if it is broken – ask somebody how to fix it
• Revisiting averages…
• A segment of one

Constant improvement

As I was going through all my posts during the last few days I was amazed to realize how much I learned, grew and improved. Actually, reading some of the earlier posts made me cringe, due to the style, the bad use of grammar and spelling mistakes (I left the original first post, just as a reminder of how badly I used to write). I guess i will continue to make mistakes, but less and less over time (one has to be optimistic).

However, I also saw my improvement over time. How my writing got better. How I started to focus. How I started writing things that  actually matter and I even dare say, are groundbreaking. I have been experiencing a growing readership to this blog all through the last year and the upward trends is continuing. I want to thank each and everyone of you for taking the time to read, comment, tweet or e-mail me about the blog. There is no greater reward than the interaction with you and than being recommended by you. Thank you.

Three new additions to the blog:

1. My Philosophy page – this page represents some of the pillars of my thinking. Issues and concepts I constantly write about and deal with. I guess it will be updated from time to time, but I feel confident enough with this list to publish it and use it as a symbol to what The Comparative Advantage Blog is all about.

2. About page – If you would check out the about page, you will see I updated it (as I try to do that from time to time). However, one update, is especially important to me. An addition of one sentence explaining what I am trying to do with this blog: I am trying to change the way people manage people, one post at a time.

3. Index – The blog has tags and categories, but I have been looking for a way to make it more approachable and to create better lists according to the subjects I am writing about. I am still currently playing with it, but I am going to use the BagTheWeb website to create an index of the web site. This is the link to the main Bag, and in the above best posts  list, you will find links to lists of posts on every subject.

Happy New Year!