8 Signs That It’s Time to Look for a New Job

There are good jobs, bad jobs, and jobs that make you want to gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. Most of us can take the good with the bad, but when things at work are continuously awful, it’s time to start thinking about a change.

Listen, I get that we can’t all be Lego assembly testers, video game reviewers, or rock stars, but come on…how how much misery should we take before we start planning a job move? [read]

The Formula for Business Success

To me, the absolute most powerful marketing strategy is to run a really great business that your customers love and tell all of their friends and family about. All the ads and social media effort in the world cannot overcome poor quality or lackluster customer service. That is why for the past 17 years my career has focused exclusively on studying the fundamental elements of business success.

Traveling worldwide at upwards of 200 days a year, I have worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the best (and worst) business leaders of our generation. I’ve also maintained a strict regimen of reading a minimum of 100 business books a year since 1989. [read]

Best of 2010: Our Most Popular Tips, Interviews & Think Pieces

Information overload has been a key trend of the 21st century, and 2010 was no different. With our communication channels and social media distractions growing exponentially, the biggest challenge of the moment seems to be carving out creative space. To address this, we at 99% found ourselves revisiting a few common themes again and again: how to prioritize our tasks, how to be disciplined in execution, how to find focus and flow, and how to keep the momentum going. [read :: the 99%]

“get” or “buy” – which increases sales?

Here at Amp Music Marketing we run a large number of websites for a wide range of musicians. From gospel choirs to synth-rock bands, global stars to breakthrough artists, we work with them all! This broad approach often gives us a unique insight into trends in the wider music industry that might be apparent to a solo artist or small record label.

While there are certainly marketing techniques, practices and styles unique to each genre or individual artist, there are many more which work well across the spectrum.

We’re also huge believers in using data to drive our marketing efforts, constantly reviewing and analyzing the results of one album launch and incorporating them into the plans for the next. [read]

Most Likely Targets for Cyber-Crime in 2011

A report released on Tuesday by security firm McAfee predicts that the top targets for cybercrime in 2011 will include smartphones, geolocation services, URL shorteners and devices that run Apple operating systems. Social networks and Internet TV platforms such as Google TV also made the list of potential threats from online scammers. [read]

How to organize a retreat

There’s a tremendous opportunity to create events where people connect. Unfortunately, it’s also easy to turn these events into school-like conferences, not the emotional connections that are desired.

You can create an advance with a team that knows one another from work, or even more profoundly, with a bunch of independent thinkers who come together to energize, inspire and connect.

I’ve been to a bunch and here’s what I’ve learned, in no particular order:

• Must be off site, with no access to electronic interruption
• Should be intense. Save the rest and relaxation for afterwards
• Create a dossier on each attendee in advance, with a photo and a non-humble CV of who they are and what they do and what their goals are
• Never (never) have people go around a circle and say their name and what they do and their favorite kind of vegetable or whatever. The problem? People spend the whole time trying to think of what to say, not listening to those in front of them (I once had to witness 600 people do this!!)
• Instead, a week ahead of time, give each person an assignment for a presentation at the event. It might be the answer to a question like, “what are you working on,” or “what’s bothering you,” or “what can you teach us.” Each person gets 300 seconds, that’s it.

[read article]

Sir, Please Put the Phone Down. 5 Tips to Free You From The Shackles of your Phone

Are you similar to many other people and a little too attached to your cellphone? Does it seem only appropriate that when your cellphone rings you should answer it the vast majority of the time regardless of who you are with or what you are doing? Are there Twitter or Facebook alerts popping up every three seconds? Is there really anything wrong with multitasking and taking the occasional call during dinner, or checking e-mail while you are in a meeting?

Believe it or not, your cellphone is possibly causing you more harm than good. The majority of us probably need to take a look and change how we manage our cellphone use. Honestly, how many people can you see right now? How many are nursing their iPhone like it’s a newborn? [read]

Positivity is King

Let’s say you’re walking down the street and encounter someone who expresses their negativity to you and every other passer-by. In this kind of situation, it’s easy to avoid them; you just walk right on by. Maybe shake your head a little. But if that negative person is an employee or customer it’s not so easy to walk on by, is it?

Every entrepreneur needs to surround themselves with positive, happy, constructive people. Part of your recruiting and hiring process should be designed to identify these kinds of behaviors and root out the negative ones.  But even in the best companies, a negative person can get hired; and sometimes, it’s a case of a positive employee turning into a disaster.

In researching this article I found a plethora of material and tips on how to effectively deal with a negative employee. Much of this advice can be boiled down to a few simple steps, all of it in keeping with the E-Myth Point of View. [read]

Reaper 4 is Coming, Adding More Flexible UI to Lightweight PC-Mac DAW

Reaper 4.0 has hit prerelease, the latest version of this $40+, lightweight (measured in a handful of megs) DAW for Windows or Mac. The banner feature is called WALTER, “Window Arrangement Logic Template Engine for REAPER.” The idea: you should have your music production screen look the way you want, with elements moved to whatever you like.

Jeffrey James points us to this release and explains that the feature allows you to “design the DAW the way you want it.” For instance, normally Reaper displays meters horizontally. Add a snippet of code telling it that’s not what you want — “set tcp.meter [290 28 12 51 1 0 1 1]” — and you get vertical meters, as seen below. If the idea of hacking your UI sounds unappealing to you, I expect there will be legions of Reaper users posting snippets so you can easily find what you want. [read]

Become a Mac OS X power user the easy way

Mac OS X contains many shortcuts, special keyboard combinations you can exercise to make things happen, but unless you make the effort to learn them there’s no guarantee you’ll recall the one you need at the time you most need it. Fear no more: there’s ways to make finding shortcuts easier. Bring out your inner power user!

Dashboard
Dashboard is Apple’s host application for small mini-apps, or widgets. It is a semi-transparent layer that’s invisible unless activated. [read]