Browsing through the pages I found a post (not existing amymore) where there were links to seven free eboks in PDF format. I am a huge fan of reading and this is my preferred method of gaining information and I was very happy to find such amount of useful book in one place and for free!

These are great titles for people who try to start up a new business, who want to communicate better with the others, or who want to understand their inner selves. The books are:

• The Law of Attraction Explained by Ken MacLean
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Confidence Booster by Anna Marie Stewart
• Money & Beliefs by Aine Belton
• The Basics of Manifestation by Ken MacLean
• Optimal Thinking (author unknown)
• I Create Millions by Christopher Westra

You can download all the books from this link (no email or other information required!)

Happy reading!

Random Posts

• Why Are We The Poorest Country In Europe?
• 8 Random Facts About Me
• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me
• What Matters Now – A Free E-Book For The New Age
• Successful And Outstanding Blogger

Unfortunately, if you have a “toxic boss” Seth doesn’t give an advise what to do. I cannot give you one either. In my working experience I had a boss who you can call “toxic” only once and he was really an unpleasant person. Almost nobody wanted to work with him with a little exception of a handful of middle managers who had some shares from the company. Most of the people came and went within a period of 6 to 12 months. There was (and still is) a huge turnover in that company. I didn’t find a way to deal with him so I didn’t make an exception and I left after working there for 7 months.

However, I have another example of working with a toxic colleague that I think might be interesting for you. It was a long time ago; I was young and very ambitious and he was a little more senior than me so he felt like being my personal boss.

I started working with a technology I liked and I faced a lot of challenges in the company – mostly technical problems – that I had no patience to plunge into. As a result I increased the pace of work and I forced all my colleagues to start thinking of a better approach to our work. For example, we were a company with about 30 offices countrywide and our business was changing very rapidly so we have to update and to deploy our applications throughout the whole company very often. We had a “national tour” (i.e. business trip through all the offices to install the new versions of our applications) about 4 times a year, which was very inefficient and expensive for the company. I was the one who created a new, more efficient structure of our applications and a way of automated deployment. Well, we used floppy disks at that time (it was the age before internet) to send the new versions countrywide and to get back copies of their local databases but my approach gave the development team more flexibility, saved us a lot of time and a lot of money to the company.

At the same time, this colleague of mine became very jealous. He wanted to be that engine that drove the company forward but at the same time he wasn’t able to propose good ideas. So, finally he turned against me and started to criticize my ideas and to find flaws where there weren’t any. When I proposed something he rejected it and proposed something else, sometimes something obviously dull but his own. Our competition went over the boundaries of normal working relationship and turned into pure hatred. He was saying: “You have to do it my way because I am your boss! If you don’t do it my way I will make the big boss fire you!”. And I was saying: “But my approach is better than yours! And I am smarter than you!”

Obviously it was not the way our relationship should go so I started wondering how to deal with him and to keep my job at the same time. Following the advice of my spiritual mentor at that time, I changed my attitude towards him and I started to agree with everything he said but at the same time forcing him to take the full responsibility for his decisions.

He wanted to be my boss but he was afraid to defend his ideas in front of the whole team. He wanted to be some kind of a “grey cardinal” – a man who rules the world from behind a curtain. I made him go into the light. When he asked me to do something I said that I don’t know how to do it so he has to teach me. When there was a problem to solve I asked him to solve it because he was smarter. When he came up with a solution I asked him to share it with the whole team and to defend it before them because I couldn’t. At some point he had so many responsibilities, so many things to do and worry about, so finally he gave up. He didn’t become less toxic – he continued to envy me but he let me do some things my way, which was well appreciated by the rest of the colleagues.

I think he was some kind of an “energy vampire” – a man who lives by sucking other people’s spiritual energy, a man who is happy when you hate him. When you communicate with such people you feel so weak and tired like you’ve been squeezed.

We tried to cope with each other but when the company went into some financial instability I quit and found another job. The funny thing is that he quit a couple of months later although he was a shareholder and wanted to climb up the corporate ladder. I believe he was missing his source of spiritual energy and left to look for it somewhere else.

So, this was my story. It would be interesting to know if you also had such stories of dealing with “toxic colleagues” and if you had – how did you make it?

Random Posts

• New Project Management Blog Launched – PM Stories
• Recommended Readings: Computer Ergonomics
• Whose Methods Are Better?
• Why Are We The Poorest Country In Europe?
• Persistence

There was an article in All About Agile blog, entitled 20 Qualities of an Agile Leader. Well, the title is a little misleading and the author clarifies later that all kind of teams need inspirational leadership and these are the 20 qualities of the inspirational leader:

1. Strong communication – storytelling and listening
2. Passion for learning and intense curiosity
3. Focus on developing people
4. Having fun and being very energized
   
5. Strong self-belief, coupled with humanity and humility
6. Committed to making a significant difference
7. Clarity of vision and ability to share it with others
8. Dogged determination and often relentlessness
9. Strong focus on priorities
10. Not afraid to show some vulnerability
11. Regular use of reflective periods to think and learn
12. Real passion and pride in what they do
13. Confidence and trust in their teams, giving them real empowerment
14. Respect for all (team members, temps, customers, suppliers and directors alike)
15. Clear standards of ethics and integrity; openness and honesty
16. Ability to drive, inspire and embrace change and continuous improvement
17. Positive attitude at all times and an innate ability to be diplomatic in any circumstances
18. Lateral thinking and ability to find innovative ideas and solutions to problems
19. Ability to inspire and motivate others
20. Willingness to take (calculated) risks

I find this list quite comprehensive. I marked the ones I find most important for me in blue. I find them the most important probably because I still need to improve these qualities in me. How about you? Do you agree with all the points? What are the most important ones for you? Do you have all these qualities?

Related Posts:

• Great Inspirational Quotes
• Recommended Links: 100 Lifehacking Talks

Yesterday I saw a great post in Penelope Trunk’s blog – 10 ways to make people hate you at work. She presents a very colorful list of ways to be nasty. You should read it. My favorite one is “Being obsessed with your workload” and I an going to share some thoughts about it.

I don’t know if this is a matter of culture or education but when I first faced with such behavior I was shocked. I’ve been working in some small companies before and it was my first collision with the corporate culture. It was the first and the biggest software corporation in Bulgaria. It was held by U.S. owners and it was announced as the first software company organized in “the American way”. My case was pretty simple: I was a developer at that time and I had some technical problems, which I couldn’t resolve myself. I needed help and I asked one of the senior guys, known as a “big expert” for a help. Then he answered: “I am a very important person and my work is very important. Your work is not, so I can’t waste my time solving your problems.”

I had never seen such attitude in my career before that and I was astounded. Later on, in the same company I saw many more examples of such behavior and I understood that this is a part of the corporate culture. Before that I hadn’t seen people working with headphones on, now I see them everywhere. I understood that people involved in intellectual work (such as software developers) need privacy and should not be interrupted frequently because their thought process cannot be restored easily and every distraction causes them a lot of time to get back on track but still don’t understand what kind of person should you be not wanting to help your mates?

Now I am a manager and I have a superior manager. He is a direct manager of four people like me and not only doesn’t he respond to my e-mails but sometimes he doesn’t read them at all explaining that he is so overloaded with work that he doesn’t have time to read or answer my e-mails. I am still wondering: if you are a manager and you don’t have the time to manage your subordinates because of too much work, what kind of work would it be?

I will highly appreciate your comments on this topic.

Related Posts:

• The Nine Biggest Myths Of The Workplace