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We are looking for people  a bad website (or any website) that they would like an independent critique of.

We will record our thoughts using screen recording software and give it to you free…

We will do this on the provision that we can then use the material in a future training course on readability and accessibility.

We aren’t web designers so we have no interest in fixing your website up. You will just get honest feedback.

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The Apprentice Howard fired

At this point in the Apprentice every year, you can almost see Suralan finds it harder and harder to fire people.

A perfectly respectable candidate like Howard went and you see the difficulty Suralan had.

The task was the classic shopping channel task with teams of 3 having to source and sell products on live shopping TV.

Almost set up to manufacture disputes, each team was split into a pair and a single person to source products for the other team member to sell (without them seeing them until the night before).

Deborah, Yasmina and James went for lower priced items (cheap!) – the sort of products that are only found on shopping channels.

Where else would you find an attractive young woman dressed in full finery saying it is “great” and “really good fun” to go out and pick up leaves with a long err.. leaf collecting thing?

Howard, Kate and Lorraine went for the higher priced items including an a low fat chip pan that should have really sold itself and an awful “leafy” leather jacket (similar to the wolf jacket in style) from a few years back.

Thankfully, the edit only showed minimal clips of the actual presenting.

Suralan put it down to bad selling and saw Howard as a “steady eddie” and so he went.

Hard not to feel sorry for Howard, (I think) it was his first time in the final 3 and I agree with the apprentice blog that perhaps Lorraine has been riding her luck for a couple of weeks now.

Next week – more cringe fest with the interviews with Suralans most trusted men…

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Blog carnival of education

A great selection of blogs and the not so serious side of teaching and education over at the blog carnival of education.

Check it out here

http://siobhancurious.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/carnival-of-education-225/

If you found this post useful and interesting, there is tons more in our weekly update. You can take a COMPLETELY FREE online training course just by dropping your name & email in the box below. If you didn't find it useful, please tell us by taking our blog readers survey.

Management styles

Management styles

We all make decisions every day. It is these decisions that allow us to manage our lives, enabling us to do the things we want to do, while working with and around: other people, time and the everyday problems which always seem to occur.

Similarly a business needs to be managed. An Organisation is not called that because it falls apart every five minutes, but because the various parts have been managed and organised in order to fit its purpose

How the various parts are managed and by whom, largely depends on the type of organisation /business and its aims and objectives and the management styles of the individual managers themselves.

Management in its simplest form is about how you make use of your resources. These resources can be anything from how your money is spent and balancing a budget, moving people around, designing and placing items, in order to make the best of what you have.

There are four main management styles which can be employed within a business structure.

Taking each of these Management styles individually does not show a true picture of how a business should be managed.
It is likely that in most modern organisations many, if not all, of these styles are used at some time or other as changes to policies and practices are made almost on a week to week/month to month basis.

Which management style does your organisation use when and why?

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The Apprentice – Ben finally fired

A bit of a hum-drum episode last night.

A variation on the “buy from wholesalers-sell to the public” task which has been repeated at least once in each series. This variation was baby and mum-to-be related and the “pitch” was at the Earls Court baby show.

It’s hard to say which of the products was the “least worst” and they included

• A cardboard box cot
• A pair of high heeled shoes for babies that can’t actually walk
• A handmade wooden rocking horse selling at £1500 or more
• A “scrum cap”  to stop toddlers hurting themselves (how long before these are compulsary at nursery schools?)
• A blow up paddling birthing pool

Suralan promoted the two parents as Project Managers – Lorraine and James

Unfortunately, Lorraine allowed herself to be “sold” to with the one hand collapsable pushchair which she spent the rest of the task wrestling with. However, the idea of one “big ticket” item and one “impulse” item (the skull cap) was sound.

Unfortunately, James and his chums were brow beaten by Debra into going for the rocking horse and the birthing pool. These seemed like the “odd couple”.

We, the viewer, had learnt earlier that only 2.2% (not 2%!) of women actually use birthing pools so based on that logic, only 2 out of 100 visitors were likely to be a prospect anyway…

As for the rocking horse, the logic seemed to be that they only needed to sell one for it to be a good choice.

There is an old saying that says

“If you need to know the price, then you can’t afford it”

Well, they showed the price and still nobody bought it.

Victory to Lorraine’s team and their treat was to have an audience with the cartoonist Gerald Scarf and have a caricature drawn.

And so, as Suralan pointed out, it was fourth time up in the boardroom for Ben, Debra and James.

Either of them (or all of them) could have gone and it is hard to see any of them surviving much further.

The ultimate winner must still surely come from Kate, Howard, Lorraine or Yasmina but next week, one of my favourites – the shopping channel task and one slip there could spell disaster.

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Free PR 6 Directory

Sharp End Training has recently picked up an expired domain with google page rank 6. These domains are highly sought after and improve search engine position & rankings due to their perceived importance.

For TODAY only 20th May 2009 – while we are setting up the categories – You can submit your site FREE of CHARGE.

If the category you want doesn’t exisit – please check back later – we are setting categories up all day.

This offer will close at 4pm UK time and from tomorrow — the price will be AT LEAST $10 USD.

Be quick folks – this post will be removed later today

oh – here is the link

http://www.si20.com

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Bad emails

How to send really bad emails

Email is a wonderful tool and you can use it to communicate with staff and customers. Unfortunately, hardly anyone has ever had email training. This means that even people working in the same organisation have wildly differing understandings of how to send email…

Here’s how to send really bad emails.

- Delay your reply at least a fortnight – this will make people think that their email program is at fault, or anti spam software has eaten their message or better still make them come and ask you about it wasting more time.

- Ignore requests for information for as long as possible. Ideally you should wait until after any deadline. Then ring them to say “I got your email and I am just about to deal with it”

- Under no circumstances acknowledge receipt of sensitive or important documents. Obviously this should never be sent via email.

- ALWAYS WRITE ALL YOUR MESSAGE TEXT IN CAPITALS.

- Use as much jargon as you want – IMHO HTH. It doesn’t matter if the other person doesn’t understand. Make them find out.

- Make sure there is a large and prominent legal disclaimer attached to every one of your messages. It is important that this should overshadow the message you’re trying to communicate. Don’t even think about put this on a web page and linking the email to it…

- Take special care to make sure that all the recipients’ email addresses are visible to everyone who reads the message. It doesn’t matter if they work outside your organisation. You have given the spammers a head start.

- Make sure you do “reply all” with a pointless or meaningless response. “I agree” sent to 400 people is superb…

- Make sure you don’t give them any clues as to how to contact you using the telephone. Make them go and find your phone number, they’ve got it somewhere…

- ALWAYS attach at least 3 WORD/EXCEL documents to each and every message. An extra tip is is to resend multiple versions of the same document in quick succession. You don’t have to bother about version control. Large documents will also clog up the persons Inbox, network servers or as a bonus – both…

Also not everyone might have the same version of office as you but hey – that’s their problem…

- Don’t bother spell checking your emails. You always have perfect spelling and it’s only an email anyway.

- CC things to as many people as possible – They’ve got time to read things of passing interest. It also covers your back if things go wrong. Think of it as a form of free insurance.

- Sending emails to people on holiday is always a good idea. They will catch up in no time when they get back..

- Help the reader to NOT prioritise reading by using bland subject headers, like “Help!” or “Information wanted!”

…and finally – It is vitally important that you understand people have nothing better to do than wade through your email messages every day.

Have you got all that? Of course, we’re all professionals, aren’t we? We would NEVER do anything like this, would we?

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How to write goals

How to write goals

Weekly update subscribers got this article from guest author Gemma Thompson.

Having a goal seems like the easiest thing in the world, after all dreaming of our hearts desires is automatic. However, as Diana Scharf Hunt said ‘Goals are dreams with deadlines.’

So how do we create an effective goal?
There are several key elements that I believe make a goal very powerful.
Firstly write it down!

Why? Well in 1953 a group of Harvard students were asked which of them had a specific written goal, only 3% of them had. When revisited 20 years later that 3% had accumulated more wealth than the other 97% put together!

Then you have to be specific about what you want, saying you want a career in television is very different from saying that you want to be the most in-demand producer in the UK earning at least  £500,000 pa. This helps you ensure you get what you want … and you get it the way you want to get it so that your ethics and values are not compromised.

The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.  ~ Charles DeLint

In addition to this the goal should be measurable … like a route that has been planned one stage at a time and it should contain statements that you can use as evidence to prove that you have achieved some, or all, of your goal.

You will also find it much easier to attain your goal if you are solely responsible for it, there is little point having a goal that states I will get a payrise as soon as my boss thinks I deserve one!

The next thing you need to do is ensure the goal is has a deadline and I recommend ‘future pacing’ your goal which means you are writing it as if you have already achieved it. It should go like the example given below.

It is the (insert date) and I am feeling (insert emotions) because (insert goal).
I achieved this by (list milestones on route)

When you future pace your goal you visualise it as a reality, increasing your positive outlook and using the law of attraction to draw it into your life.

How does this law of attraction work? Well, in a nutshell, it means you get what you focus on. This is common sense and scientific fact.

Scientifically speaking we are all subject to a barrage of information all the time, and our brains can only process a specific amount of that information at a time. So we have something called the reticular activating system that helps us to tune out ‘useless’ information and tune in to information that we need.

To put this in the context of your goal, if it states that you are working in television, your ears will ‘prick up’ every time something to do with this is mentioned, leading you to new opportunities.

Common sense wise if you think about a problem you are more likely to find the solution than if you don’t think about it!

Also if you have a more positive outlook you are more confident and attractive to others. For example if there are 2 people going for same job, both with the right experience and qualifications, but one with a future paced goal and therefore more confidence and focus, which would you hire???

Lastly, to make sure your goal really impacts your life – read it out, at least once a day, this keeps it fresh in your mind and strong in your heart.

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Asda Customer Services

Surely there is a serious message in hear but I can’t think of it at the moment…

You can see a full transcript of the call at this link

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