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Look Back on 2013

At the start of this year, The Management Pocketblog started an experiment: The Pocket Correspondence Course – a series of blogs designed to form a wide-ranging management course, covering all areas of management. We are not finished yet.

If you have been following, you may have noticed a bit of a pattern:

The course is divided into three volumes: each one covering half a year:

  1. Volume 1: Personal Skills
    … covered personal effectiveness at work, managing yourself, your work and your emotional states, and personal development in the first quarter, before moving on to look at a wide range of communication skills in quarter 2.
  2. Volume 2: People Management
    … covered managing and motivating your people in quarter 3, and leading teams, dealing with change, and handling tough situations in the final quarter of the year.
  3. Volume 3: Organisational Management
    … will cover operations, strategy and project management in the first quarter of 2014, and business services, finance, sales and marketing in quarter 2.

It has been a real challenge to balance a deep desire to create something comprehensive with the need to keep it easy to read and quick to assimilate. Likewise, I have also tried to balance a strong dollop of theory with a vivid sense of practicality. I hope I have succeeded. If you have followed the course to any degree, please do use the comments to let me know what you have thought.

Tomorrow (as this blog gets published) is Christmas Day: Merry Christmas. So I am aware that few will be reading this. For those hardy souls that are, here are my personal favourites from a year of blogging.

  1. Self Confidence – because it was the first
  2. Career Development – because it is full of practical exercises
  3. Being Organised – because this is who I am
  4. The Interview Process – because I remember working particularly hard on this one
  5. Report and Proposal Writing Still Matters – because writing is important
  6. The Worst form of Communication – because we need to get better at emails
  7. How to Manage a Challenging Conversation – because most of us have so much to learn here
  8. Coaching: a Manager’s Best Tool – because… with a title like that, you should know why
  9. Appraisal Time: A Polemic – because of its simplicity
  10. What Motivates your Team Members? – because I am a big fan of Herzberg’s model
  11. Team Building – because this is the most creative of the series to date – I build a model just for this blog
  12. Handling Conflict – because it finished a year of blogs

Merry Christmas,

one and all.

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