Central Iowa Chapter of IIBA®

By Jeff Cerny

Your chances of being tapped to deliver a formal presentation are much higher than they were just a few years ago. In fact, by some estimates, as many as one-fourth of the jobs in the United States will require employees to give a formal presentation in 2010.

Unfortunately, many presenters fall into certain habits that become barriers to communication. These habits are breakable, though — and each has a good substitute to take its place. The positive replacements focus on making the content clear, relevant, and memorable. And they can turn an adequate presentation into one that’s remarkable. Here’s a summary of 10 bad habits you can break.

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By Greg Shultz

As an IT professional, chances are you read a lot. And, it’s a good bet that most of what you read consists of manuals and other technical books and articles directly related to your work. However, you really owe it to yourself read other types of IT-related books. For example, reading nonfiction IT-related books can help you gain different perspectives on the industry, while reading fictional books about IT will allow you to relax and enjoy the industry. So as we get ready to close the book (pun intended) on the first decade of the 2000s, I thought I would compile a list of 10 books I think every IT pro should read.

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10 books every IT prof should read

TechRepublic:  By Jeff Cerny

 

 Tony Hsieh (“shay”) has good reason to be smiling lately. He’s the face behind a billion-dollar business. His company has gone through the roof in the decade since it started with his mission to be the leader in customer service and also to sell shoes — lots of shoes. On July 22 of this year, he wrote the employees of Zappos to say, “This is a big day…” The open letter announced that the company was being acquired for $887.9 million by Jeff Bezos’ online giant, Amazon. By Hsieh’s description, acquisition “doesn’t really convey the spirit of the transaction.” It’s more like “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…”

After Hsieh finished at Harvard with a computer science degree, he sold his online advertising company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million. That was in 1998, when he was 24. Zappos was just one of several online projects he helped bankroll through his next company, Venture Frogs. Now with 1,600 employees, 500 of whom are in the call center, Zappos is unlike a lot of companies in this economy — they are hiring. Tony’s advice to companies still getting to the one billion mark is that there’s a huge potential advantage in putting the right fundamentals in place while you’re still small(er).

Although the always-on toll-free number is prominent on every page of the company’s Web site, customer service is not the top priority for Zappos. Corporate culture is. Tony says getting the corporate culture right results in customer service falling into place, along with everything else. Instead of being a department, customer service is the company. To ensure the right attitude about things, prospective employees are asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, how lucky they believe they are. Every new hire gets four weeks of “customer loyalty” training. Do your job well at Zappos, and you have a good chance of being honored with your own personal random-acts-of-kindness parade through the office.

Tony Hsieh is not in this for the short haul. He describes the window he’s looking through as being “really long-term” and is open to new directions for the company, like (among other things) an airline. He talks here about what happiness means to him and to Zappos and how it will figure into his upcoming book.

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