Jim Anderson

One of the most important parts of being an IT manager is your ability to create an operating budget for your team. In order for your team to be able to accomplish everything that is expected of them, there will be costs and they'll do things that (hopefully) generate revenue for the company.

You wouldn't think that a CIO who just got fired from his job at HP would have a lot to teach us about IT strategy, but that's where you'd be wrong. Randy Mott is a CIO who has been around the block a few times...

Have you ever given any thought to the damage that you might be doing to your company's other brands when you slash the price of your product? It turns out that cutting your product's price might boost your product's sales, but at what expense?

I'm sure that you've heard this before, but your audience is sizing you up once they lay eyes on you. Sure, we hope that they have good listening skills, but this may not matter. You've got somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds or so to make a good first impression.

If you have been out to a mall, driving in traffic, or attended a sporting event lately then you've seen that just about everyone had their faces planted into a mobile device of some sort. From a product manager point-of-view, this sure seems to be telling us that we need to find a way to get information about our product onto everyone's mobile phones. But how?

When it comes to sitting around the negotiating table, we're all equal, right? In a perfect world, the answer would be yes. We don't live in a perfect world and so the answer is a very solid "no". So what does this mean for us – do some negotiators deserve to get more?

I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times I've found myself in a situation in which I needed to share some information with my audience that was too big, or too strange for them to be able to grasp it. What's a speaker to do?

So right off the bat, let's get one thing straight: the Labrador Retriever is incorrectly named. It turns out that this breed of dog did not come from Labrador. (the northerly region of the Canadian province of Newfoundland). Rather, the breed comes from Newfoundland in Canada.

So what does a product manager need to do in order to make his / her product more profitable? As I suspect every product manager learned during the last global recession, cutting costs associated with your product is one important step. That's a nice skill to have on your product manager resume, but it's not enough. Once that's done, what comes next? How about raising your product's price? Great idea, but how does a product manager go about doing that?

There you are in your next sales negotiation and everything is flying along nicely. All of a sudden, wham! The other side goes and suddenly threatens you with something if you don't do or agree to one of their demands. Oh, oh – that "Dummy's Guide To Negotiating" book that you read last month didn't cover this situation. What's a negotiator to do now?