 Ahh, social media. Where from the comfort of your living room you can make your point known to millions of people. People and businesses have grown from being virtual unknowns to worldwide phenoms (think “Gangnam Style”) thanks to social media. Then there are those who fell from grace like a lead balloon (think Roseanne Barr, Anthony Weiner, or Paula Deen) because of social media. Both the rises and falls can happen swiftly and without advance warning. Sadly, it doesn’t even have to be true. Fake news travels just as fast as the truth. It just has to be tantalizing. It also doesn’t even have to go viral; a handful of viewers can see something that will alter their opinions of the person posting. That viewer could be your current or future boss, customer, or business partner.
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 Throughout my career, I’ve facilitated and been a party to disagreements or conflict more times that I can possibly count. Sometimes things worked out okay, and those affected were satisfied with the outcome.
Other times, things didn’t turn out as well. As I’ve thought about both the good and not-so-good outcomes, it caused me to dig deeper to find the underlying factors that helped drive the outcomes. Read more at ProjectManagement.com. 
Jane was a group manager over a team of six buyers for a large department store chain. Her team specialized in buying house-wares, including linens, sheets, towels and small appliances. Her team met every week to discuss advertised specials for upcoming weeks and any supplier issues that the team needed to be aware of. There was one linens supplier, Patty’s Linens, that has had some difficulty with product quality and the department store was experiencing higher-than-normal returns on the product. Two weeks earlier, the supplier submitted a plan for how they were going to improve the quality of their product. The department store decided to keep the supplier on for three more months to evaluate their plan and give the supplier an opportunity to resolve the quality issues. With this as backdrop, we eavesdrop on Jane’s current team meeting:
 In The Clarity PM: 6 Areas to Improve, I talk about six attributes of a what I call a Clarity PM, as follows:
I’ve certainly been burned by not doing each of the attributes well. Number 5, clarity of external dependencies, has brought unwanted surprises that created ugly fire drills. It has caused me to be more mindful of those dependencies and how I unearth and manage them, making me better at intentional external dependency management. Given so, I’d like to share some lessons learned to help you avoid getting bit by an external dependency. Here are six external groups that can carry dependencies that can have a material impact on both your work and the external group’s work: Read more at ProjectManagement.com.
As a parallel to the book, I developed an excel spreadsheet to help you define good-enough goals and work towards those goals. The Nine Crucial Elements to Achieve Good-Enough Contentment Assessment includes an annual goal setting tab to help you identify what you'd like to achieve by the end of the year for each good-enough contentment element and put steps in place to do it. You can download the spreadsheet which you should use after reading the book.
 Recently I read a Forbes article about navigating leadership challenges in a rapidly changing world. The article highlighted 10 areas of focus for survival.
Nothing on the list was an earth-shattering surprise for me. Things like building a robust network, cultivating emotional intelligence, and embracing continuous learning can be found on most lists of focus areas for leaders. What I found interesting was what the article listed as number one: Prioritize mental and physical health. For some, this might not make much of an impression. For me, it brought back a trajectory-changing time in my life that happened more than 30 years ago. Read more at ProjectManagement.com.  Recently, Harvard Business Review published an article about what the next generation of project management will look like. The article highlighted 10 next-generation skills:
Read More at ProjectManagement.com .
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