Independent business blogs are blogs that aren’t supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don’t need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don’t get as much publicity.

This week, I’m pointing you to posts by Art Petty, Mary Jo Asmus, Lolly Daskal, Suzi McAlpine, and Kate Nasser.

From Art Petty: Learn to Identify and Assess Assumptions as Part of Your Decision-Making

“Unchecked assumptions in our strategic and product or project planning activities are like that car in the blind-spot of our mirrors when driving down the highway. Failing to check before making a move can have disastrous consequences. Effective teams and planners, much like careful drivers, look hard to isolate and address blind-spots before turning into them. The starting point for this process involves isolating, unpacking and stress testing assumptions.”

From Mary Jo Asmus: How to help people to change themselves

“You’re frustrated with a good employee who reports to you because you feel they aren’t working up to their full potential. You’ve worked with them for some time now, and they appear to want to make the changes you’ve agreed to together, but you don’t see them.”

From Lolly Daskal: Stop Looking For Leadership!

“But I am going to tell you to stop looking for leaders. Because the individuals that are leaders, you don’t have to look for them, they are there and they will rise up, they will do so in the following ways:”

From Suzi McAlpine: How To Move From Blame To Empowerment (and Why It’ll Make You Feel 1000 Times Better)

“When something goes wrong at work, it’s easy to move into the ‘blame and complain’ mode. Here are just a handful of scenarios that might lead you to get the Blamemobile out and take it for a ride:”

From Kate Nasser: Leadership Tunnel: The Need to Be Right Leads Nowhere

“Leaders, overcome the need to be right or you’ll find yourself in a leadership tunnel alone going nowhere. Then what?”

That’s it for this week’s selections from independent business blogs. If you liked this piece you may enjoy my regular post on “Leadership Reading to Start Your Week” points you to choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms about strategy, innovation, women and the workplace, and work now and in the future. Highlights from the last issue include looking for leadership guidance in classic philosophy, why the best senior teams thrive on disagreement, how America can bring back manufacturing, four innovation mistakes that you really need to avoid, preparing teams to lead innovative change, Women in the Workplace 2017, and four ways work will change in the future.

How I Select Posts for this Midweek Review

The five posts I select to share in my Midweek Review of the Independent Business Blogs are picked from a regular review of about sixty blogs I check daily and an additional twenty-five or so that I check occasionally. Here’s how I select the posts you see in this review.

They must be published within the previous week.

They must support the purpose of the blog: to help leaders at all levels do a better job and lead a better life.

They must be from an independent business blog.

As a general rule, I only select posts that stand on their own, no selections from a series.

Also as a general rule, I do not select posts that are either a book review or a book report.

I reserve the right to make exceptions to the above.

Here, on Three Star Leadership, I post things that will help a boss at any level do a better job and live a better life. At the The 360 Degree Feedback blog, I join other bloggers with posts on leadership development. And, at Wally Bock’s Writing Edge, I share tools and insights to help you write better.

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