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 Anne Perschel, Julie Winkle Giulioni, Jesse Lyn Stoner, Mary Jo Asmus, and Marcella Bremer.

From Anne Perschel: The Road to Greatness: Let Go of Ego , Here’s How

“To let go of ego, think of your brain as a company with different functional areas of expertise and a different leader for each. Ego is simply one of those functions. Like all functional leaders, Ego is inclined to step beyond his turf. Ego’s natural instinct is to do that – a lot.”

From Julie Winkle Giulioni: RESPECT: Find Out What it Means…

“Anyone who toils away for 40, 60 or 80 hours each week—spending more waking hours at work than at home—understands the profound importance of healthy, productive workplace relationships. And at the core of those relationships is respect. Study after study confirms that employees who feel valued and respected will be more engaged, more productive, and more likely to stick around. At the same time, recent research that Olivia Gamber and I conducted suggests that one of the most important factors to employees is having a boss they respect and trust.”

From Jesse Lyn Stoner: Lincoln’s Secret to Greatness

“Is greatness an attribute reserved for only a few special people? Abraham Lincoln didn’t think so. He believed we are each capable of greatness.”

From Mary Jo Asmus: Your leadership instrument

“In reality, those who are masters of their instrument are as much the instrument themselves as the violin they play. They must attend to themselves to be all they can be in order to continue to play music with mastery. So it is with leadership. Very few individuals are ‘born leaders;’ they must learn, practice, and master their craft”

From Marcella Bremer: Suffer, survive or thrive in organizational culture?

“It’s a simplified story, but you get the picture: there are stages in the development of civilizations, of human life, of workplaces, and so on. They go by various names, but you can simplify them into three stages:
When everything is normal, you survive. This is the default line.
When possibilities and basic needs are lacking, you suffer.
When opportunities and need fulfillment is abundant, you thrive.”

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 revisiting the matrix organization, the perfect pinot problem, saying goodbye to buying software, a study that indicate that firms with more women in the c-suite are more profitable, and calming employees’ minds with mindfulness.

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.

If you’re a boss, you should check out my Working Supervisor’s Support Kit.