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 leadership posts by Suzi McAlpine, Ken Downer, Julie Winkle Giulioni, Ed Batista, and Art Petty.

From Suzi McAlpine: Are you operating in your sweet spot?

“Below is a simple tool you can use to help you have conversations around strengths and development with your team members. It’s also a great one to use on yourself! I call it the Sweet Spot Development Model”

From Ken Downer: Making Time: There’s Never Enough; Can We Make More?

“It was a busy week; I needed more time to get it all done. But the other day, my daughter thought a yoga session at a nearby vineyard sounded like a good idea. She was even more right than I realized. There among the grapes, I found that making time is possible if we focus on the thing we are doing, and not on all the things we aren’t. Here’s what I mean.”

From Julie Winkle Giulioni: Storytelling and the Reserved Leader

“The problem is that others learn from our stories. And storytelling is among a leader’s most important skills to affect change. So, reserved and facilitative or not, we must master this ability if we want to optimize our impact and results. Here are three things I’m doing to help me get over the hump and become more comfortable and adept at sharing my stories.”

From Ed Batista: The Importance of Shared Narrative

“Warren Bennis, the great leadership scholar and a World War II combat veteran, noted that of a leader’s essential skills, ‘the first is the ability to engage others in shared meaning.’ This process, which we might simply call storytelling, entails distilling a complex set of circumstances into a readily understandable narrative, providing distinct but mutually compatible versions of that narrative to different audiences, and repeating this process until the narrative is shared by the entire community.”

From Art Petty: Why You Should Maintain a Professional Journal—Twenty Prompts to Help You Get Started

“I’ve long believed journaling is one of the most powerful continuous improvement tools we can use in our working lives. Yet only a small number of individuals I encounter employ this great self-development tool. My goal is to increase that number. Here’s some encouragement:”

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. And, at my blog for part-time business book authors, I share tools and insights to help you write and publish a book you’ll be proud of.

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