Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development

Structured as five-minute webisodes, the Professional Development Series is a ‘meat and potatoes’ guide that is available to anyone with access to the Web. Mary Delaney of Careerbuilder.com, Lon McGowan of iClick, Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, David A. Junge, MD, Chris MacAskill of SmugMug, Warren Brown of Cake Love and Ann Marie Harrington of Embolden, among others, have devoted their time to speak candidly about their experiences coming up in their respective professions. These revealing interviews with this high caliber group of professionals has been assembled into one video collection that can now be viewed on Cambridge Who’s Who Connect and the Cambridge Who’s Who Video Channel.

The Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series was designed as an educational resource to enlighten those interested in realizing business growth, career development and/or professional brand-building. Interspersed within each chapter are handy hints and tips that sum-up and reinforce the notions expressed by the featured professionals. Each of the five initial Professional Development Series webisodes also focuses on a particular subject: Branding and Marketing, Networking, Business Financing, Motivation and Sales. For a taste of what these content-rich chapters entail, be sure to watch the Cambridge Who’s Who Video Series Introduction 

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

The first full chapter, Branding and Marketing: The Right Way to Attract Attention, explains the significance of establishing your brand, which is the single most important means to convey your identity, strengths and goals. Part of branding involves informing your clients or contacts about a promise that you are willing to make to them – it is up to you to determine how you go about fulfilling that commitment and conveying that in your branding campaign. This episode of the Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series also explores the relationship of networking to promoting your brand and marketing your products and services. 

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

In Strategies for Successful Networking the featured experts emphasize the value of keeping up with your daily networking activities. This includes interacting regularly with professionals in and outside of your industry, maintaining a strong Web presence and utilizing several online social media tools. When it comes to successful networking, your appearance – as in what you wear and how you carry yourself – can serve as the perfect conversation starter because, you never know what professional opportunities lie ahead. Chris MacAskill of SmugMug leads by example.

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

The Business Financing: Tips to Transform Your Ideas into Reality video cuts to the chase with a valid insight: financing for your company or bright idea begins with a solid, detailed business plan. From there, funding your venture becomes a constant process of setting realistic goals, monitoring your cash flow and redirecting your strategy at a moment’s notice. Two passionate and successful business owners, Warren Brown of Cake Love and Lon McGowan of iClick, have each learned first-hand the challenges of establishing their own companies; they offer valid advice on how to ignite your entrepreneurial fire.

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

Proven Sales Techniques contains important information about effective sales tactics, and it also bestows relevant tips on how to handle yourself as a professional. Learn from some of the most successful salespeople in the game – many of them have faced failure in their careers, but have used such experiences to sharpen their skills rather than accept defeat. Mary Delaney, an executive at CareerBuilder.com, shines as a beacon of inspiration in this episode, detailing her 12-step plan to get potential clients on the phone. The segment concludes with a list describing the “Top 10 Characteristics of a Successful Salesperson.”

By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Claire Power Murphy

Cambridge Who’s Who Industry Expert Claire Power Murphy

Much has been said about the importance of proper branding, marketing, networking, financing, motivation, sales, expertise and technology use. There are many resources available to support your business, especially here at Cambridge Who’s Who.

You learn and attempt to apply all the techniques and your business grows along with the oft-accompanying stress. Or the business does not grow. In either case the KEY factor is you!

The time has come to add a new component to growing a healthy business and that is you! Do you grow regardless of circumstances?

Have you noticed the acceleration of new knowledge with which you must keep abreast? Have you experienced the fast pace and increase in competition? If you wish to ‘keep up’ and even excel, it is time to examine the degree of flexibility with which you flow with the times.

Much more than you realize has to do with the condition of your own body and its ability to adapt. Is your circulation of ‘life-giving’ blood flowing freely? Is your chemistry balanced so you can maintain a level head while incorporating increasing numbers of people and new ideas into your business?

You pay much attention to the quality of fuel for your automobile. Are you fueling yourself with the highest quality fuel (nutrition) to attain the maximum energy to keep ‘ahead of the curve’?

Self-improvement IS the key element which will make a difference for you, your loved ones, society, AND your business!

Claire Power Murphy,
Cambridge Who’s Who Top Industry Expert:
Health, Wellness, and Nutrition!
www.selfrej.com

Claire Power Murphy is a Cambridge Who’s Who Top Industry Expert on health, wellness and nutrition.  To learn more about Claire’s area of expertise and service, please visit www.cambridgewhoswhoconnect. Here you can learn all you care to know about Claire, her esteemed colleagues and more in an interactive and informative format.

By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Bruce Deitrick Price

Here’s an odd thing to confess: I have been writing about education for 30 years. It has been an exciting adventure; it has also been at times totally mystifying.

We have grown to expect that there are faster, more pleasant ways to accomplish any task; conversely, there must be slower, ineffective ways of doing so. It is the second methodology that the education establishment seems to prefer. Our public schools appear almost intentionally designed to perform at a mediocre level. How can this tendency be explained?

When you look at the statistics and surveys, you will notice that they paint a consistently bleak picture. We spend billions every year on public education, yet SAT scores continue to fall. Our top students do not compete well with top students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. And then there is the really big mystery of 50 million functional illiterates. Who let this tragedy happen?

To answer these questions, I researched further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators from a century ago looked at life, children and this new field they had created. The unexpected reality is that they were not primarily focused on education as most of us understand the term, but were preoccupied with social engineering. Education was a set of tools with which they intended to build a new, more leveled society.

Many of the articles I have written attempt to explain where and why our educators got off track. I have been especially fascinated by the Reading Wars, a significant conflict in American education and a clear illustration of what can happen when elite educators lose their way. Basically, phonics was scorned; a flawed method called whole word was enshrined and literacy promptly started to decline.

As I gained more understanding about the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board to improve our public education system. We simply have to identify the failed ideas and get rid of them.

Education reformers typically try three other approaches: spend money, recommend new policies or point out best practices. I do not think these techniques will work now. The problem is that the education establishment is married to its bad ideas; these people are set in their ways. We need an intervention.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in an education war with our own educators. I want to persuade the public that this is an intellectual war – we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. I do not think we have any hope of improvement unless we confront what happened to American education: namely, that our schools were made ineffective by design.

So now we have to move in the opposite direction: discard the gimmicks that were smuggled into the system; then restore basics and academics to their proper prominence, albeit taught in the most ingenious ways. Our first job is to zero in on the dozens of overhyped “progressive” innovations that turned out, in practice, to be destructive and regressive. We will be better off without Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, No Memorization, Self-Esteem, Bilingual Education, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything and a dozen others.

Many people like to believe that our educators are clumsy or befuddled by fads. No, I am afraid not. You would have a much clearer sense of what happened if you were to imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey seated around a table discussing their ideological goals, devising tactics, and trying to keep the public from interfering. I know people who shy away from the word “conspiracy,” but let’s be realistic. This track record goes back nearly a century. Let’s show respect for those 50 million functional illiterates who spent their lives in a twilight zone, thanks to John Dewey and his pals. You cannot create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade. I think the evidence proves that our education establishment did just that.

It is painful to deal with such an unpleasant history, but it is also very liberating. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Dewey and his friends were socialists; they were trying to create a socialist America. This goal is clear in their writings. For them, the obvious first step was to reduce individualism and to raise more cooperative children. How do you do this? Dewey’s answer–and it is still in play–is that you drastically limit the time spent on reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., while giving much more time to group activities. And when you do teach substance, you teach it in muddled, ineffective ways. There is the whole agenda in a nutshell. It is only a matter of time before everybody knows a lot less and thinks much less clearly.

I should mention, by the way, that I never criticize teachers. I am concerned only with top education theorists, administrators, etc. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much the victims of these educators as the children and parents are.

—
Bruce Price deals with all of these topics on his website Improve-Education.org and in his fifth book “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA – What Happened to American Education.”

By Cambridge Who’s Who

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