Personal Project

Introducing: Bibliophilanthropy.org

2016 01-19 Bibliophilanthropy Prep

Happy Valentine’s Day! What better way to celebrate a day of love than sharing that Bibliophilanthropy.org is fully live and open to the public! I hope you will join me in creating a philanthropic community of book bloggers and lovers. If you have any questions after checking out the site definitely get in touch!

I’ve been developing Bibliophilanthropy.org off and on since November 2015 and you can read about it here on the site. It’s something I believe in and is a great way for the book blogging/loving community to come together and put our money where our mouths are.

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 403: What Millennials Want From Work – Jennifer J. Deal & Alec Levenson

Long story short, Millennials are just like everyone else so quit complaining about us! 😉

When I saw the title I knew I wanted to read it as I’ve been reading everything I can recently on management, the workplace and professional development topics that interest me. The publisher, McGraw-Hill Professional, kindly provided a pre-publication copy* and it will be available the first week of 2016.

Obviously, the ultimate lessons of the book are a bit more complicated than the opening of this post, but it really does boil down to something as simple as we’re all the same, just reacting to ever-changing technology, economy and society. It was reassuring to see this with well backed global research and written in an approachable and readable way.

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 392: Simple Giving – Jennifer Iacovelli

When I read Doing Good Better, I was looking for this. That isn’t a knock on Doing Good Better, it’s a kudos to Simple Giving and Jennifer Iacovelli. And I guess that’s an even bigger kudos to Tarcher/Penguin for sending me a copy because I would never have found sought it out, even though philanthropy is what I do for a living.* Simple Giving comes out next week October 27, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Where Iacovelli succeeds in the breadth of which she covers in this rather short book. She talks about individual and crowd sourced philanthropy, she talks about volunteering and socially conscious purchases and businesses and she spends time talking about how you can engage even the youngest of philanthropists in volunteering their time.

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Books, Professional Development

Book 383: Managing Up – Rosanne Badowski and Roger Gittines

My final foray, at least for the time being, into professional development was Badowski’s Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship with Those Above You, and if I’m completely honest it’s the only one I should have read.

I enjoyed the “theory” and the “professional opinions” in the Harvard Business Review compilations I read, Managing Up (The 20-Minute Manager Series) and HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across, but neither of them had the wit, the humor or the charm of this book. Seriously, there is something to be said about reading a book that could be an incredibly boring (or pedantic) subject that makes you laugh out loud or giggle to yourself on public transportation. They all provide great advice, but this book offered the advice through the art of storytelling and not the other way around.

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Personal Project, Professional Development

Finding My Voice

As my final follow-up piece in my series of why my blog and online presence will enhance future career opportunities I’m going to talk about my voice. (For the first three pieces click the links: introduction, technology and building relationships.) For all intents and purposes “voice” in this piece can easily be exchanged with “aesthetic.”

2015 03-04 Yet Another Typo, Proofread PeopleLet’s get the basics out of the way; I was not an English, Communications or Journalism major. A lot of the English grammar terms I know I learned while taking Spanish because I apparently didn’t pay attention in high school English class. (They taught us that right?) What little editing I do know I’ve picked up on my own, learned in a really intensive copy editing class or am schooled in on a regular basis by the amazing editor at work. What’s great is that, none of this keeps me from wishing to copy edit books, like the one above, or to organize and copy edit the internet, but that is an entirely different world.

All of this being said I still have a voice. I have a distinct voice and it’s worked to my advantage personally, on this blog, and professionally, working with students and young alumni. Someone recently said to me that the ability to change your voice based on who you’re writing to/working with is a skill you can’t be taught, that you either have it or you don’t. I like to think I have this skill and mostly it is thanks to this blog.

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