On the program today for Thursday May 17, 2012
- Keeping your morale up as you focus on your career with Frank DiGiammarino.
- New online tool — Citizen Bridge — that has just been introduced in Canada to try to help improve the political dialogue.
Money: it seems like we’re never off the the rollercoaster of whether there will be a government shutdown or not. All this week we’ve been talking about House Speaker John Boehner’s comments about the debt limit — essentially drawing a line in the sand.
President Obama yesterday warned congressional leaders that he would not tolerate a replay of last year’s debt-ceiling fight, which led to a near government shutdown and the first credit-rating downgrade for the United States. The Washington Post reports, the President said that kind of political deadlock is “not acceptable.”
But just how important is this debt fight anyway? Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein notes that a no debt deal option isn’t the nuclear option that it was last year. According to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the US won’t hit the debt ceiling until a few months into 2013. By that time, either the Bush tax cuts will have already expired and the automatic spending cuts will have already begun or the parties will have come to some big fiscal deal and the debt ceiling will have been raised along the way.
One other note — and big kudos to the folks at EPA. How and when to respond to comments in social media has been a significant challenge for agencies. The EPA has put together two documents — one is guidance to employees on how to represent EPA online the other is a social media response flow chart about how and when to respond to a comment.
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A Few Closing Items:
- President Obama yesterday awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously, to Specialist Leslie Sabo Jr. — 42 years after his selfless act of heroism during the Vietnam war saved the lives of his fellow soldiers. Sabo, then 22, died on May 10, 1970 as his patrol was ambushed near a remote border area of Cambodia. The attack by North Vietnamese troops killed seven of Sabo’s fellow soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and would come to be known as the “Mother’s Day ambush.”
- Do you hate meetings? Most of us do. And we’ve been in those meetings where a handful of people — or one person — hijacks any progress. Say, for example, the multi-taskers — people who are so important that they can’t possibly be tied to focus on the topic at hand. The Wall Street Journal offers some advice for making meetings more productive. Have a clear agenda… Draw out quiet people by asking them in advance for a specific contribution… limit the length of slide presentations… and set a end of meeting time and stick to it.