Management development training is one option available for those wanting to keep their skills sharp during these trying financial times. By keeping up with trends in management and updating skills, you are helping to keep your job during a recession.

Many of my employees have enrolled in customer service training programs to better serve our customers and to ensure they come back and purchase our services again. We feel that if we provide a great experience for our customers they will want to return.

The CEO of my company wants all of the managers to participate in organizational development training to make sure we are all as professional as possible and to keep our company in performing at its best. Professional development programs keep everyone looking sharp.

By participating in any courses that improve skills, we are helping to keep the recession from hurting us. The investment is small compared to the monetary gains.

I collect a few things like thimbles and stamps. But, my favorite things to collect are maps. I have all sorts of different kinds from city maps to road maps to country maps. The thing that I like most about collecting maps is that for every place you can think of, there is most likely at least one map for that area.

My mom is from southern Texas and my father is from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Every time I go there I end up finding new maps of the neighborhoods where they grew up. Now, my parents are in a nursing home so they don’t get to make it to Texas to much these days but they like to see those maps so they can tell me what used to be at some intersection.

It’s like showing them the maps of all over the USA gets their memories going and it refreshes their minds too. They seem more coherent after they look over a map.

Greg Jarboe writing for Search Engine Watch suggests that Online Reputation Management Requires Cabinet War Rooms.  What he is saying is that  because of the speed that news is now incorporated into universal search results, you’d need to havea specialized ‘War Room’ in place to deal with almost inevitable reputation crisis the moment they arise.  He compares this ‘War Room’ to the one Churchill used in London during WW2.

If your CEO suddenly faces a crisis that will negatively impact your company’s share price by 20 to 30 percent, is there a war room?

And down the corridor, is there a map room, where your SEO and PR people can collate and summarize all relevant information on the crisis and present it on maps, which are constantly updated?