There’s a good list of project management podcasts over at PMcrunch which is interesting to check out. I would have listed the same here.

I’d recommend: The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner I especially enjoy, you can find Cornelius on Twitter for a good PM quote too.

Audio programs on motivation and business like the ones you can buy at Nightingale Conant are also often very inspirational and easy to lay down and pick up again, very practical in the car.

I’d recommend: The New Psycho Cybernetics audio program, it’s a very good listen. The weird title put me off at first, but it’s genuine stuff. I guarantee you you’ll get some good ideas out of it. I got interested after reading this post at Freestylemind.com.

Some very cool audiobooks I enjoyed are:

• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, goes good with the book
  , has great insights on networking.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People: Unabridged, even if you read the book, it’s worth it.
• First Things First which is the audio version of the book I got as a reading assignment on my PM training at Xios, also very good.

I moved to the other side of the country, my commute got a bit longer. About 2 hours a day longer to be precise. It’s been like this for several months now and I’ve found listening to podcasts and audiobooks to be a very rich experience, certainly with the many traffic yams around Brussels.

Hope you like the list, if you have any other audio programs or cool podcasts you’d like to recommend, I’d love to hear from you.

Edit (10/06/2010): I found some inspiration on Bil Gates’ blog, he recommends lectures from the Teaching Company. I’m listening to The Art of Critical Decision Making at the moment, it’s great!

You couldn’t believe how much money could be saved every day with clear communication. If you can’t meet in person, call, if you can’t call, chat, mail, pigeon post, … but arrange a point in time where you can talk person to person.

It just works. We even had a hotel desk bell at Nascom that we hit every time we called with a client as a novelty.

Some things I learned:

• Be specific and compact in the goals you set for others.
• Learn how to delegate correctly.
• Take a step back, see if your behavior matches your goals.
• Let people know up front that you are going to evaluate their work.
• If you have to reprimand someone, finish with an encouragement.
• If you have to reprimand someone, reprimand the behavior not the person.
• If someone does something good, praise it, do it soon.

The book is a short story about a man who wants to learn about becoming a manager, you read about how he learns these lessons from a successful manager known as “The One Minute Manager” who does all sorts of things in one minute. It’s easy to look past the story and that’s the point of the way the book is written. The advice the book dispenses is really good. On the back it says …

… a powerful recipe for getting big results from people …

… and that’s true.

There are a lot of good one-liners and lists taking up a full page making the book even shorter than 112 pages, it really takes a very short time to read but it’s powerful stuff.

My score: 8.5/10

• The Struggling Manager
• Project Smart
• PM Hut

The Struggling Manager has some really cool articles about efficient communication and I bet Rob Redmont – the author – writes just like he talks to people. Good advice, over and over.

PM Hut makes up for it’s ugly design (it’s true) with a high posting rate and a lot of very good authors who probably also have their own blogs somewhere.

My head of project office told me about Project Smart when we where talking about PMI training. It’s a great training resource and the post frequency is just right.

I use Google Reader to keep up to date with the latest and greatest, if you haven’t tried it yet you should, it saves you time and for that it totally rocks.