The Audio Blog is going to be a regular installment of Manager Tools. Our intent is to provide you information on about a weekly basis about things that interest us that we find different or amusing or surprising about management that perhaps don't make a strong enough case to be a podcast, or in many cases are not actionable.

We like our weekly casts and our monthly casts to be actionable. That's very important to us, because we know it's important to you. You don't just want theory.

But we see things and hear things and read things and talk about things all of the time that may not be actionable simply because they're interesting or new or different, or because they're simply a data point. And they're an interesting data point to us.

Mike and I read extensively. And often we talk about things, but we know it'll never be a cast, and we feel like we're depriving our audience of what we think and what we see in our consulting work, in our client work, and in our own professional development in working with members and listeners and registered members and premium members as well.

So, this is the first installment of the Audio Blog. And my first installment of the Audio Blog is a topic some of you will probably laugh at. It's about something I've seen advertisements for on TV lately, called "Transitions Lenses", and I see this a lot in technology managers and just technology individual contributors as well.

And those are glasses - eyeglasses - that change based on light and dark. And the idea is, isn't this great? You don't have to wear sunglasses. You can just wear your regular eyeglasses, your prescription glasses outside, and they darken.

Folks, don't do it. There's an enormous problem with Transitions Lenses. It's always been there since the very beginning. They've been making it better, but they still haven't eliminated the problem. And that is the fact that after they've darkened a few times, when you come back inside, they never become completely clear.

You are perceived as wearing shaded glasses, basically sunglasses, inside. What's worse, they're not dark enough to be sunglasses. They're just kind of dark. And I assure you, the people that don't wear them don't like you wearing them. They make a less than professional impression.

The benefit that you get of being able to go outside without sunglasses, which by the way, everybody else has to wear sunglasses, in case you haven't figured that out...The benefit you get is completely your own. And the negativity, which is also completely your own, is that other people judge you harshly because they don't like what they see when they look at your face and your Transitions Lenses, is absolutely your fault. And it far outweighs any benefit that you get from not wearing sunglasses.

Whatever you're doing, if you're wearing Transitions Lenses now, stop. And go back to regular prescription eyeglasses.

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