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If you have perused the list of “Podcasts I Listen To” on the right side of The Hot Iron, you will only see a few podcasts, but it is a small but mighty list. My favorite is The M Show, a weekly podcast by John Wall covering business and marketing. John is a friend, and I have been fortunate to have been a guest on several of his shows.

As an avid reader of The Hot Iron, you may have heard of or subscribe to the spoken feed from Odiogo, a service that reads blogs and creates a podcast from the content. The link to my Odiogo feed is at the top of the right side of the Web pages.

In a shameless attempt to intro The M Show, I will use the Odiogo reading of this blog post to create a vocal intro for John. Without further interruption to you daily schedule:

Hello, this is the digitized voice of Odiogo at Odiogo.com that reads aloud The Hot Iron blog by Mike Maddaloni at thehotiron.com and you are listening to the best podcast ever, The M Show, with John Wall. I hope that sounded OK?

As I hear the podcasts of my posts after they are created, I don’t know how it will sound. Hopefully it will meet John’s strict quality standards!

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Since 2001 my family, friends and I have participated in walks in Boston and Chicago to support the American Liver Foundation (ALF). This is a result of my channeling my emotions and energies after the loss of my Mom that year to Primary Biliary Cirrhosis, or PBC, an auto-immune liver disease that mostly affects women. Through funding research, wellness programs and advocacy, ALF is the leading organization in the US fighting liver disease.

This year my lovely wife and I will not be able to participate in the Liver Wellness Walk & Fun Run in Chicago, but that is not stopping us from participating. Taking a page from what I do on the Internet, we are forming The Virtual “A” Team, and out tag line is “We’ll Be There In Spirit!”

Anything you can do to contribute to this cause is greatly appreciated. Please visit our team page to make a contribution by credit card – if you would like to give by check or cash, please contact me directly.

Thank you in advance, and feel free to bookmark or pass along this post!

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Where I was behind on meeting my goal of reading one book a month this year and writing my “take-aways” from them here at The Hot Iron, I am well ahead on reading but behind on writing! This post gets me caught up on a journey of reading, not to mention clearing off my bookshelf. As I read books, I give them away. This makes room on my shelf and I can share what I read with others.

The book Not On The Level by Michael V. Maddaloni is a welcome departure from the books I have read so far as it is fiction. It is the story of Joe DeFalco, a first-generation Italian-American baby-boomer who grows up in Philadelphia and his life story from grade school to retirement. As an Italian-American myself, I greatly enjoyed reading this story.

If you read the story and then read the bio of the author, you will see they are very similar, so it can be assumed that much of the book is based on real events or stories heard through his life. The book takes you from his youth in Catholic schools to the Marines, college, the Secret Service and corporate America to this retirement. At each stage there are opportunities presented to Joe and decisions to be made. Where some earlier decisions in his life may not have been the best he made, many of these were influenced by his environment. As he grows and experiences more of life, his wisdom shows in his decision-making.

As a result a take-away from this book was on decision-making and how much they are influenced by our environment. Fresh in a new environment, these influences are greater than later as we get accustomed to it and make our own observations and couple them with past experiences. I also have to admit another take-away is to read something other than business books.

My overall take-away from this book is that you need to know who else is out there who shares the same name as you! Though our middle initials are different, I share the same name as the author of this book. I first found about the book and author when Googling myself, and many others have pointed this out to me as well. I don’t think we are related, as Maddaloni is a town in Italy and many people have surnames derived from where their ancestors are from. Nonetheless, in addition to my recommendation to read this book here on The Hot Iron, I will contact him directly with my praise for his enjoyable work.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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