Harvard Gets an “F” for an Elevator Speech

September 28, 2009

Even Harvard is teaching people how to develop a one-minute elevator speech.  But I wouldn’t suggest you try the HBS Elevator Pitch Builder .   As various words whiz by on the screen, you’re instructed to click on the ones that would help describe you.  I could barely keep up, much less give any serious thought to how I wanted to position myself. Read more

Business Communication via the Electronic Grapevine

September 17, 2009

Sitting at my laptop in my neighborhood Starbuck’s, I felt the tension release from my body as Firefox transported me to the Internet.  I had been offline for two days.  As I attended to some personal business, without my computer, I was truly feeling totally out of the loop. Read more

Advice for Employers on Labor Day: Keep up the Employee Communications

September 7, 2009

Labor Day was ushered in this year with some of the glummest news.  On Friday, the government said unemployment rose to 9.7 percent and nearly six million jobs have been lost in the past year.  Many experts are predicting this will be a “jobless recovery.”

So what does this mean for companies and their employee communications? On the surface, it seems like not much.  Plenty of fish in the sea, if you want to replace someone.  But I have a different point of view – I think the unemployment ranks could be worse news for employers than their employees. Read more

Is Letter Writing Dead?

September 2, 2009

I mean the old-fashioned letter with a date, inside address, a salutation, body of the letter, closing and signature. What passes as a “business” letter in email is really nothing more than some phrases and short-cuts like BTW (by the way) TTYL (talk to you later).  Emails are piling up in our mailboxes.  Half of them we delete without even reading them. I wonder how much impact these emails are having and whether an honest-to-goodness formal letter might actually cut through the clutter. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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