Sherrie’s Blue Emails: What I Learned From My Bridge Director’s Consistent Email Communication

November 24, 2009

Just like clockwork, I received my twice-weekly email from Sherry, one of the bridge directors and instructors from my local duplicate club where I play.  For more than six months, since I returned to playing duplicate bridge, I have been receiving these reminders about the Tuesday and Thursday morning games.  “Are you playing tomorrow morning?” she’ll ask. Read on and you’ll understand what I’ve learned about business communication from Sherry. 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

• 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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