Employees as Company Change Agents

March 26, 2009

No question, companies are struggling to control their brand essence and key messages during this economic slump.  Communicating positive news is more important than ever in the 24/7 news cycle and with an Internet that can circulate good – and, let’s face it, mostly bad – news around the globe in a matter of seconds.  But companies are overlooking their most important advocates to the outside world – their own employees — because of a lack of internal communications.  And this can torpedo a company’s reputation. 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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