What CEOs Can Learn About Employee Communications From the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own”

November 14, 2009

I just returned from a joyous concert by the U.S. Army’s “Pershing” Band, as it is known, that was in town for its annual concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.   As I sat there with friends tapping my feet and applauding every brassy patriotic song, I thought what a great lesson I was learning about communications.  And that’s this:  when you communicate with joy, you turn an audience into your biggest fans. Read more

The CEO as the Chief Communication Champion

April 8, 2009

The shadow of a leader – meaning the impact an executive has on his or her employees – is always bigger than you think.  This is especially true when it comes to trust and believability in internal communications.  For internal communications to be meaningful, it is important for executives to lead by example: “Don’t just do as I say, do as I behave.”  In addition, employees in most companies are craving leadership – they want champions they can trust to lead them in new directions. 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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