How Obama’s Story Telling May Shift the Conversation on Health Care

August 17, 2009

The debate on health care has reached a fever pitch with both sides — those for and against it – dug in for the fight.  Until now, President Obama, the most cerebral of presidents, has used the logic of his argument to try to communicate to the American people the details of his health plan.  But it hasn’t been working. Read more

Communicating With Passion

April 18, 2009

Whenever change permeates a big company, resistance is inevitable.  The announcement of change itself raises anxiety levels, creates doubts in employees’ minds, and makes them feel vulnerable and uncertain.  And it raises serious questions:

•    What will this mean for me?
•    If I must operate differently, am I up to it?
•    Do I really believe what I’m hearing about the future of the company? 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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