Mar 17
“When a company can’t seem to get its strategy straight, it’s often because of a reluctance to make truly hard choices. It is natural to want to keep options open as long as possible, rather than closing off possibilities by making explicit choices. But it is only through making and acting on choices that you …
Jan 02
How many people would miss my work if I stopped contributing it?* That’s the question that’s been nagging at me as I enter 2013 — but I’m approaching it in a positive way. It was a challenging year; I ran into a lot of roadblocks as I tried to create content that customers would find …
Dec 09
I’ve been having difficulty sleeping lately, so I was particularly irritated about being awakened the other night by a loud noise. I had fallen asleep in the couch…and the loud noise was a commercial that was more than a few decibels louder than the basketball game I was watching. I’m not sure whether it …
Aug 11
I keep running into people who are frustrated by what I call the Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen phenomenon. It happens when you’re working on a project where you start with a reasonable number of team members, but then the meeting invites start getting forwarded, multiple people from the same group start joining, and …
Feb 12
For the past few years, high-profile bloggers led by Chris Brogan have urged readers entering the New Year to identify three words that will act as rails to keep them headed in the right direction for the coming year instead of creating a list of resolutions that are either vague or directed toward a single …
Feb 01
I recently heard a podcast with Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne (the Manager Tools and Career Tools guys) that quoted a passage from John Brown’s Body in a way that really resonated with me. It really gets to the heart of the challenges of turning strategy and planning into execution. Or, as Mike Tyson once said (and I …
Dec 28
It’s a slow week at work, the rest of the family is either doing other things or sleeping late, and I’ve been feeling lately like I’m not in control of things to the degree I have been in the past. So I’m focusing on six things to get myself ready for next year — so …
Sep 21
At the end of his terrific Social Media Workshop in Philadelphia last week, Jeffrey Gitomer retook the stage (there was a certain aggressiveness (in a good way) about the way that each of the speakers attacked their subjects) and sent the troops out to battle, imploring us to look at our notes and ask ourselves, …
Sep 13
Does your organization have an Alex Barron? Barron is the substitute offensive lineman who cost the Dallas Cowboys a victory over the Washington Redskins last night when he committed a holding penalty that negated a Cowboys touchdown on the game’s last play. Forget about whether the Cowboys should have ever been in that position at that …
Jul 13
One of the great challenges in business communications is making a computer-generated letter sound personal and still achieve its goal. It’s not easy to make a collection letter feel like it was written to an individual, to walk a line between friendly and firm and recognize that many of the recipients are embarrassed to be …
Loading tweets...
Ways to Follow Me
Click on a button to find me on Twitter, see my LinkedIn profile, subscribe to my RSS feed, or contact me by e-mail, snail mail, or phone.