It’s good organizational practice to express stories in as many different media as possible, and by media I don’t mean the obvious platforms–video, audio, social, podcasts, press releases, books, memes, and what have you, though there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re [...]
Among the most-frequently heard complaints by employees, it doesn’t matter how large or small a company is–is that there are too many meetings. That meetings are too long. Involve too many people, many of whom spend most of the meeting distracted by texts and emails. That they don’t [...]
You know how the astronomers said not to look at the eclipse with our naked eyes, or we’d go blind? That’s the way I feel a lot of times about how managers look at data. They stare at it so hard they go blind. If the eclipse itself is all that’s in your frame of reference, your [...]
You know what the traditional entertainment business is? It’s a poker game with six seats at the table. Five of the seats are taken, and one of the seats is always open. That seat is reserved for you, as long as you have money. Doesn’t matter what stakes you want to play for — whether [...]
With very few exceptions, raising your game to an exceptional level of performance takes practice. It’s a well-worn bromide, as old as the punchline of the joke that goes– “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice!” Great performance artists practice. They [...]
There’s a good piece running in Scientific American demonstrating that ‘Storytelling is Surprisingly Arithmetic.’ (I’m geeking on how they use the word ‘arithmetic’ as an adjective!) Research done at the U. of Vermont on 1,300 works of fiction claims to have [...]
I’m lying awake in a hotel room in Milwaukee at 2:30 AM, wondering why someone hasn’t called us back who’d promised to call us back weeks ago about a significant piece of business. Even as I run scenarios in my mind, my noisy, nosey mind, I know I’m barking up a fruitless [...]
When I was in college, we elected a King of the student body. Twice. Robert “King” Kersten, today a surgeon from Cincinnati, ran, at first, as a joke. As a parody of student government. He promised students an ‘enlightened oligarchy consisting of me and my close friends.’ [...]
The Internet of Things, you say? As if it is a new concept. As if, until it’s enabled by silicon circuitry, it doesn’t exist. As if, until we have answered the question How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? angels haven’t danced anywhere. As if the circuitry, and the [...]
Sarah Brennan, who has a popular HR Technology blog, recently wrote about the state of HR Tech in the wake of a downdraft in the LinkedIn stock price. Around the same time, I began hearing buzz around HR automation, which sounds, to my ear, like an oxymoron, like the work it does is turn [...]