Businesses — large and small — tend to default to the written word to manage and get ideas across to teams. Words are easier to produce. They are the commerce of emails. And most office-software packages have a nice big fat word-processing tool. We forget that not everyone absorbs the written word best. Work is a grown-up classroom. Learning […]
First sentence: Best of 2014
February 12, 2015 by
I’m a word person, but even I stand daunted by the floods and floods of text surround the asking for contributions. The emails and letters never…stop…coming. In many of the asks, the development department kicks off their letter by carefully re-stating the obvious of who you’re supporting — “Thank you for your past support of Punktinet School,” or […]
Good management target: Screamails
September 14, 2014 by
We’ve all gotten them: Emails that are terse, all-capped, copying everyone in the world and sent with HIGHEST PRIORITY. They usually arrive late on a Friday, or even in the middle of the night. These are the emails that make good managers cringe, emails that are destructive of teams, of morale, of productivity. Scream-mails. So […]
Make meetings count #2
May 7, 2014 by
Meetings. We spend hours in them. We invite too many people. We don’t invite the right people. We fail to question whether a standing meeting has outlived its function, or whether a new standing meeting really needs to be born. We confuse throwing people in a room with running a productive meeting. A few years ago, […]