You've heard about idiot employees Facebooking themselves out of jobs. If you manage folks in a shop that allows access to socnets you've probably spent some time wondering whether your people are using Facebook to dick around at work or are leveraging it for meaningful connections (or some such nonsense).…
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When I was young I spent a summer working in a glass factory. It made bottles of all types. The shifts were 12 hrs at a time, from 7 am to 7pm or vice versa. Breaks, lunch and station changes were scheduled to the minute. They have places like this…
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I just read a great post by David Silverman re how bad biz writing is partly a result of what we learn in school. Talking about the excessive use of big words and the tendency for length to trump clarity he says: In every essay, "-ion" and "-ing" words outpace simple…
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Writing is really hard. It is one of those things that lots of people claim to be good at but aren't. Mechanics, style, flow and the inability to express thoughts succinctly are the usual suspects when it comes to crappy prose. Even if you are OK at putting words together,…
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In a dictatorship candour is generally absent from public life. This creates situations where the dictator has trouble getting good information about what is actually going on. For example, in the first Gulf War Saddam Hussein had such faulty intelligence re his own military's capacity that the Iraqis got into…
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Since yesterday was so much fun I am back again with installment two of "Shoot that term in the head." Today's victim is "this is a critical time." This unfortunate group of words is often employed by managers who are trying to impart a sense of urgency to their troops.…
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This post by Julien Smith on the perils of saying "I love you" inspired today's post, the first in a new video series called "Shoot that term in the head." In business there are sorts of fucked up and vague terms that people use as ways to obfuscate, betlittle, exploit,…
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I just grabbed Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars. True to form, it's bomb ass. The book details how marketing is really about telling stories - a premise you've definitely heard if you've been near a business in the last 5 to 5000 years. So, if telling a story is…
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Do you remember "show and tell" in kindergarten and grade school? Members of the class would get up, showoff some object and tell the teacher and their peers about it. It is a great exercise and, for most of us, one of the first real experiences with formalized presentation. During…
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I used to love really wordy authors. Salman Rushdie, Conrad Black type guys who have such ridiculous command of English that native speakers are often left wondering 'what the fuck did that guy just say?' Pedantry does impress in some circles. In others it is quickly labeled arrogant. The normative…
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