The FDA might be accidentally brilliant. Every now and then for the past several years, that thought has crossed my mind. Without context, it may seem like a strange conclusion to make about any government agency. For anyone who was there in DC on November 12, 2009 when the FDA held their first public hearing
Continue reading »
We often use the word “visionary” to describe leaders or companies, but rarely in connection to metrics. If the typical communications strategy is dispersed via Powerpoint within a large organization, usually measurement is the last slide before the end. We need to transform our relationship to measurement. The problem is, marketing people are typically guilty
Continue reading »
Imagine you’re a chef. You have spent the last twenty years learning your craft. Studying ingredients and cooking techniques. Working for sometimes maladjusted and dictatorial restaurant owners or lead chefs. And now you’ve made it. You have your own kitchen that you lead – and you’re recognized. Your food has made it onto the plates
Continue reading »
There is plenty of advice out there on how to create a great presentation. Most of it centers on two pretty common pieces of advice: Tell more stories. Use bigger fonts. Neither is always easy to do, but the more events I attend – the more I realize a single fact that still manages to
Continue reading »
It is tempting to search for the next big thing. There were no shortage of journalists sent to SXSW this past weekend for their annual quest to answer exactly that question. And this year many came up empty — or at least indifferent. Some even skipped the event completely. Of course we like to see
Continue reading »
About four years ago I started getting a lot of unsolicited emails from women. My first book, Personality Not Included, had just come out and readers were emailing me with their own stories of how having a personality had made a difference in their own careers. While school often teaches us that we must remove
Continue reading »Today was the first snow day of the year for those of us living in the Washington DC area. And though the amount of snow that caused schools and businesses to shut their doors for the day would make any of our Northern neighbors laugh out loud … it was still a big day. As much as
Continue reading »I’m going to break one of my own rules today. Usually, my philosophy for sharing marketing insights is to always use a positive tone. Even when a strategy is executed poorly, I would rather focus on missed opportunities than write about the negative. That usually works for me … but not this time. What doesn’t
Continue reading »
There are exceptions to every rule. That’s what we like to think, isn’t it? We are all unique in our own way. No two people (or snowflakes!) are alike. There’s no shortage of cliches to describe the same thing. The Snowflake Mindset says that everything is unique and we should never forget our differences. The
Continue reading »
