First Time Here? Take A Quick Tour …
Aziz Ansari wasn’t planning to stick around after his show for photos. Most of the people in the packed theater in Washington DC where I saw him perform his Buried Alive Comedy Tour last week probably weren’t expecting that anyway. Despite social media breaking down virtual barriers to conversations with unreachable people (and Aziz has
Continue reading »There are two kinds of coaches in sports. There are coaches who create a playbook before a game and follow it – and there are coaches who make their playbook for a game based on watching the game and making adjustments based on what is happening. Guess which kind of coach usually leads more successful
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For years I have given students in my classes at Georgetown one basic rule for writing assignments: there is no minimum word count. Why? Because the more words you use, the more likely it is that many of them will be meaningless corporate-speak. Today I’m excited to share that I’m part of the team behind
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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