I am a convert. As I have written before, I now buy most of my books (all that are available digitally) on Amazon’s Kindle App for my iPad. I get my protein bars though Amazon. I get my ink for my printer from Amazon. And a whole lot more. And my experience on Amazon has… Read More Amazon’s Secret – Make it Easy; Make it Fast; Make it Insanely Convenient
Getting the steps right is proving brutally hard, even if you know them. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto —————- This week, I am presenting synopses of Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, both to law enforcement professionals. (And my colleague Karl Krayer is… Read More Getting the Basics Right (Like Communication, and Team Building) – It is Still, and Always, Hard To Do
News Flash: You can get a free copy of The Myth of the Garage by Chip Heath and Dan Heath from the Kindle Store at Amazon. ———— This is really interesting. And I like it. And not just because it is free. I can’t begin to tell you how much I like reading on the… Read More The Ebook, The Myth of the Garage, by the Heath Brothers – For Free!
On Slate.com today, there is a post mortem on Second Life, and a pre-mortem on the “doomed” Google+. The authors are the Heath Brothers (the Second Life piece: Why Second Life Failed), and Farhad Manjoo (the Google+ take down: Google+ Is Dead). So, what do we learn? (By the way, I am a big fan… Read More Second Life, Google+ and the Very Rough Road to Successful New (or Sort-Of-New) Endeavors
We are what we eat, so they say. And, here’s the really interesting/surprising/not-so-surprising news. We eat what we have been eating, over the very long haul. Here are a number of excerpts regarding the 25th anniversary of the study of what we eat, from Sylvia Rector (Detroit Free Press): Trendy though we think we are,… Read More We Eat What We’ve Always Eaten – Subtle Change vs. Massive Innovation; Maybe it Depends on the Industry
Let me help you plan your reading for 2011. The issue is… Leadership Development. Look at those words. Think about them. They say a lot. Mainly they say this – leaders have to be developed, and leaders have to focus on, and work on, continual development. This does not happen by accident. Some leaders may… Read More Here’s a Suggested Reading List for Leadership Development (for 2011) – Now, with Update
Do you have any idea how much time is wasted trying to figure out just what that other person is trying to say to you? Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by that other person trying to figure out what you are trying to say? Unclear messages, whether verbal or written,… Read More Clear; Simple; Concrete; Unexpected; Credible; Story; To the Point – Communicating 101
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the Heath brothers describe a very real problem for people who give speeches and presentations. Here’s the problem. Speakers believe that their listeners know more they actually know. Speakers do not want to “speak down” to the audience. They do not want to treat… Read More Remember that Your Audience is “Intelligent, but Ignorant”: ”The Curse of Knowledge” (wisdom from the Heath brothers)
Cheryl offers: I was at DFW today catching a business flight to Nashville TN. Most people traveling this month seemed to be dressed quite casually, really comfortable for the hot summer months, with a few noticeable exceptions. The one exception that caught my eye was women in 5 inch high heels. Don’t get me wrong,… Read More “Clarity dissolves resistance.”
I have reached the point where I just need to quit reading. It is all so confusing. (This is not the first time I have reached this point…) Malcolm Gladwell in Blink and the Heath brothers in Switch tell us that we are better off with fewer choices. Give us too many choices, and we… Read More Decision Paralysis vs. Preference for Variety
First Friday Book Synopsis 