Endeavorance
The point of our blog isn’t to show you how up to date we are with buzzwords and jargon. It isn’t to instruct you with how-to guides, tips, tricks, and hacks. It isn’t to encourage, endorse, or engage in conformity. The point of our blog is to provoke, to counter popular notions, to question the status quo, to prompt your imagination, and to challenge you to think and achieve more than you might otherwise. Whatever happens, it’s worth the endeavor.
Endeavorance
The point of our blog isn’t to show you how up to date we are with buzzwords and jargon. It isn’t to instruct you with how-to guides, tips, tricks, and hacks. It isn’t to encourage, endorse, or engage in conformity. The point of our blog is to provoke, to counter popular notions, to question the status quo, to prompt your imagination, and to challenge you to think and achieve more than you might otherwise. Whatever happens, it’s worth the endeavor.
Content Marketing: By the Numbers
When you structure your content correctly, you’ll maximize the amount of text people read. And when you improve the readability of that text, you’ll increase both comprehension and retention. As a bonus, when you do both, your SEO score will increase naturally.
Four Ways To Get Fired At (From) Work
I have an idea for a new product. It's called Egregiously Chuckleheaded Opinion Liability Insurance (ECOLI). It would indemnify publications that print bad advice — along with the the addlepated know-it-alls who author that advice with no regard for the unintended...
How Do You Take Your Coffee?
For many of my friends and co-workers, the coffee bean is as essential as lavender oil to a stress-relief yoga-therapy session. Until that dehydrated bean juice crosses your lips, there is no starting the day. But why is it that some of us prefer extra cream while others need 10 packets of Splenda?
The World Wide Web: A Writer’s Guide from a Design Guy
When you structure your content correctly, you’ll maximize the amount of text people read. And when you improve the readability of that text, you’ll increase both comprehension and retention. As a bonus, when you do both, your SEO score will increase naturally.
8 More Unrealistic Expectations That Will Ruin You
I like Forbes. I do. But one of two things must be true: (1) Children are its new target readership. (2) It's sucking wind for content. Case in point: Forbes published this article from a dude with a Ph.D. in clinical and industrial-organizational psychology: "8...
They Should Have Called Me
The intellectually avant-garde Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published another one of its groundbreaking and staggeringly insightful posts. This one, entitled, "Want to Be More Productive? Sit Next to Someone Who Is", contains this breathtaking revelation:...
14 More Simple Expectations Great Employees Have of Their Boss
I saw a LinkedIn post the other day that had 18,400 likes, 619 comments, and 7,791 shares. Those are big numbers. The post is called, "14 Simple Expectations Great Employees Have of Their Boss". I'd have been a little less surprised at the numbers if the title had...
Give Yourself the Right Challenge
As I've suggested with some regularity, the only way we're going to achieve innovation is to stop talking about and aspiring to it. Because it will never be consistently defined, it will never be implemented in any coherent, constructive fashion. The same is true for...
My Semi-Fictional Resumé
As soon as someone decided marketing could be inbound and automated, you had to know there was trouble brewing. Sure enough. The fictionalization of everything has now been extended to People Services (formerly Human Resources or HR). Here's how I know that's...
The Usual CRACKPOTS
The story you are about to read is true. Names, links, and actual terminology have been withheld to protect the innocent and the unwitting from skulduggery and knavery — and to shield the duplicitous and the unscrupulous from the slings and arrows of righteous...
My Digital Valentine
With Valentine’s Day bearing down on us, the online-dating sites are ramping up their attacks, particularly on television.
No More Bitter Pills
I’ve never been one to butter people up. I don’t know why. I seem to somehow lack the knack for telling the truth without ticking someone off.
Trust Everybody, But Cut the Cards*
A gentleman named Venky Ramachandran ("I design context for the Future of Work") wrote a LinkedIn post recently that made it easy enough to imagine he'll soon be designing the context for his the Future of his own Work, since he had the courage (or the naiveté) to...
5 More Skills That Innovative Leaders Have in Common
With no fanfare of any sort, the venerable Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published the first in a series of brain teasers, word puzzles designed to look like articles, containing syntactical dead ends, grammatical errors, and logical non sequiturs. The purpose of...
Reliable Idiots
When I was in my teens, Brent Musburger was on CBS covering the NFL. During one such telecast, my father told me Musburger was an idiot. I took Dad at his word and remained skeptical. In the 1980s, I was watching a college football game with my sons, both of whom are...
Crowded Lines
Recently, for the first time in nearly 30 years, I heard the song, "Don't Dream It's Over", by the Australian band, Crowded House. (The band comprised Paul Hester, Nick Seymour, and the Finn brothers — Neil, Tim, and Dorsal.) Along with a beautifully melodic chorus,...
Unnatural Abilities
Fast Company, in a magnanimous attempt to help David Hoffeld sell his book on selling (why did he need the help?), published this article — "Your Brain Can Do More Than You Think It Can, Says Science". Hoffeld is (according to his profile on Amazon) "CEO and chief...
My Trendy New Year
I was in a chi-chi shop during the Holidays that had a display of handbags fashioned from something called vegan leather. My first thought was that vegan leather must come from cows fed only on corn-fed grass that had been humanely slaughtered by filing down the teeth...
Nigerian Prince: RIP
I didn't receive any formal notice of his demise, but it appears the Nigerian Prince who was, at one time, so notorious for his spam emails, as blatant as they were transparent, has bought the farm. I suspect this because I recently received the following email from a...
Gibberish: 3,647,105 — Language: 0
Already reeling and darn near senseless, language is still taking body shots, kids. This post showed up in my LinkedIn feed after attracting some recent comments. It contains this nugget: Frustration and even anger are common, understandable reactions to new ways of...
Go Ahead, Back Up
This just in, kids. According to Harvard Business Review, networking events are a waste of time. That's right. The author, who's the founder and CEO of an un-networking community, has this to say: Regardless of how you define networking, your success will be directly...
It’s About the Fight
Seth Godin published a recent post that said this, in part: There are plenty of people who will pander, race to the bottom, and figure out how to, "give the public what it wants." But that doesn't have to be you. Professionals have standards. Professionals push back....
No Dots in the Echo Chamber
We're not losing our ability to connect dots, kids. We're giving it away. That reality was driven home by three things that came to my attention recently. Two of them were articles. The third was a website. Here they are, in order: 6 Cognitive Biases That Are Messing...
The Empath to Reality
Sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, you've got it made. (Variously attributed.) As I get older, I continually wonder about reality, about the nature of reality, about our ability to perceive reality, and whether there is any objective reality at all....
Have You Heard From Yourself Lately?
It must have been a slow news day at the Wall Street Journal. The editors commissioned Alina Dizik (God bless her for being young) to write a piece about office space. She produced the article, "Open Offices Are Losing Some of Their Openness", which, through no fault...
An Evening of Hartford History
During a recent visit to the Infinity Music Hall & Bistro in Hartford, Connecticut, to see and hear Marc Cohn perform, I ran into a friend, who happens to be an architect. That led to a later discussion with Anne Bjorkland* about the depressed market for...
On the Road … to Business
A confession: As a late-blooming college student (I was 28 when I hit the hallowed halls of higher education), I became a Literature major because I didn't have the vaguest notion of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I still don't. I still haven't grown up. And I...
Regressive Innovation
Are you ready for this? The venerable Hartford Courant ("the country's oldest newspaper in continuous publication") ran an article about Aetna's trimming its workforce (another Obamacare casualty), in which it published this: As it scales back its workforce, Aetna is...
Today’s Interview
Following last week's press release, Yours Truly (YT) interviewed the two principals quoted in the release — Herman Belch (HB) of World Technology Firm (WTF) and Albert Murfwhiffle (AM) of Nano File Works (NFW). Herein, a transcript of that interview. YT: Gentlemen,...
Today’s Press Release
I don't know if you've seen this. But I have ... everywhere. Baked, AK – October 47, 2016 – World Technology Firm (NYSE MKT: WTF), a leading global provider of innovative solutions and services, today announced a strategic partnership with Nano File Works, Inc. (NYSE...
10 More Reasons a Candidate Should Walk Away From a Job Offer
Apparently presuming we've never been gainfully employed before now, the ink may not yet have dried on our birth certificates, or we still might be a tad disoriented from our tumble off the turnip truck, Recruitment Grapevine saw fit to contribute to the deterioration...
The (Rocket) Science of Breathing
I was absentmindedly listening to a conversation between two people the other day, when one of them said, "Nadi shodan." I immediately, reflexively, but rather presciently (without intending any pun, of course) said, "Gesundheit." Little did I know I'd be sorry for my...
The Lessons of Experience
More than 20 years ago, I worked for The Travelers. That's right: In those days, it was called The Travelers, as opposed to Travelers, it's known today. I worked in the division that sold health insurance. That's right: In those days, it was called health insurance,...
5 More Reasons Why You Won’t Reach Your Business or Fitness Goals
Here we go again. Since common sense was replaced by ignorance and pedantry, we've been beleaguered by all manner of lists, reasons, how-to articles, how-not-to articles, and sundry claptrap intended to convince us (or remind us) we have no idea what we're doing and...
Rules Are For Chumps
Good news! We now have even more reasons to justify our conducting ourselves like idiots — linguistically lazy idiots at that — and to rationalize our utter disrespect for language and its precepts. That's right. The editors at Inc., apparently tired of doing their...
Disruptive Innovation Research
A phrase caught my eye the other day. It was one of those phrases that was sad, disheartening, and demoralizing all at the same time. It was sad because whomever wrote it no doubt believed he thought it meant something and also believed he knew what that something...
Nuts for Donuts
If you're anything like me, you have a hard time getting away from your desk during the day, even for biologically and physiologically important things like eating and ... well ... you know. There are always things that have to be done: The next deal has to be made....
Two Missed Boats
The other day, I saw the LinkedIn profile of a person who'd given himself the title, Freelance Conceptor. When I saw it, I thought, as Robbie Robertson says, "Oh, this is sure stirrin' up some ghosts for me." Contemplate that for a moment. For that matter, just...
The Nosey Know
Oh, boy. Here's another guy who wants to tell us what to do. It's no coincidence, by the way, that he also wants to sell us something (dig a little more deeply under the free free Web training*): Interested in more? This article is an adaptation of a longer blog post...
Purple Is the New Powerful
One of the reasons we love what we do is that we get to hear every conceivable rationalization for subjectivity, arbitrariness, and disregard for the target audience. Case in point: We recently created a new corporate identity and corresponding collateral materials...
5 More Scientifically Proven Ways to Give a Killer Presentation
The other day, I came across an informercial for Prezi, not-so-cleverly disguised as yet another in the interminable myriad of how-to treatises to which we find ourselves ceaselessly subject in this, The Golden Age of Self-Evident, Sophomoric, and Unrequested Advice....
Some Things Can’t Change
These are tough times here in these United States. Seeming to be anything but united, we seem to be intent on finding every way imaginable to divide, to disagree, to fight, to kill, and to point fingers at everyone but ourselves for what we're doing, for the...
7 More Common Characteristics of Unproductive Employees
One of two things must be true: It's easy to be hoodwinked by people who don't do anything. We've lost our ability to recognize people who don't do anything. I'm not sure which of those is true. But I know one of them must be because Inc. saw fit to publish an article...
Water For the Drowning
Read this. Then read it again: This has spawned a plague of traffic brokers who specialize in traffic laundering at an almost unbelievable scale ... “real” traffic is undervalued or, some would say, indistinguishable from fraudulent traffic ... everyone is doing it,...
We Are What We Eat
The perils of ingesting gluten have been fairly exhaustively chronicled, here and in other other, almost equally august media. Nevertheless, as is our incorrigibly human knack, we remain susceptibly gullible to all manner of fads, frauds, flimflams, and other forms of...
10 More Red Flags Not to Hire That Promising Candidate
The dense streak that necessitated the publishing of "Ten More Signs Your Manager Wants You Out" to let employees know when they'd already hit the skids continues. Only now it extends to the manager who wants you out. That's right. Apparently, managers are now so...
The Greatest
Sometimes, we measure our gains by taking the measure of our losses. In the span of two-and-a-half years, three hugely influential men have passed from my life — my father, B.B. King, and now Muhammad Ali. There was a point at which I couldn't imagine my life without...
Ten More Signs Your Manager Wants You Out
Some 20-plus years ago, I was asked by the company for which I worked to fly from Connecticut to Virginia for a meeting on a Friday afternoon. It turned out to be the most amateurish, unprofessional, and bureaucratically typical exercise in passive-aggressive...