Newsletter 64. Why progress requires embracing people’s right to be wrong. Plus the decline in publishing workers, Gucci vs. Lord & Taylor, three people to follow and three books to read. The freedom to be wrong We’ve gotten to a point where we rip people apart for being wrong, when we should be celebrating them….
Early in my career, I became a project manager. Working for many startup companies, I found myself managing lots of projects, and that continued throughout the 30-plus years I worked in the corporate world. I brought three assets to my work managing projects: I lean on the written word as a prosthesis for my brain…
I’ve written before about Boston Globe sportswriter Christopher L. Gasper’s penchant for mixed metaphors, as a way to illustrate how metaphor overload can interrupt the reader’s trance that makes great writing work. But things here in New England pro football have gotten desperate. The New England Patriots, not to put too fine a point on…
No matter what poll-based content you read, you are not just reviewing what the data show. You are reading data, corrected for bias, weighted for lack of representation, scored for bias, aggregated, and then manipulated by a model. Each of these “corrections” is a human decision. These models are valuable, but they do not represent…
In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Stanford University researchers Mohamed A. Hussein and Zakary L. Tormala published a paper titled “You versus we: How pronoun use shapes perceptions of receptiveness.” Thinkers and authors including Daniel Pink and Tamsen Webster have cited the study as justification for using “we” in persuasive contexts. Is this research…
Newsletter 63: A revolutionary new take on management; the lie that Harris and Trump agree on; five ways to write a book. Plus three people to follow and three books to read. What if you actually asked your people what they wanted? Today’s newsletter is a little different. It’s dedicated to my review of a…
I have to continually remind myself that the rest of the world doesn’t operate on the same principles that I do. My principles are so entwined with who I am that I’ve internalized them. It’s “the curse of knowledge” but for business philosophy. So it’s a worthwhile exercise to write them down. My principles Do…
I was minding my own business on LinkedIn when AT&T’s ad popped up. It shows a woman getting several things done at once, including eating potato chips. The tag-line: “Multi-task to the Max.” This is a terrible and disgusting message. Multi-tasking is evil People who try to do two or more things at once will…
When you hand your book in to the publisher to start the production process, it should be complete and perfect. It never is. Everyone is subject to the temptation to sneak things in after the deadline. And you can do this. When the marked-up text of the book comes back from the copy editor, you…