It’s the perfect holiday present for your hard-working staff and clients: a signed copy of Writing Without Bullshit with a personalized message from you. For less than $15 per person, you can show your workers, your clients, or anyone you value that you’re a no-bullshit kind of person — and make them smarter, too. Here’s how it works: Email…
Should Nordstrom continue to carry Ivanka Trump merchandise? It sells. So Nordstrom will keep selling it. In its rambling email to employees, it wraps that fact in tissue paper and packing peanuts. Why not have the courage to tell the truth? A friend of mine recently emailed Nordstrom to protest its decision to continue to…
It was a beautiful spring day in Washington when the two most powerful people in the free world held their first meeting. She sat primly on the striped couch, waiting. Her silver hair glistened in the sunlight; an active intelligence danced in her eyes. She’d been here before, in the presence of a succession of…
It’s been a hell of a year. The election didn’t turn out the way I expected or hoped. A lot of people that I admired have died. Facebook is full of angst and fake news stories. It is easy to despair. On a personal basis, I am now a year and half into the experiment of…
Donald Trump’s latest statements at the New York Times demonstrated an amazing “flexibility” (in other words, he changed long-held positions). If you were scared of Trump’s rhetoric, perhaps this encouraged you. But once you understand the dangers of negotiating in bad faith, your optimism will evaporate. What is bad faith? In a negotiation, each side…
Here are five ideas for my next book. Tell me which one you like best. Thinking Without Bullshit: Embracing the Discipline of Analytical Thinking Based on my 20 years as an analyst and my training in mathematics, I will describe the steps you need to take to think like an analyst. Will feature interviews and examples from…
Passive voice in opinion pieces is pernicious: it hides who actually is supposed to do stuff. Donald Trump’s choice for CIA director, Mike Pompeo, repeatedly used this technique in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. When you’re advocating surveillance and data collection, we want to know who’s doing it — but Pompeo uses passive misdirection to focus on terrorists…
The Trump Organization settled fraud suits against Trump University for $25 million, removing the trial from the President-elect’s schedule. But because a settlement is a negotiated solution, you can’t immediately tell who came out on top — maybe $25 million is a lot less than the plaintiffs could have gotten. That is, until you read…
United Airlines announced Basic Economy, a new class of travel that lets you pay less and suffer more. In their press release, it sounds like a win for travelers, but as a frequent traveler, I predict a very different outcome. And it raises a question: where are the limits of a PR person’s job of making…