If you’re writing anything interesting, you’re collaborating. And if you’re collaborating, Google Docs and Google Sheets are indispensable tools. Most of you work in organizations where Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are standard. They’re comfy and familiar. If you send a file in those formats to somebody, you know they can read it. So why bother…
The only purpose of business writing is to create a change in the reader. Create the change and you succeed; fail to make the change and you’ve wasted your time. Before you spend hours on a piece of writing, spend 15 minutes on the one tool that will make it most likely to be effective. Learn…
I try to be balanced. But I admit that I am biased in favor of candidates who are coherent. By the end of last night’s debate, there was only one of those left on the stage. Donald Trump sounded like a conspiracy nut on speed. Because I analyze writing, I won’t talk about who “looked presidential.”…
Why do you work? To make money? Or because you’re doing something that you love? Not all of us get to do work that we love. If we’re lucky, we don’t do work that we hate. Here’s my idea of what you should do to move your career forward. Take a job that pays enough…
The joy of BlendTec’s “Will It Blend” videos is that they take expensive, painstakingly produced items — like iPhones — and reduce them to an undifferentiated mess. And that’s just what a book index does to the content in a book. Writing Without Bullshit covers a wide range of content, because everything is fodder for a writer….
Here’s what you need to know about authors: they spend a lot of time on their books, care about them, and think that they and their books are special. If you respect what they created, they’ll be happy to talk to you about anything reasonable. If not . . . well, they’re very witty smartasses,…
Visions statements inspire. Wells Fargo’s inspired fraud. A close read of the company’s Vision & Values Statement reveals how the bank’s employees took some of the statements in this vision too far, ignored others, and created a corrupt scheme to meet quotas and violate customers’ trust. Elizabeth Warren mentioned the Vision & Values Statement during her withering…
Bombs went off in New York and New Jersey. This has become an occasion for our leaders and candidates to say what they are going to do to keep us safe. The thing is, there is no way for them to keep us safe. That’s scary as hell, but it’s incontrovertibly true. Here’s what kept…
UPS has the information about customers, locations, and shipments to be an amazing leader in customer experience (CX). It has the people, devices, and bar codes to turn the Internet of Things — of packages — into an artificially intelligent engine for customer delight. But based on my experience, UPS is the slave, not the master,…