Category: Communication

Connecting with an audience is a critical business skill. We all need it when we try to get a point across to someone else. We may be teaching a new idea or skill, explaining the importance of a new strategic initiative, or maybe trying to persuade a prospect to become a client. In my recent […]

Imagine you are the customer service representative working the live chat support the day of the company holiday party. It’s pretty quiet in the office, but you get an incoming chat that says HAPPY HOLIDAYS! You think “wow…so kind”, but then you notice no reply and eventually it ends. Immediately afterwards, you get another, and […]

One critical aspect of brainstorming and other idea-gathering processes is that one must not judge the ideas as they are presented. After that gathering phase, though, the ideas are useless if no patterns or relationships can be discovered. One good solution for that is the Affinity Diagram. The process was identified in the 1960s by […]

If you’re worried about interviewing for a SQL Server job, here’s some advice from the former head of an IT department on what matters (along with examples from the three critical areas where you need to have answers ready). As an instructor for Learning Tree’s Querying SQL Server 2014 and 2016 courses, I’ve worked with […]

In my previous post on improv, I said about improv, “It requires thinking on one’s feet. More importantly, it requires working with the other actors in the scene — each player must be able to respond to and lead the others with lines and actions that enhance the scene and make it entertaining for the […]