Category: Communication

Lifehacker recently featured a post titled “How To Use Improv to Change your Life”; the post made me think how improv (improvisational theatre) had changed my life. Way back in high school I took a summer theatre class from a teacher who’d worked on Broadway. We did lots of fun activities that summer, but my […]

The headings in your email or larger documents are probably more important to your readers than what you’re actually writing about. Fortunately, it’s easy to figure out both how to write genuinely useful headings and to know where to put them in your emails or documents. How you’ll use your time getting this right, though, depends […]

A participant in a critical thinking class I taught recently suggested a solution to a problem I’d posed to the group. “Let’s do a PMI analysis,” I suggested, expecting the class to be familiar with the tool. None were. The tool can be a very productive way to frame a discussion. What is a PMI […]

Writing clearly and effectively is difficult — in fact, there’s no chance that you’ll get it right the first time….which is why you get to rewrite. Rewriting isn’t about fixing your mistakes, rewriting is about adding excellence. Here’s a three-part plan for doing rewriting right.My buddy Mal Stiefel once said he was never at a loss for words […]

In the end, team success isn’t about the abilities of the individual team members — it’s about how well the team members can work together to leverage each other’s abilities. And, for team members to work together well, they all need to be experts at four skills. There are four skills that every team member needs for the team […]