Dean Brenner

Over the last two years, at least one thing should be crystal clear to all of us… that an inability or refusal to evolve can lead to existential threats to our business. “Evolve or die” has become more than just a cliché… it has become a truism that we ignore at our own peril. And […]

One of our central tenets in teaching persuasive communication is to know your audience. Having an informed sense of your audience’s needs, concerns, and context (did the company just suffer a drop in the stock price, did the VP in the room just get a big promotion, is a merger shaking everything up?) allows you to craft […]

If you are like the vast majority of people we meet in our workshops, then you are struggling with too many meetings, too many messages, too many requests, and too many demands on your time. If you are like the vast majority of people we meet in our workshops, then the boundaries between your home […]

In this episode of The Message Makeover Podcast, we dip into the waters of one of the most widely-publicized scandals in recent US history. We interview John Vandemoer, the former sailing coach at Stanford University who was caught up in the college admissions scandal that ensnared coaches at many schools including Yale, Georgetown and USC, […]

The people who know me outside of work, or who know my family, know that we live on a street in a town that takes its Halloween very seriously. Our street has become Halloween central in our town, drawing kids from lots of surrounding communities above and beyond just our own. I keep an accurate count […]

I have a wide range of conversations with the people I coach. Coaching discussions on communication and leadership skills can cover a lot of territory. But there is a short list of things that seem to come up over and over and over. And at the top of the list is this seemingly simple idea. […]

I am an amateur history nerd, and love to read political and military histories in whatever precious little spare time that I have. Recently I was reading a short piece about the mental challenges soldiers often have after they leave the battlefield. After Vietnam, and through to present day, we refer to it as post-traumatic […]

One of the greatest struggles that every organization goes through is the battle against institutional memory loss. The loss is gradual. It begins before you are even aware that it has begun. And if left unchecked, the loss will gain momentum, and usually ends with a terrible fall, at great cost. History gets repeated. Mistakes […]

Communication clarity is really hard in the 21st century… a mantra I have recited over and over in this space. It’s hard because of the noise, the competition for mind share, and shrinking attentions spans. But often the best way to combat difficulty and noise is to focus on the most simple, basic elements of what you […]

Over the course of this blog, we write frequently about the important ingredients for great communication… clarity and brevity chief among them. Today we touch on a third critical ingredient: context. Context is critical. Context creates relevance. Context helps your audience engage and listen. Context helps your audience care. We are all time starved. We are all attention deprived, to varying […]