Dean Brenner

The “Derek Jeter is Awesome” narrative has been pretty well done to death by now, so I won’t belabor the point. But his retirement on Sunday marks the end of a lot of things, above and beyond a baseball career. Sports, celebrity and politics have undergone a sea change in the last 20 years. Everyone […]

A quick thought for you today… We preach “knowing your audience” here at The Latimer Group. We preach it all the time, all day, every day. It is critical to clear communication in the 21st century. In a team context, we would add a slight wrinkle. In a team context, being a great teammate and […]

Today’s post was written by Amy Fenollosa, Director of Learning at The Latimer Group. Did you see Apollos Hester this week? He’s a high school football player from Texas whose 2-minute interview on local television went viral. It’s gotten more than 5 million views in less than a week. What is it about Apollos that intrigued […]

We recently contributed another article to our friends at Switch and Shift, a business blog focused on “the human side of business.” Our latest piece is called, “How to Practice the MOST Human Thing,” and is all about listening to and respecting our colleagues. 21st century communication has become more about speaking than listening. More […]

I’m working with an executive right now who has an interesting and engaging leadership style. He likes to collaborate, he likes dialogue, he wants to hear what people have to say. He allows lots of input, and seems to detest strict hierarchy. I like this style, actually, because it is similar to my own. But […]

We spend a lot of time with our clients talking about ways to create outstanding business communication. And all great business communication has five common characteristics, or ingredients: clarity, brevity, context, impact and value. Every single time we communicate in the work place, we need to be thinking about all five of these things. We […]

In nearly every one of our communication workshops, we spend significant time discussing the role of detail in 21st century communication. Does detail matter? Of course it does. How much detail is necessary? That depends on many things: who your audience is, how familiar they are with the topic, how senior they are, how mission […]

Have you ever worked with someone who “keeps score” with you? You know, that person who always seems to remember the people who owe them something, or who did something bad to them, or how many people they need to get even with? Scorekeepers are people who keep track of how many good things they […]

Have you ever written or sent something to a friend or a colleague, perhaps something important, that you worked hard on, and then been surprised when no prompt response came? It is hard in this situation to know what to think, or how to feel. Did I say something wrong? Did they not like it? […]

This past weekend, I participated as a speaker in a training conference for young leaders. This is something I do every year, and that I enjoy immensely. It’s a great program, well designed, with lots of valuable information from multiple speakers. I spoke twice (both times on good communication skills) to two different subsets of […]