Practice DOES Matter
Posted On November 20, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
I had an outstanding experience yesterday with a workshop participant from one of our major client companies. This young man had participated in one of our one-day presentation skills workshops about six weeks ago. And then he signed up for a different workshop this week, a two-day “executive communication skills” workshop. In the October session, […]
The Death of Spin Communication
Posted On November 10, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
The recent election cycle in the United States has made one thing very clear to me… that we have now reached a critical breaking point in our tolerance for “spin” communication. What is “spin” you ask? Anyone who lives in the USA knows exactly what it is, because that is all we hear anymore in […]
Global Communication and the 3 Things Every Audience Needs
Posted On October 9, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
In the coming weeks, we’ll be doing some work with clients on three continents, and executives from 15 different countries. In planning business travel of this scale, it always gets me thinking about how we communicate in that global environment, and how we have to adapt what we do to an audience that may not have […]
The Recipe for Great Communication Is Never Complete
Posted On September 15, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
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 […]
Interpreting the Silence: “Why Haven’t They Gotten Back to Me?”
Posted On September 3, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
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? […]
Can We Disagree Without Being Disagreeable? (If wishing made it so…)
Posted On August 6, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
I prefer speaking with people who think differently than I do. It’s more interesting. It’s more challenging. It makes me think. It opens my eyes to other perspectives. And sometimes it makes me angry. But it’s all 100% healthy. And unfortunately our society – in business and politics, and especially on social media – is […]
Choosing the Correct Tone When You Speak
Posted On August 4, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
Sometimes it is hard to know the right way to say or write something. Sometimes it is hard to know the correct tone to take. How should I speak to these people? How formal or informal should it be? The answers depend on lots of things: the nature and seriousness of the topic; the level […]
How to Edit Your Presentation When Time is Short
Posted On July 29, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
It’s a common occurrence in the business world. You prepare a meeting, presentation, or speech for a certain length of time, only to find out that you have a lot less time than you planned for. Sometimes we even learn our fate as we are walking into the presentation. We’ve spoken a lot lately about […]
It’s Never as Clear as You Think It Is
Posted On July 11, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
There is a disconnect that I witness every day. The disconnect is between our own perception of what is “clear” and what others think about that clarity. When we have an idea or a strategy or something in our head, and we have thought it through and worked it out, in our own minds it […]
A Tip for More Powerful Storytelling
Posted On July 3, 2014 BY Dean Brenner
This is a simple idea, but a very powerful one. We’ve all heard it before, yet so many of us continue to ignore it’s value. Whenever possible, tell your story with pictures and not words. Pictures create images in the mind, and for most of us the mind retains the things it sees much longer […]