#MakeYourPoint

The world I grew up in and the world my young son is growing up in are vastly different. And I’m not even that old! But when I was a kid, there was no cable TV, no internet, no streaming content… We had five channels, and you watched what was on, commercials and all, and […]

Did you learn some new things last week? Do you look at the world the same way you did six months ago? Do your business strategy and business goals change over time? In other words, if my knowledge of you and your business is based on where things were for you six months ago, would […]

I just returned from my 25th college reunion this past weekend, and yes… it was fun and exhausting, and a wonderful walk down memory lane. I spent time with great friends who I see regularly, occasionally and almost never, and all of it was amazing. Every reunion contains countless “so what have you been up […]

We write all the time in this space about the importance of getting to the point. No one likes to sit in a meeting, or presentation or on a conference call and listen to someone delay or ignore the most important information. We hate it when others do that to us. And yet many, if […]

Simply get to the point. I write about this topic a lot… and I keep writing about it, because every day we see people speak who take their sweet time getting to the point. We are all busy, we are all suffering from reduced attention spans, and we all hate sitting in meetings, presentations or […]

We spend an incredible amount of time speaking with our clients about capturing attention right up front when we speak. In a hyper-speed, over-scheduled, attention-starved world, it is critical that we have the skills to capture our audience’s attention right away. Otherwise, they will never engage, they won’t be listening, and they won’t absorb anything […]

My wife recently gave birth to our second child, a baby girl born in May. What a blessing… we are grateful every single day to have our new little one with us. Over the course of the last two months, I’ve been thinking a lot (obviously) about family, and when you spend time every day […]

In our communication skills workshops, there is a theme that always comes up that seems to surprise first-time participants. We talk about many of the most important aspects of great business communication: clarity, brevity, being memorable, setting context, communicating value, staying “on message”… all of the things that are required in the 21st century business […]

We are learning to deal with details and data, enormous amounts of it. We have spent the last 20+ years making massive improvements to the ways we create it, gather it, store it, share it, and analyze it. But it is only recently that we have realized that all this information and data and details […]

We all know how it feels to have our time wasted. Have you ever been in a meeting/presentation/conference call that seemed to have no purpose? Or where the speaker could not get to the point? Or where you wondered why you were even there? [Pause for you to nod in agreement…] Have you ever listened […]