There was a great article in last month’s Inc about a corporate spy. What he does is, at least what’s described in the article, completely legal. It relies on public records and ‘loose-lipped’ employees. In one example, he describes finding the US contact for an Asian patent holder in minutes using Google Translate and international […]

Mark and I have every intention of writing a series of casts on onboarding. Until that happens, please, please don’t use two services I read about this month in Inc (not available on line). The description of the Allaboard service in Inc says, ‘All about lets new hires log on to view company videos and […]

Mark and I recently talked about what to do to help someone when they know they’re about to be or have been laid off, so it was top of mind when I read an article about Mayor Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. In it, he was asked a question about how he reacts to […]

When you read a whole lot of different things all at once, themes start to jump out at you. I read 10-15 magazines at the weekend, and I kept seeing the same theme expressed by the successful people who were interviewed. Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote said: ‘Hiring people smarter than yourself is the […]

We’re happy to announce that registration is now open for our Effective Manager and Effective Communications Conferences in Washington, DC on June 4 – 5, and Houston on June 18 – 19.  Attend our Effective Manager Conference on day one or our Effective Communications Conference on day two.  Discount offered when you attend both days! […]

I read a bunch of magazines at the weekend and it occurred to me that I really don’t think all that deeply. There was an article in Fortune about a company which grows turf and then sell it to football stadiums. It’s a $60bn a year industry that employees 800,000 people in the US. I’ve […]

In our conferences we tell people that everyone gestures – even people blind from birth. Gestures aren’t related to what we see, they’re related to what we’re saying. Over the weekend I read some research about smiling. The researchers looked at athletes at the Olympics and Paraolympics and measured their smiling. They found: 1. There […]

In an article in Entrepreneur Ross McCammon says “We decide not to be on time (and it is always a decision) the message isn’t, I’m too busy. The message is, I don’t respect this meeting enough – I don’t respect the people waiting for me in the meeting room enough – to do the easiest […]

It seems surprising that there are still articles written about multi-tasking. I thought that we’d all accepted that we can’t multi-task. However, in December’s Entrepreneur magazine, there was another article, letting us know, that no, nothing has changed, and we still can’t multi-task. There was one line that helped me understand the problem differently though: […]

In an article in Success Magazine, there is some guidance on how to ask questions to speakers in presentations. It says: express your reservations or ask your questions in a respectful, non-confrontational way. In other words, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. Don’t mutter, “That’s never going to work.” So half […]