Clear communication is hard work – even for communications professionals. Our company has always skewed in the direction of over-communication. We have weekly staff meetings, biweekly practice group meetings and daily team meetings. We set financial and operating goals collectively, as a company, and provide regular updates throughout the year. Sometimes, open communication feels thankless. [...]
In our personal lives, we are often cautious about who we choose to trust, out of fear that we’ll get hurt. In business, savvy leaders often take big risks in order to find success, but they also exercise a healthy amount of caution about who they trust as business partners and advisors. When I came [...]
I’ve always had a tendency to agonize over major decisions – college, jobs, moving, buying a house, etc. I become an information hoarder, trying to gather as much detail as possible to weigh my options. Working at an agency – or working in PR for that matter – you’re often forced to make decisions based [...]
In movies, my favorite scenes tend to be close-ups and panoramic shots. Close-ups are intimate; they help me see details that I might otherwise miss. Panoramic shots take me out of the moment-to-moment action and provide context. Both make me stop in my tracks and think about the story from a new perspective. Like movies, [...]
If you’re in the PR industry, you’ve spent endless hours debating, agonizing over and reading about the future of PR. But it’s not every day that you’re invited to look into the crystal ball of one of the great PR minds of our generation. Last week, Worldcom Public Relations Group invited its members to do [...]
[Full disclosure: I am a New York Giants fan.] As a leader, sometimes it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong. It just matters that you make a choice. Actually, that’s completely untrue. While decisive action can earn you the respect of your key stakeholders, New York Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin would be the [...]
Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Drug Reps Soften Their Sales Pitches.” In it, Jonathan D. Rockoff reports that several drug companies (including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck& Co and Eli Lily & Co) told sales reps to stop “detailing” doctors with aggressive, tightly-scripted sales pitches and instead provide information that doctors really want [...]
The idea for this post struck me as I was reading the back of a frozen fish sticks bag. I’m sure it sounds odd, but so was the fact that the messaging stuck with me. I was first drawn in by the description – that they add only 35% breading vs. 50% of most national [...]
Fun, for me, is: Holding my 6 year old upside down until he giggles Watching the Golden Globes instead of the Giants this weekend Sneaking a good piece of fiction into my business travel Sometimes work is not fun. There are lots of good reasons for that. Budgets grow smaller, project scopes change and turnover [...]
The average tenure of a PR professional at an agency — title and company size depending – is short. That frequent change often disrupts clients, but that change also begets opportunity for a fresh perspective on what could be fusty account work. Cue the new guy. That’s you. The objective: prove your value proposition to [...]
