Behind the very successful author teleseminars series is a new friend of mine, Elizabeth Marshall.  Together with the brilliant Michael Port, who wrote Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling, comes a little book with big sales ...

Have you noticed that if you send an e-mail to a Web site address labeled “Info” (for example, info@company.com), you will never, ever hear back from a real person?  It seems that this “Info” address is akin to a black hole, and it’s particularly upsetting if the site lists no other person or entity you can contact with a question or ...

One of my colleagues at Edelman, Dan Santow, has a great blog of writing tips, and I thought this week’s post on clichés was worth sharing with all of you. Says Dan:  A cliché is a metaphor or phrase characterized by its overuse. For the most part, using clichés is lazy, an easy out, a ready-made excuse not to take the time needed to think ...

A few days ago, I was scheduled to be on a local NPR radio show with one of my biggest and longstanding influencers, Bruce Tulgan.  For those of you who might not know, Bruce is internationally recognized as a leading expert on young people in the workplace and has his own consulting firm, Rainmaker Thinking, that has trained employees in ...

Continuing my investigation into I/O Psychology, this week I’m reporting on Groupthink, a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970s.  Groupthink occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because of group pressures.  Groups affected by groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize ...

I get a lot of e-mails asking me how people should use LinkedIn for business networking.  And the truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself, which is why I’m looking forward to my friend Jason Alba’s book on the topic.  This week, though, I came across a great post from Chris Brogan at Lifehack with some tips for making it easier ...

I am always instructing people to be fastidious about written communications at work – including casual e-mails.  This means choosing your words carefully and proofreading any and all documents before you send them out into the world.  In this era of virtual teams and constant e-communication, how you come across in writing is a critical ...

When you’ve reached a certain level in your career, or have been in the same field for a long time, it’s easy to become overconfident and think that you know exactly the way things should be done.  This, however, is a dangerous place to be.  Not only will you get lazy in your approach to innovation, but you’ll also be prone to an ...

Dave Lorenzo at Career Intensity talks about a scene he recently witnessed at his office.  A group of clients visited company headquarters for a day, but during the scheduled meetings parties on both sides spent much of the time typing on their Blackberries.     Says Dave:  “If you were a company employee and you invited a ...

A few weeks ago, I read a post on how to generate a following for your blog.  I would love to give credit to the author, but I can’t remember where I saw it.  In any case, one of the post’s recommendations was to include the blog’s URL in your e-mail signature.  This may sound like a no-brainer, but I hadn’t thought of it, and so I ...