Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

Who remembers the Mike Myers SNL skit Simon ?  (For an introduction, or refresher click the link ) Somewhere along the way of becoming an adult, we've stopped communicating visually. If you look at Mike Myers in that SNL skit, he's doing the most basic form of effective communication-- combining pictures with a story.  PowerPoint slides with bullets. Carefully formatted Word documents. Long emails that are grammatically challenged. These are the things that dominate our business communication.  And you wonder why business people complain how horrible communication usually is within the company... In Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley which is a book that I read a while back on my Design Thinking binge, he writes a section on Drawing Confidence. In that section, he refers to Dan Roam who is a visual thinker. This is a guy that can basically wake up your right brain if you choose to awaken it. (Click on his name to see what he's about) An effective way to f...

Everyone has heard that the majority of our communication is nonverbal. Whether it's 60%, 70%, or 90% -- it really does not matter.  Just know that more of your communication is nonverbal than verbal- even if you are one of the most talkative people on the planet.  Unless you are very self-aware of how you are perceived in meetings or presentations, it's hard to recognize the type of vibe that you are communicating. And I would probably say that the majority of us are probably too self-involved to even recognize other people's nonverbal cues when we are in a business setting. After all, we are all worried about what other people think of us.  This means that we're focusing on direct eye contact,  our posture, our voice inflection, and whatever other presentation advice we've been given by outside help -- if we've been bold enough to get outside help. If you have not received outside help or are embarrassed to, yet you want to be an effective...

I've observed executives use a rhetorical question as a way of thinking out loud to themselves.  Unfortunately, to the casual observer or a management consultant, the rhetorical question can be misinterpreted as an opportunity to provide an answer as quickly as possible. The first step to answering a rhetorical question is to not answer it at all.  Over time, and through some hard knocks, I've learned that silence is your most powerful ally when a rhetorical question is asked.  If you are like 9 out of 10 consultants that feel like you need to fill in the quiet space, you will end up soliciting more questions that you really don't want to answer. Management consultants want to jump to conclusions and solutions as quickly as possible.  Executives typically want to think through the problem at hand and assess all of the options before making a decision.  The rhetorical question is one way of doing this.  So do yourself a favor. When you hear a...