There’s a law of diminishing returns you have to watch out for when you’re developing thought leadership and other content. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” according to Voltaire. It’s possible to work on content for too long. For example, creating a PowerPoint deck that takes months. Or, the fact…

Before Slack. Before Teams. Came Yammer. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 when it still carried the moniker of a social networking company. As a technology and corporate culture, Yammer is forgotten by a whole generation of the IT industry, but the cultural principles are very applicable today. Here are five…

After years of writing about technology, hearing vendor pitches, and interviewing for marketing jobs, I’ve come to see that there’s a problem with product messaging in the IT industry. The roots of it seem to run quite deep in the industry. Here are five reasons why companies have problems with…

I’m no stranger to working from my home office space with plenty of pre-pandemic experience. In those days, I had a schedule of taking my laptop to a few choice spots, such as my local Panera and some other locations. Saturday writing day before the pandemic meant going to Caboose…

Amazon Alexa has been one of my best friends during the pandemic. I was an early adopter because the promise of a voice UI is still interesting to me, at least. Here are some of my favorite Alexa skills: 1. iHeart Radio I can’t work in silence to save my life. The iHeart…

I coined the term management overhead when I was working in a highly politicized environment. VP level management became obstructions to productivity. In some cases, I was on project teams where VPs and directors outnumbered the people who could do the work. Here’s what I like to call the 5…

Creating content — writing in particular — can be a very solitary pursuit. Even so, the isolation of the pandemic adds an additional layer of stress and anxiety because of personal and professional pressures that the creator, reviewers, and designers might be under. Here are some tips to help if…

I’m fond of saying that publishing content is a straight line. Still, so many content project gotchas remain that trip up marketing and other content creators from publishing. Large and small organizations have their own challenges that content creators and their stakeholders bump up against. Too often, organizations (read: internal…

I grew up as the perpetual last kid picked in gym class. It took me until my thirties before I could even call myself physically active. I did make fitness a way of life despite my gym class baggage. The pandemic did knock me off course a bit. A nap…