Category: Communication
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Cultural Inertia
Often, as a leader, you can see the long term consequences of a culture if it continues unabated. You see people taking habitual actions that lead to horrible ends and you want to encourage them to change, but changing a culture is never as simple as you’d like it to be. Recently, I finished reading Earth…
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The rudeness of not following my unstated expectations
Imagine the following situation: You invite an acquaintance out for a cup of coffee. They strike you as someone you might like to know better and figure this could be a good way to get to know them outside of your normal social circles. They graciously accept and you’re looking forward to it. The day…
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Visualizing Our Mental Limitations
When I saw this picture on my friend Daniel’s blog, I immediately thought it was an excellent picture of one of the themes that I write quite a bit about — our inability to both predict the future and recollect with accuracy our past. In both cases, we don’t see things as clearly as we think…
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Voice Recognition is Always a Decade Away
We recently upgraded our phones at work to a centralized PBX. One of the services provided for free as a trial, was transcribed voicemails sent to you as an email. Sure, the technology has been around for a while, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of my French colleague’s recent voicemail (for the…
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Can you hear me NOW?
What about NOW? Ever felt annoyed hearing the person on the subway or at the table next to you say this into their cell phone? Ultimately, talking on cell phones in public places has become a shunned activity, but I’ve always wondered why this is so annoying to us? In pondering this question, I’ve come…
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Shibboleth Question
You arrive in a conference room dressed to impress. Sitting across the table is Bob and you’re trying to explain to Bob, someone you’ve never met, why this product would help him. In the middle of the explanation, he interrupts you and says: Yeah, I know all about this field, just skip to the conclusion…
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Thanksgiving in Mexico
Since moving to Mexico, we’ve become accustomed to differences between our expectations and the culture. Since Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated here, Thursday felt like any other day, and since my wife didn’t have class on Friday, we planned a celebration with her class of 13 (plus guests) from the University. The plan was to meet at…
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Preemptive Apologies
We are hiring, bringing the requisite meetings with people to find the one that is a good fit.. Earlier this week, we had breakfast with one such candidate. He was really nice and had a good skill set but it wasn’t a match with what we were looking for. After the breakfast, he sent a…
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Mixed Messages & Uncertainty
My wife and I were walking this evening and we arrived at a light that was completely lit up – Red, Yellow, and Green – all shining brightly. The cross street also had all lights turned on — Red, Yellow, Green Left Arrow, Green Right Arrow. This is the ultimate mixed message. If all the…