Tag Archives: Communication

What Alfred P. Sloan Can Teach You About How Being a Listener Makes You a Better Leader

Contrary to popular belief, great leaders are not the best communicators because they talk a lot; but because they listen more than they talk. Listening is a superpower. Here’s a short story on how Alfred P. Sloan led the transformation of General Motors with a listening-driven mindset.

Closing the Gap Between Leaders and Their Teams

Closing the Gap Between Leaders and Their Teams

For an organization to work efficiently, there must be a good and strong relationship between the team and its leader. Chiyin Chen’s study on ‘Transformational Leadership’ shares that this relationship creates better work outcomes and boosts employee satisfaction. When a leader can articulate their vision and inspire their team – employees are more driven to put in the work and invest in their relationships within the organization.

Make It Easy To Work With You

make it easy

In the world of product design, your goal as the designer is to make the product easy to understand and use. People will get frustrated, anxious, angry and just leave it if it’s not easy to use. Similarly, organizations have to be designed to be to be easy to work with for employees, customers, partners and providers. Of course, most aren’t.

Strategy that sticks

making strategy simpleHow do you talk about your business’s strategy so that your employees get it?

Any strategic planning session eventually needs to deliver a robust strategy, one that anyone can understand and execute. The truth is this rarely happens, as most strategic plans end up in a binder somewhere, and confuse more than enlighten people.

What business leaders want to avoid at all costs is confusion, which leads to inaction. So, how do we solve this challenge?

So what? Finding a hook for your idea is an innovation imperative

Innovative ideas, initiatives, products, culture transformations, have little chance to succeed if they aren’t enabled by smart communications. And it all starts with a simple and easily understood message. 

I’m in the process (pre-production) of co-producing a film with a Director friend of mine. The idea for the film wasn’t mine, so one of the first things I asked him after I read the script was: what’s the hook?

That was at the end of October last year. To this day, that question remains unanswered. And as we’ve been casting for the last two weeks, most of the actors have asked us the same question: what’s the hook?