Tag: Communication

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Are Business Cards Still Relevant?

Exchanging business cards was an important part of the customer/client relationship. Since COVID, there are less face to face meetings and less cards being exchanged. Couple that with evolving communication technology and a person can wonder if the business card is past its prime.

This video discusses the potential demise of the business card and provides a full tutorial on making your own NFC business card (you are going to need these blank NFC cards).

The tutorial offers a solution that is significantly cheaper than Linq or Popl.

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News You Can Use: 4/22/2020


Photo by AC Almelor on Unsplash

  • Meticulous and Orderly, Germany Can Handle a Pandemic

    By reacting to the outbreak early, Germany also bought itself time to build on other “preexisting” strengths. Even before Covid-19 struck, it had far more beds in intensive care units than most other countries. It has been adding many more. So Germany still has spare capacity: About 10,000 of the more than 22,000 beds are free. This lets its hospitals save the lives of more of the patients coming in, and even take some from France and Italy.

    Yet another preexisting advantage, on the socioeconomic side, is a century-old labor law that prevents abrupt layoffs and lets employees get paid even when their work temporarily dries up. Called Kurzarbeit (literally “short work”), the program gets companies to keep paying staff up to 67% of their salaries even when there’s nothing to do, and the government reimburses them. More than 650,000 firms have signed up already, representing millions of employees, from bakers and cleaners to engineers. They and their families can stay financially resilient during the lockdown, and employees will be able to quickly return to work when the virus fades.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-16/coronavirus-meticulous-germany-knows-how-to-handle-a-pandemic

  • The Restaurant Impact From COVID-19
  • Before you forward that ‘uplifting’ email to homebound colleagues, think again

    But here’s why chain email, no matter how well-intentioned, is not the way to do it:

    It’s intrusive. When working from home, it’s hard enough avoiding distractions that siphon away our focus and energy without having to filter out time-wasters disguised as work matters.

    It may offend. One person’s inspiration is another’s irritation. Some people draw comfort from psalms and hymns; others’ love language is dirty limericks and Lizzo lyrics. Either group bombarding the other with their own particular form of “inspiration” is just asking for an HR intervention.

    It’s a security risk. Although this chain mail is benign, if annoying, some forwarded messages can carry malicious payloads. Social engineering spam and memes can lure people into revealing personal information. Scams like these have always been around, but they tend to proliferate during a crisis when people are most vulnerable. The coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/before-you-forward-that-uplifting-email-homebound-colleagues-think-again/

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News You Can Use: 12/23/2019


Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

  • Survival of the Richest

    This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

    The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

    https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

  • What detoxifies a negative work environment?
  • How Sears Lost the American Shopper

    Alan Lacy: If there’s a significant strategic failure on the part of Sears over quite a long period of time, it was the inability to get off mall with a viable, important retail format.

    In my era, we tried the Sears Grand format, basically a big-box store that was right across the highway from Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s. Those first few stores that we did, they were doing $45 million and our mall-based stores were doing $25 million in annual sales.

    We couldn’t build enough stores to really catch up to what was happening at that point with 1,000 new competitive outlets being opened every year by Home Depot, Lowe’s, et cetera.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sears-lost-the-american-shopper-11552647601?mod=e2tw

  • The Secret to Writing Emails with Military Precision

    A CTA, or call-to-action, is the last bit of an email where you encourage your reader to do something: shop now, learn more, sign up, etc. Sometimes, the CTA is a button, but it doesn’t have to be. It does have to be concise, attention-grabbing and easy to understand. For marketers, CTAs are non-negotiable because they help businesses get more customers.

    In our everyday emails, this device can be just as useful for accomplishing the purpose of our message. Be it organizing a meeting, requesting feedback or assigning a project, a concise, final reminder of what we’re after can improve the utility of any email. In fact, it’s so important that I tend to start my emails with CTAs and work backwards.

    To make your CTAs pop, separate them from the body of the text and play around with bold text and colors. If you have several action items, separate them with bullet points, and try to limit your action items to two per email. Another helpful practice: If you’re addressing multiple recipients, use “@” to assign action items to different people, e.g. “@Pam: review slides and send feedback by Tuesday EOD.” That way, there’s no ambiguity about what’s expected from whom.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/343044

Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/11/2019


Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

  • The protests at Google are about free expression, not money

    Transparency is at the heart of the recent employee controversy. “I was put on administrative leave, without warning. My account was deactivated while I was working,” Laurence Berland told fellow workers at Friday’s demonstration. He claims that he was grilled for two and a half hours by Google executives–not allowed to take notes or even use the restroom–and that he was never given a clear explanation for his offense. “I had to find out from the press,” he told the crowd, referring to the Bloomberg article.

    The only documents he claims he accessed were appointment calendars of Google executives–calendars that are open for any full-time employees to peruse. The motivation, he says, was to see if management was meeting to discuss ways to monitor activist workers like him.

    Google employee organizing has always centered around ethical issues like the company’s cooperation with the federal government or its treatment of women, minorities, and contractors. It’s not been about money–at least not for the employees themselves.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90435484/the-protests-at-google-are-about-free-expression-not-money

  • On Momternships: Do Working Moms Really Need to Start From Scratch?

    Returnship programs aren’t, strictly speaking, new. Goldman Sachs launched the first returnship initiative a little more than a decade ago; since then, 50-plus companies have opened their doors, including IBM, Johnson & Johnson and United Technologies. In April, Apple offered a 17-week return-to-work program for professionals who both took time away from work and have more than five years of professional experience. These programs are typically open to people who have left their industries for two or more years and last for a limited period — usually between eight weeks and six months — and are designed to provide networking and mentoring opportunities, help returnees refresh their professional skill set and give the company a chance to gauge whether the returnee is a long-term fit.

    However, these programs are not without their flaws. While some returnships are paid, many are not. Others require the returnee to pay for their participation. Hiring, too, can vary widely. While Ford’s returnship program hired 98 percent of its enrollees, Goldman Sachs only accepted 1.9 percent. Both are on extreme and opposing ends of the hiring spectrum; research indicates that most programs hiring between 50-100 percent of their participants.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/342348

  • Before you write an open letter, make sure it meets this criteria
  • How to manage teams when you’re not the subject matter expert
    ADMIT YOU’RE STILL LEARNING

    When I first became a product manager, I was supervising an engineering team. It became clear pretty quickly that I didn’t understand the complexities and constraints team members were facing. And because no one was going to teach me how to do my job correctly (and they shouldn’t have to), I realized I had to be proactive in learning about the challenges.

    UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT OF PAST FAILURES

    To right the wrongs in the department, I needed more context around the team’s past efforts. I needed to examine what succeeded and what failed and assessed it against the current landscape before proposing any ideas. For the team to take me seriously, I knew that I had to demonstrate knowledge and awareness around the broader circumstances.

    MEET WITH TEAM MEMBERS INDIVIDUALLY

    Meet with everyone on the team individually, and ask them what’s going well or poorly. Pose questions that hit on the elements of a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help you spot problems, find the high-impact small wins, and determine any longer-term projects and issues.

    In that vein, set one-on-one meetings to build trust with people in other departments. A lack of expertise can be an advantage in terms of learning how the rest of the organization views your team—you can play the role of student and demonstrate you care about others’ perspectives and how your team’s work relates to theirs.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90434738/how-to-manage-teams-when-youre-not-the-subject-matter-expert