Procurement & Career Guidance
Do you want your memos, emails, and presentations to improve?
READ IT OUT LOUD.
Before you share those documents with anyone, read the text out loud and evaluate if it sounds weird or doesn’t flow well. It is also a good way to search for typos.
Photo by James Pond on Unsplash
Online discourse is already strictly controlled by the Chinese government, which requires all websites to do real-name checks on users when they register an account (for example, by linking phone numbers, which are tied to government-issued IDs). Discussions on Douban E Zu often center around politics, which may have prompted heavier restrictions. Real-time comments (called “bullet screens”) on Bilibili and AcFun are harder to monitor for banned content and even though the government recently issued new guidelines for screening comments on bullet screens, censors may still be working on ways to maintain control on them.
Most recently, WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging, games and e-commerce platform, blocked users from changing their headshots, alias and What’s Up status. Then this weekend, users began reporting connection issues with their VPN services, which are used to get around mainland China’s “Great Firewall” and access forbidden sites.
“I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” she wrote in an email to co-workers announcing her departure on 31 May. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”
“The message that was sent [to others] was: ‘You’re going to compromise your career if you make the same choices that Claire made,” she told the Guardian by phone. “It was designed to have a chilling effect on employees who raise issues or speak out.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns
As soon as you put up a slide filled with too much text, people stop paying attention to you—they’re trying to read the slide. Ultimately, you want people to focus on the speaker rather than trying to dissect the slide. The slide is there to support the speaker and guide the audience through the content.
The audience is there to listen to the speaker, no matter how great your PowerPoint. Yet at the same time, you want the presentation itself to have meaning and utility, so it stands on its own. Balancing these forces is the eternal question—what should go on the actual deck versus the role of the speaker?
The answer is generally the well-known KISS rule. Break large chunks of information down to high-level text that just covers the topic, and then speak to the rest of it. And, keep it simple. Less is always more.
Brown understood that to build support for the Process within the team, he would have to create a sense of mutual trust. He most famously does this through monthly breakfast meetings, in which players deliver a PowerPoint presentation about a subject of intense personal interest. Topics have run the gamut from tattoos to coffee to snakes. There was even one as serious the Balkan conflict, which touched the life of Croatian power forward Dario Saric.
The point is get to know one other as whole people, not just employees, and thereby make the strategy that assembled these players feel like a part of the team’s core identity. The morning storytelling sessions might seem superfluous, but their ability to get players’ buy-in was real. In fact, it was a player, Tony Wroten, who first used the phrase “Trust the Process.” Those words caught on among the team’s members before spreading like wildfire across the league.
VoiceAI also comes with real-time sentiment analyses and coaching for call centers. For businesses with a large customer service component, this could help expedite calls by “providing real-time recommendations to representatives as conversations happen,” per a press release.
The service will also provide smart notes, which automatically pick out the salient points in a meeting or call, so you’ll know exactly what Elon Musk said about investors and their “bonehead” and “boring” questions during a Tesla earnings call.
Put a Post-It note on your computer or your phone that says the words um and ah (or the words you’re wanting to stop saying) with a red line through them. This will help make you aware when you’re about to say these words.
What you’ll notice after a few days is that you’ll be conscious when you’re about to say these words. After a week you’ll be so aware that you’ll be able to pause and not say them. Awareness is the key to success so when you become mindful when you’re saying these words during general conversations you’ll have the ability to not say them during your media interviews.
Just take a look at the abysmal conversion rates for online content. The New York Times gets 89 million uniques per month, but only has 2.2 million subscribers, excluding crossword and other app subscribers. The Guardian has 800,000 financial supporters, but about 140 million unique visitors at a peak a few years ago. Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received donations from 6.1 million donors, yet just the English language edition of Wikipedia received 7.7 billion page views last month. That’s 1,300 April page views per annual donor.
The implied conversion rates here are in the very low single digits, if not lower. And that’s no surprise given the extreme lengths people go to get content for free. A friend of mine uses AWS to rent IP addresses to reset his article meter on popular news pages, allowing him to download web pages through a Singapore data center using a custom command line utility. Engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars are suddenly tantalized by the challenge of trying to break through a porous paywall. I have less technical friends Googling URLs, setting up proxies, and other tactics to get to the same outcome.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/13/subscriptions-for-the-1-percent/
Photo by MontyLov on Unsplash
When you pace too much, you’ll lose out on the opportunity to use your movement to punctuate what you’re saying. In writing, you use spacing to separate paragraphs on a page, and punctuation to build pauses into a sentence. Movement can do the same thing when you speak.
For example, suppose you said, “We have to move in new directions. We have to innovate.” If you stood still and delivered those two lines non-stop, they’d land with little impact. If added a short pause between the sentences yet remained still the whole time, you’d have a bit more impact. But if you paused and also moved between delivering the first line and the second, you’d have the most impact.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40438283/this-public-speak-habit-is-annoying-your-audience
“Agile project success has less to do with whether or not developers are certified and much more to do with whether or not the entire organization is making the culture shift towards an agile mindset all the way from the lowest-level developer up to the CEO,” Doucette says.
Taking time as an organization to understand, adopt and apply agile principles and practices is what it’s all about, he adds; agile certification, scrum masters, agile coaches and the like are not going to be effective on their own unless there is company-wide buy-in of the principles and practices behind the methodology, Doucette says.
http://www.cio.com/article/3033058/certifications/do-agile-certifications-mean-anything.html
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz asked the commission to confirm that it won’t be caught flat-footed during Wednesday’s net neutrality Day of Action.
The two pro-net neutrality Senate Democrats cited an incident in May during which the FCC’s comment portal crashed due to what Pai described as a “non-traditional DDoS attack.” The Senators were rightfully suspicious about the supposed DDoS claim as it would have coincided with a call to action by TV host John Oliver, who urged viewers to leave comments expressing their displeasure at the FCC’s policies.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/wyden-schatz-letter-to-pai-net-neutrality-day-of-action/?ncid=rss
A recent study out of the University of Iowa showed that those who can type quickly are more likely to emerge as leaders of remote groups. That’s a direct correlation between typing speed and being perceived as a high performer.
It goes without saying that high performers at work get promotions and raises more quickly. Thus, better typing skills should lead to higher salaries. Somewhere, Mrs. Ames is reading this and thinking, “I told you so!”
The Iowa study found that “individuals who can type faster are able to more quickly communicate their thoughts and drive the direction of a team.” In my experience, that is spot on.
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/the-overlooked-job-skill-that-could-be-the-key-to-your-next-raise/
Photo: Brodie Vissers
Wood takes a structured approach to mentoring. He and his senior team meet regularly to identify high potential people who, with the right coaching, could advance to the next stage in their careers. “Whether they are on a technical or a management track, we identify those people who are doing well in their current jobs, but could also do a job one or even two levels up,” says Wood. “We put those people into a formal mentoring program, but we also make it clear that if anyone else wants to be a part of the mentoring program, all they have to do is raise their hand.”
The point is, you can be the nicest guy in the world who treats his employees like gold. But, if you and your team are not cutting it in the eyes of your company and its stakeholders, I don’t care how likable, friendly, giving, sharing, approachable, communicative or empathetic toward your employees you are, you’re still a lousy boss.
If, on the other hand, you challenge your employees to excel at their jobs and lead your team to exceed expectations on a consistent basis, you’re probably well on your way to becoming a great boss.
We ourselves have written thousands of presentations and business documents in our careers. And, in our experience, the most important step is what we call “hanging the document.” In simple terms, you need an outline. However, this can’t be just a list of random points. The document has to have a structure. It has to hang together in a way that makes your point as clearly as possible.
When you deliver a presentation in the form of a story, it becomes more relatable and helps your audience develop an emotional connection with the material. This in turn coaxes memory into action. What’s more, using images to metaphorically support the story you’re telling can reinforce that effect even further. When your listeners feel connected, they’re not only more likely to remember, they’re more likely to take action.
After running Microsoft for 25 years, Bill Gates handed the reins of CEO to Steve Ballmer in January 2000. Ballmer went on to run Microsoft for the next 14 years. If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. He tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and profits more than doubled from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was managing for quarter-to-quarter or even year-to year-revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of the company is its long-term survival, then one could make the argument that he was a failure as CEO, as he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.
https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-visionary-ceos-never-have-visionary-successors
Photo: Vincent Guth
