That’s how I evaluate my writing, whether it’s a letter, article, brochure or any of the various ways we help companies communicate with their dealer-distributor networks. What writer has not looked at something he or she wrote months later and declared “it could have been better?”
Why not make it better now? If you imagine that [...]

I heard Robin Crow, author and owner of Dark Horse Recording, say, “Leadership is like bifocals.  You have to be able to look down and see the fine details, and then look up and see the big picture.”  Now, maybe everyone has heard this before, but I hadn’t and thought it was a great analogy. [...]

I can’t help but notice how many stores I shop at these days that have a rewards program. Some programs are based on a point system that keeps track of my purchases and allows me to cash in the points for rewards. Others provide coupons for dollars off future purchases when I spend a certain [...]

What thoughts come to mind when you hear words like “create” or “content”? Do you shiver at the thought of a blank screen or piece of paper (if you’re old-school), waiting for your thoughts, ideas and insights?
While such fears aren’t uncommon, they can be quite costly. Creating custom content is a highly effective way to [...]

For those of us who dabble in technology, it’s an amazing realization to discover the level of complexity that has crow-barred its way into our livelihood. I’m currently involved in a project that features an online tool with functions and sorting of data to generate reports that would boggle the mind. And, if I only [...]

When you are writing on a topic, about a subject, a person, or introducing a new idea, use the 15/85 ratio. It simply means that whatever you write about represents no more than 15 percent of what you know about that topic, person, idea, etc. The beauty of this approach is that you don’t necessarily [...]

Recently, I heard a story on the radio about companies that do well in a recession. Darryl Rigby, of the consulting firm Bane and Company, stated companies run like cars on a racetrack. Imagine the economy is like an oval racetrack.  On the straight-aways where the economy is in growth, it’s the fastest (biggest company) [...]

Should an owner communications publication be an expanded product brochure? Should it be a feel-good piece? Or, should it connect a brand with an owner through lifestyle stories and pretty pictures? It could be all of the above – or none of the above.
A case could be made that if owners want to read about [...]

I received an invite a while back to test out a very cool new Web service called flavors.me while it was still in its closed, beta phase. (So I got that going for me, which is nice.) I started using and testing the site, setting up my profile and incorporating the various feeds the site [...]

You may laugh hysterically (I do) at “The Three Stooges,” or you may sneer at their lowbrow antics, but one fact remains: they were (and still are) huge. I recently saw an excerpt from one of their episodes so violent it was banned from TV (something about the part where Curly puts a logging cleat [...]