Les Potter, ABC, communications guru and visiting instructor at Towson University, blogged the other day about the loneliness of the solo communicator and the importance of regular social interaction with fellow professionals. He quotes a couple of songs (“One is the loneliest number”) and then after a few comments, both on the blog and off, [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2008
The scream
If I have to write about another “enterprise-wide end-to-end process” or “methodology,” I may scream. The good thing is, in a home office, there are few in earshot to hear the noise. You’ll be glad to know I am working hard to not include any of the offending words in the article. After all, I [...]
Sticks & stones
So it’s the first night without the Olympics on TV, and I have to say I kind of miss them. I did not slavishly follow anything, but left whatever event happened to be on as background while I read the newspaper. The journalists covering the events were a sharp contrast to those I read in [...]
Guilty summer pleasure
All summer, I kept working away on hot days, even with a pool coolly beckoning. “I’ll finish this project now and swim late in the day,” I told myself. I can’t tell you how many times a glorious sunny day turned dark as rain swept in about 4 p.m., just about the time I was [...]
Oh, Mom!
Summer is my season, so even though I enjoy different seasons, this time of year always makes me feel a little down. I’m expecting to feel a little bluer than usual just over a week from now, when our youngest heads off to university. Many people talk about how glad they’ll be to “get rid [...]
Joining the scrum
Is this a new HR term? I’m talking about “scrum” as a way of describing a manager (sorry, “leader,” as this particular client now calls the management level)/employee communications session. The old use of scrum relates to rugby. I’ve seen it described as a way to restart a game after an interruption (say, a minor [...]
Trying to quit?
You claim you’re trying to quit. You sneak off to furtively indulge in just one more. You check your pockets often to make sure you have your secret vice with you. In the old days (the Dark Ages, as my kids would say), you’d be a smoker. These days, you’re a BlackBerry user. That analogy [...]
Splitting hairs
So IABC has renamed their annual international conference. It’s now going to be called the “world conference,” to “better reflect the organization’s global reach and mission.” Um, sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.
Sharing the love
A colleague in one of my networking groups, Rob Clark of The Elusive Fish, once likened social media to being at a party. He suggested that just as we would at a party, we need to get out and talk to people. Jean Gogolin (in her WordTales blog, found through links from other bloggers), suggests [...]
Reaching for a word
Did you know that there is a column in The Atlantic where Barbara Wallraff posts reader requests for words that don’t exist but should? What a delightful idea! Word Fugitives gathers suggestions for things like “a husband’s uncanny ability to ask his wife if she needs help with a household task at the exact moment [...]
