I am a lifelong devourer of books, but I rarely read nonfiction. I don’t know why, but reading big, fat books about building the Brooklyn Bridge or Lincoln’s cabinet just don’t grab me, narratively, the same way that fiction does. …
Tag: Communications
Messaging’s never not hard
Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article with the headline: For C.D.C.’s Walensky, A Steep Learning Curve on Messaging. The article outlined how Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has …
What’s the message?
I have been thinking about this tweet a great deal, because I often think about messaging as both intentional and unintentional actitivities, and also, I think about messaging in terms of what people actually hear and understand, not just what …
Us, the audience
I read a lot of things, and I watch a lot of things, and I am not particularly discriminating in my consumption. I read books, magazines, newspapers, gossip columns, advice columns; I watch television, films, and also a shit-ton of …
The good and the bad of sameness
Groundhog Day is one of my very favorite movies of all time. I love the central themes at the heart of it—that if you are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of living the same experience over and over again, …
Expectations: Yours, mine, everyone’s
There’s a part of the working experience that doesn’t get talked about very often, but I think it highlights one of the most important skills that one can learn in a job: managing expectations. Your own, and others. This issue …
I want that pony!
My husband, when we were first married, was somewhat….taken aback by what a good shopper I am. Listen, it runs in my family: my mother is an expert when it comes to outlet-shopping, and can comb through overstuffed racks of …
The messages are landing
In my line of work (communication), sometimes you get so caught up in the planning and the doing, you skip over the “did it work?” part. Sometimes, that part is built in—if you are communicating on behalf of a political …
Retrospective: My communications evolution
FIRST IN COMMUNICATIONS (meaning the publishing industry, in 1990), there were printed materials, and there was the telephone, and the fax machine. We had computers, but they were blinking green cursors on black screens. We communicated through the books we …
Clients and consultants: Thoughts
We take a break from the nonstop dumpster fire that is the ongoing news from 2020 to return to some more mundane work topics. Today’s topic: consultants. In thinking about today’s topic, I unearthed a blog post I had written, …