Cory Doctorow gave a very interesting speech recently at the Personal Democracy Forum (hosted by my friend Andrew Rasiej). He spoke about the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and the risk that Internet-connected devices could be hacked (or programmed by their OEMs) to do things that a user might not want them to do. Specifically, he […]
Phone Best Practices (No Calls Please)
I have come to believe that a phone call is usually the worst form of business communication. It suffers from the downside of meetings with almost none of the upside. A phone call: requires synchrony, meaning everyone has to be available at the same time; is inefficient because most people read and write faster than […]
Better Meetings
Meetings seem to have more champions than does e-mail. Meetings enable you to “look ‘em in the eye” and are personal. These sentiments get to the heart of the main – perhaps the only – advantage of a meeting over other forms of communication: body language makes a meeting a much richer form of communication […]
The List: An Approach to Maintaining Your Professional Network
David Blanke and I got to talking over lunch recently. He had left Sailthru and was thinking about his next gig, spending a lot of time meeting with people, primarily CEOs and investors, who could help him identify and weigh his options. Like most busy startup (and other) executives, Dave hadn’t devoted as much time […]
E-mail Best Practices
E-mail is an oft-pilloried form of communication. It’s sometimes tone-deaf. There’s too much of it. It’s not as immediate as texting or calling. I am reminded of a line attributed to Winston Churchill; “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” Similarly, e-mail is flawed, but it’s often the best mode […]