Blogg

Realisation: Remote collaboration was the engine behind my engagement during my years with IBM

It took me a year to get sufficient perspective of the fifteen years I spent with IBM to realise just how much of my engagement and energy had been generated from the transparent collaboration and networking I had experienced with colleagues around the ENTIRE world. Not that I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but […]

Productive phone conferences

In these times of coronainduced travel restrictions, I expect that remote meetings will surge. And that many will feel inexperienced and uncertain on how to make those meetings productive and positive, as participant or as host or presenter. With fifteen years under my belt in international and global roles in one of the world’s most […]

Productive video conferences

In these times of coronainduced travel restrictions, I expect that remote meetings will surge. And that many will feel inexperienced and uncertain on how to make those meetings productive and positive, as participant or as host or presenter. With fifteen years under my belt in international and global roles in one of the world’s most […]

Productive web meetings

In these times of coronainduced travel restrictions, I expect that remote meetings will surge. And that many will feel inexperienced and uncertain on how to make those meetings productive and positive, as participant or as host or presenter. With fifteen years under my belt in international and global roles in one of the world’s most […]

Effective webinars

In these times of coronainduced travel restrictions, I expect that remote meetings will surge. And that many will feel inexperienced and uncertain on how to make those meetings productive and positive, as participant or as host or presenter. With fifteen years under my belt in international and global roles in one of the world’s most […]

Never take the absence of a no for a yes

Sales people are taught to never take no for an answer. Consultants should be taught never  to take the absence of a now as a yes. As a consultant, you don’t have any executive powers towards your client. You consult. You analyse. You suggest. You explain. But you don’t decide. That’s the prerogative of your client. And […]

Think of your employer as a distribution channel of You

Uneven relationships usually don’t work out well in the long run (at least not for both parties). That old truth holds water for romantic relationships as well as for between countries and….on the job market. Employers complain about the low employee engagement revealed in their annual employee surveys. Duh! What do they really expect when […]

To walk in the shoes of someone else, you first have to take off your own

Know your customer! Understand the user! Know your enemy! We’ve all heard these calls. To best be able to sell to customers what they really need and will appreciate, to design things that people will use, appreciate and rave about to their friends and acquaintances – or to best beat your enemies – you first […]

Persistent Team Chat, Merely a Gilded Reincarnation of Reply-to-All Email?

  Persistent team chat has been the darling of the collaboration scene for a while now. The most prominent one being Slack, but also Atlassian HipChat, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and now Watson Workspace from my employer. Cool, fast, flexible are words often used to describe the greatness of most of those products. There’s been […]

Why you shouldn’t subcontract social media communications

Hardly any organisation can get by nowadays without a presence in social channels, but many still feel uncomfortable about how to do it. Luckily, most have realised that it’s not just like pushing your marketing messages onto some audience, as in traditional marketing (but some still do, unfortunately). So what’s the big difference? And what […]