Gentle Reader,

E-mail correspondence, like all business communication, plays a balancing act between formality and efficiency.  But there are other features that are unique to e-mails.

One in particular made compiling this list especially difficult:

There are actually two …

You’ve got the facts. Do you have the feelings? Show them!

When you’re making a presentation, you’re imparting information. Whatever your message might be—Vote! or Buy my new book! or Floss after meals! — you have some emotional attachment to it. (If you truly do not, I recommend you decline invitations to speak.)

Let your audience see and hear your emotions. I’m not saying every presentation needs to be a Hallmark moment. You don’t need to hand out Kleenex. But you need to impart more than mere facts if you want to motivate your audience.

Let’s take an …

When the question is, “How many slides are sufficient for my Powerpoint presentation?” my mind irresistible chants: “….he would chuck what a woodchuck could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

That’s not really off point: You need as many slides as you need, but not more than that nor less.

In some situations presenters are told how many slides they must use, or can’t use. In fact, participants at Ignite! presentations get five minutes on stage to speak through 20 slides, each of which gets 15 seconds of display.  Tough parameters indeed, but I bring this up mostly …

People often seem to think that “thinking outside of the box” is all about being creative.

It’s not.

It’s really about defining the problem and it’s constraints.  In problem solving, as in mathematics, a constraint is a …

Tuesday’s Google Apps and Gmail outage from 12:30 pm to 2:10 pm marks the company’s third high profile outage this year (the others were on January 31 and May 14).

This time around, more than half of Google’s free and business subscribers received an error message informing them that their browser could not connect with their e-mail server.

While the Gmail iPhone app was originally unaffected, some of its users eventually reported that their service went down as well.

Initial reactions in the blogosphere were fairly hostile, predicting that this most recent outage would give Google a black eye in its attempts to …

Old habits die hard. Such as cramming bulleted lists onto Powerpoint slides.

Remember overhear projectors? OK, I’m dating myself here, but I do recall when overhead projectors were the last word in cutting edge presentation technology. Woo-hoo!

It was my job to type up my boss’s presentation data (for which I used a spanking new IBM Correcting Selectric) and then photocopy the sheets onto clear acetates. I than had to laboriously Scotch tape the acetates onto cardstock frames. (Some people might earn danger-pay, but, alas, secretaries never earn boredom-pay.)

When Powerpoint replaced overhead projectors, it …