Posts filed as “Communication”
Do the Right Thing
It never really occured to me. It didn’t occur to my wife. Candy never thought of it either. The morning when Annie and I got in the car, it did cross my mind, but only briefly enough to send a quick text to Candy asking, “Do you think it’s OK if I bring Annie?” It…
Listen thoughtfully, carefully, mindfully…then do something
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire.
—Reggie Leach
Take a chance. Ask a question, express an opinion, build a prototype. Fail forward….
The Flying Handshake
I met a guy named Marcus who was based in Germany and ran an IT services group, which was based in Silicon Valley. Several times a year Marcus would fly to California to spend time with his team, chatting, having meals, talking about work, but also interacting on a human and personal level. He calls…
Can’t hurt to ask
Recently Annie (then 6, now 7) and I were at the store picking out a card to for her to send to a friend. In the card display was a big section dedicated to Taylor Swift. We examined each card – Taylor Swift looking dreamy, sassy, alluring, or even defiant. Taylor can certainly strike a…
Keys to effective swift-starting teams
Next time you’re standing at the gate waiting to get on a flight and the crew shows up, watch how they interact with each other. It will tell you a lot about how effective as a team they are going to be up in the sky shortly. Mary Waller, a researcher at York University in…
Before Grand Aspiration, Shared Truth
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. I was sixteen years old at the moment the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded above NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, killing seven astronauts including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. In the months following, Richard…
The Meeting After the Meeting
Don’t do this. Don’t hijack an hour of time from people, ask their thoughtful opinion, and then excuse everyone and hold back your cronies and have that “meeting after the meeting.” Sometimes you hear it on the conference call when a team leader says, “Hey Margaret can you call me right after this to follow…
Your product is not what you sell, it’s the difference you make
Your product is the impact you make, the change you affect, the experience your product delivers. Your product is the result, the causatum, the punch. Sell cars? No, you don’t sell a car, you sell utility or transport or identity or experience or speed perhaps. In pharma? – you don’t sell drugs, you sell health…
Why can’t a cell phone be like a cow?
I’m grateful for an interview the other day with Iqal Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. When Iqbal was quite young, growing up with his siblings in a village in Bangladesh, he was asked by his mother to walk about 10km to another village to fetch medicine. He spent…
When you Systematize, You Sterilize
“To systematize is to sterilize.” – Shlomo Maital Lionel Messi plays soccer with the joy of a child. His inventiveness and wizardry can leave you (his opponents too) gaping in awe. In an interview for the New York Times with Jere Longman, Messi stated that he would quit the game as soon as it stopped…
About Shawn
Shawn Hunter is currently Executive Producer & Vice President for Skillsoft's leadership video learning collections. For over a decade Shawn has engaged, collaborated with, and filmed, hundreds of business authors, executives, and business school faculty in an effort to produce video learning solutions, as both an entrepreneur and later as a product developer for Skillsoft.
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