Writelife

In the introduction to his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut says something to the effect of, “You are what you pretend to be. So you better pretend to be something good.”
I was thinking about this as I read a Creating a Positive Professional Image (which I found through What Do People REALLY Think? on the [...]

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When market share shifts from one company to another is it because the first company lost it or because the second company took it away? It’s both, of course, but while reading Seth’s post We don’t have to care (Parts I and II) I inevitably thought about why I fly WestJet now and not Air [...]

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There’s a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and it helps to explain why the more successful you become in today’s world of work, the more your work becomes a nightmare from which you wonder if you’ll ever wake up.
It relates, in part, to something Seth Godin wrote about [...]

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I was reading David’s post Signs of a problem workplace on his Ripples blog and it got me thinking about companies and how they work. (Or, in some cases, don’t work.)
We seem to have an ironic quality built into us as humans. Nothing defines our existence as much as change. We change and the world [...]

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Over at Ripples, you’ll find a very good post on the realties of finding work. It’s called Starting over… and it nicely sums up the basics, including the most important point – contacts.
It also touches on something I was writing about in Writing professionally – get paid and paid well. It applies to any job, [...]

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Over at Seth Godin’s blog he posted a little something called The Selfish Marketer (part XIV). It’s absurd, so much so it’s funny. But it’s also a good example of what happens when you don’t follow a process through like a customer. (Something I touched on from a support perspective in Web writing rule 5 [...]

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Job problems? Have a look at Escaping a dead-end job on David’s blog, Ripples. This is the best kind of writing because it doesn’t just describe a problem it suggests ways of dealing with it.
One of the things that has always struck me as odd about employees and their jobs is that while companies take [...]

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In the various blogs I visit, and in other sources, I continually come across discussions about customers and their experience of businesses, large and small. One of the themes that pops up frequently is respect, as in Seth Godin’s recent posting, Trust and Respect, Courage and Leadership.
You would think it would be easy to remember [...]

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I’ve just read The Customer Evangelist Manifesto by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (one of the six initial manifestos released by ChangeThis). It’s a pretty good, if lengthy, overview of the failures of traditional marketing techniques (i.e., mass marketing). This part could be more briefly summarized with a quote from a Nobel prize-winning American economist [...]

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Seth Godin’s recent two part post, Blended and it’s follow-up More On Blended, contain the most interesting musings on the state of business that I’ve seen for quite a while.
They describe the state of things as they are now: still in flux, still a nightmare for the cautious and tradition-bound. His most interesting comment, for [...]

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