It’s a bad idea. Sure it’s a stylistic choice, but the company it puts you in. Gah. Gah, I say.

For some inexplicable reason, the use of a ‘Z’ to indicate multiples traps you between
teenaged girlz and semi-literate hip hop gangsaz. Strange that it should work that way. But I don’t make the language, I just work with it.

This is a report developed by the National Commission on Writing. Basically they surveyed 162 CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies about the importance of writing in their companies. The results are fascinating. Here’s a bit about the study from the intro:

“The survey reveals that good writing is taken as a given in today’s professional work.
Writing is a “threshold skill” for salaried employment and promotion. It is particularly
important in services and in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE), growing employment
sectors that are likely to generate the most new jobs in the coming decade. In a nutshell, the
survey confirms our conviction that individual opportunity in the United States depends
critically on the ability to present one’s thoughts coherently, cogently, and persuasively
on paper.”

And here’s the whole thing.

writing-ticket-to-work1.pdf

Thank you Pfeifer MBA students! With the exception of a few minor technical snafu’s Patrick’s MBA writing class was a success.

Lecture Slideshow (click for link)

Continue reading ‘Patrick! Professor-for-a-Day. MBA Business Writing Class at Pfeifer Univ / Charlotte’

oy I love this post. Every single bit of this. The Checkers are a WONDERFUL client. Nobody on earth has more heart than a minor league hockey team. Everybody from the President on town, bust their ass in this organization. It seems like team shows an operating loss each year, and I’m pretty sure it’s because they keep handing out those large cardboard checks to charities. They’ll donate half the gate in a heartbeat. I can’t say enough wonderful things about this organization.

Anyway, latest press release after the break. Go Checkers!

Continue reading ‘Client Success: The Checkers’

Naming a product, service, concept, company, or child is often difficult. There’s no way around it. The hardest part is building your criteria. When are you done coming up with ideas? How do you recognize the perfect name when you find it. And, more importantly, how good is good enough?

If the answer is, “I’ll know it when I see it”, then you’re in for a world of pain. We have a long-held alliterative belief around here that human beings are fickle, fallible and foible-ridden. Your mood, my mood, everybody’s mood swings. And by saying, “I’ll know it when I see it” is kind of like saying, “I’ll pick the first thing that catches me in the right mood.” Which is nice if you’re buying a candy bar. But if you are committing to the name of a company or a product — we’ll that’s some thing that you have to live with for a while. It requires commitment.

The Most Important Thing

The most important thing to remember is that a name is made by what a person, company or product actually does. A rose by any other name would, in fact, be as sweet. And no amount of naming (or artfully draped models) is going to make this car not suck . Would it really matter if the Pacer had a different name?

This is why so many companies are named after their founders. For example, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Arthur Guinness’ beer and Henry Ford’s automobiles. And this is a fine way to go. If you can get away with it. Splash out the shingle with the your surname on it and go. Avoid the quagmire of naming. It can take a lot of time, money and energy. You can develop a name you love only to find it’s taken. And naming can make enemies of friends. Gah.

But let’s say you press on…

Brave soul that you are. Perhaps you have a new product. Perhaps you have a company that is conceptually difference that you want to communicate in the name. That’s why this post has a part II.

This is part of a series of webisodes that we did for Patterson Pope. It’s interesting to note that every time they sent out an email blast featuring these spots, their website traffic jumped nearly 40%

It’s also worth pointing out that this is all one, continuous, perfect, GLORIOUS take.

When you take a good look at almost anything, it gets weird. Profoundly weird. Like if you stare at the word weird too long. You start too wonder if it’s really spelled that way.

Anyway, the way people interact with technology, especially home entertainment technology, is no exception to this rule. In fact, it’s quite fascinating. And here’s what blowing my mind. People feel inferior when they can’t make the technology work. Very few people, if any bother to ask, “Could this possibly the bad product design?”

To put it another way. People used to feel dumb because they couldn’t set the clock on their VCRs. Maybe dumb is not the best word. Maybe that feeling is best described as inadequacy. But these same people a) knew what time it was b) knew how to set a clock. They lived up to their end of the bargain.

The clock setting function on a VCR is clearly bad design. But, because it was consumer electronics, everybody gives it a pass. That’s weird.

The controls are horribly designed.

Seriously. If you’re good a driving one car, you can get in a completely different car and you’re pretty good in that car as well. But if you switch from one system to another. Or merely from one remote to another — WHAM — you wrap the whole thing around a telephone poll.

That’s also pretty weird.

One of the things that sets me apart is that I have a pretty good understanding of story. In fact, I devoted a whole other website and podcast to experimenting with it. It’s called the Seanachai (which is an Irish word for Storyteller) and in 2005, to see if I was equal to the task) I wrote a short story or essay each week, recorded it and shared it with the world.

And today I received this email

I am a final year journalism student in Dublin City University and I am
currently doing a thesis for radio on Seanachaí and their history, the stories
they tell, the people they affect and storytelling in general.

I would be very grateful if you could assist me in the thesis as I’ve
found your website to be extremely interesting and unique. The fact that many of
the old tales and some new ones have managed to keep up the pace with technology
as podcasts is very interesting and would like to hear your opinions on other
ways to keep this important tradition alive.

Also any contacts in the seanachaí world or your own input would be much
appreciated!

In my response I wrote this: Story is the code through which we communicate information about how to live. Facts are impossibly dull. But wrap a story around facts, or a moral point and suddenly it spreads like wildfire. And it is a fire that can burn for centuries.

I believe that there are only two things that shape organizational culture. Stories and Incentives. Another way to say that is there is what you reward or pay people to do ( a powerful motivator ) and then there’s the myth of “how we do things around here.”

There’s a pretty fascinating book about all of this called Made to Stick. http://www.madetostick.com/

“Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (Chip Heath, Dan Heath)

This is part of a series of webisodes that we did for Patterson Pope. It’s interesting to note that every time they sent out an email blast featuring these spots, their website traffic jumped nearly 40%