I’d just started a new assignment one month earlier when my boss called me into her office. The good news was that our business was great this year, and we were on track to overdeliver our objectives. The bad news was that next year was shaping up to be much tougher. To hit our numbers, [read more]

Figliuolo’s Law: an individual’s compensation is inversely proportional to the number of PowerPoint slides they’ll tolerate before stroking out.  That’s the observation of Mike Figliuolo. He’s the founder and managing partner of the executive training firm thoughtLEADERS, and the author of a new book called The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, [read more]

My guest this week is speaker and bestselling author Todd Henry, and he’ll be sharing some wisdom from his latest book, Louder Than Words: Harness the Power of Your Authentic Voice. In particular, he starts with an inspiring story about one of the greatest failures in the history of music, and what we can all [read more]

My guest this week is Google President of Brand Solutions, Kirk Perry. He shares a very personal story about a loss on a high school wrestling mat that has both haunted and blessed him ever since. Kirk is much more interesting (and charming) to listen to than my prose is to read. So I encourage [read more]

I’m very excited to announce today the publication of the Kindle version of my newest book, Sell with a Story: How to Capture Attention, Build Trust, and Close the Sale. As you can tell from the title, it’s about how to use the power of storytelling for salespeople, or anyone who needs to be persuasive [read more]

Before I became an author, I spent 13 of my 22 years in the corporate world working in consumer research. So I got to attend a fair number of consumer research conferences. One of my favorite parts of those conferences was getting to hear about interesting research challenges and what the researcher did to overcome [read more]

Which of the following do you think would work better? Imagine you’re an executive at a large, multi-national company. You have a crop of 25 newly hired research analysts in a large conference room waiting for some wisdom and inspiration from you, the boss, on their first day on the job. You have one piece of [read more]

I had the opportunity to give a presentation to Procter & Gamble’s then-CEO, A.G. Lafley, four or five times in the 20 years I was with the company. And the first time was unforgettable. That day I learned a valuable lesson—the hard way—about how not to present to the CEO. I’d been given 20 minutes [read more]

During their monthly meeting, a leadership team was discussing ways to increase compliance with the clean desk policy, starting with a debate over where the biggest violations were. It turned out, most violations were the results of documents left on the printers overnight. The vice presidents and directors took turns offering up ideas. One suggested [read more]

Anyone who’s spent any time in the corporate world has been in this situation. Somebody new joins your department — could be a peer, a new boss, or even a new direct report of yours. And you’re having one of those first get-to-know-you meetings with them. Then, at some point, they pull out a [read more]