Archive for November, 2008
Obama Job Seekers Must Reveal All … Info
President-elect Barack Obama and his staff apparently don’t want any surprises. As a result, they are grilling Obama administration job seekers with a thorough seven-page job questionaire. Suzanne Goldenberg of Britain’s Guardian Newspaper writes: Have you led an entirely blameless – or better yet, blander than bland – existence for your entire adult life?. Can [...]
The Perfect Coffee
Every once in a while, I get completely off the subject of what I usually write, and write about coffee. I love a superbly made cup of coffee. It could be a latte or cappuccino or simply a cup of black coffee with non-fat milk and raw sugar. It’s such a disappointment to enter any [...]
Media Falls For Another Hoax
To an old journalist, like me, the story never did sound right – an unnamed McCain advisor alleging that Gov. Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. You, no doubt, have heard the story. I suppose one could say the media was taken-in because of Ms. Palin’s apparent naive grasp of the world, including the [...]
Veteran’s Day
It was the image in the New York Times of President-elect Barack Obama embracing Tammy Duckworth, a veteran of the Iraq war, that will create a lasting memory about this Veteran’s Day. Ms. Duckworth had lost both legs in the war, and today is director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. They were at [...]
Focus, and Get Powerpoint Madness Under Control
While helping an association a few years ago to initiate a plan to attract more members, funders and media, I remember attending presentations where one SVP had Powerpoint presentations of as many as 80 slides, each slide containing more than 300 words and complex diagrams. Our eyes would glaze over. Neither she nor her audience [...]
Secrets of the Annotated World
Boston-based Chris Brogan, one of the new leaders in the world of how to use communications in Web 2.0, has written a fascinating blog post, Secrets of the Annotated World. There is a new form of communications out there that is active and growing each day, and defining online communications for tomorrow … and trust [...]
Obama: Principles of Leadership
Jack Welch, former head of GE, writes in BusinessWeek that Barack Obama won the presidency on three leadership principles: a clear vision, clean execution, and friends in high places. I would add that Mr. Obama was also consistent in purpose and message, and was not distracted … at least publicly … by vicious attacks. Those tenets [...]
8 Steps for Not-For-Profit Media Leadership
While researching my new book, The Media Savvy Leader, I found an authentic leader in the field of not-for-profit organizations who knows the importance of managing the message in order to achieve consistently outstanding media coverage – Layli Miller-Muro, founder and head of the Tahirih Justice Center. While Miller-Muro appreciates the power of television news [...]
Banish the Boring Boilerplate
My friend, Steve Kayser, has a terrific blog, Riffs, Tiffs and What Ifs, and today, he takes on the bad and boring PR habit of using corporate boilerplate. Let me excerpt a portion with a link to Steve’s blog: Corporate boilerplates are boring. A waste of words. Horribly obtuse. Garbled, befuddled, perplexing, muddled obfuscatory nightmares. [...]
