Dan Erwin

You Can "Catch More Flies with Honey Than Vinegar," But. . . .

Why Tone Matters and how to adjust it.

FYI: Tone is essentially the attitude you reflect toward your audience, whether one-on-one, team or even large group. (E.g.: tough/sweet/stuffy, personal/impersonal, authoritative/egalitarian, submissive/demanding, respectful/taken for granted, hopeful/cynical, friendly/distant, understanding/out of touch, etc.)  Furthermore, all these attitudes demonstrate or at least imply emotional content. It is emotion that most successfully drives attention, and tone carries emotion.

 

               It ain’t what ya do.

               Hit’s the way that ya do it.

               That’s what gets results. 

Although many execs take tone seriously in face-to-face conversations, often manipulating it for their own advantage, it’s rarely discussed for business materials other those of public relations. Yet tone is just as valuable for the achieving of objectives in our writing of emails (and similar missives) as in face-to-face delivery.

Smokescreen: Does Your Company Have Something to Hide?

One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.

But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along. 

Leave Your Tech Gadgets Behind

Tucked away in Monday’s NYTimes business section is a highly significant—no, immensely practical—recommendation. The article by Nick Bilton initially describes the work practices of Robin Sloan, a former media manager at Twitter. As you can imagine, Sloan once taught news outlets how to use the hottest social media tools. But does Mr. Sloan follow his own recommendations? NOPE! He owns an old Nokia phone with just one application: making phone calls. He also takes notes with pen, paper and notepad. And—he reads books printed on paper—not the Kindle or the IPad.

It may be technical heresy, but it’s a very smart way of living your work life.

Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing--after they’ve tried everything else.”

  

What’s the smartest foreign policy choice for the U.S. now? Remember that good strategy is inevitably about saying yes and no to the right issues. That being the case, how should U.S. politicians be answering this question? Richard Haass, the well-known diplomat, policy author and former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, flips the switch and pushes the reset button to answer this question in his latest book. In fact, he’s playing with heresy.

Set aside your doubts. Haass has not been inspired by Wile E. Coyote.

The Political Attack on Facts

Attack advertising, specifically, the attack on facts, is far more serious than most of us imagine, impacting both business and government. What happens when campaigning and campaign data and promises become disconnected from governance?

Last week, Kathleen Hall Jamison, the well-respected Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed these issues in spades at the University of. Most of us expect campaign ads to distort and deceive. But in today’s political world, according to Jamison, the more insidious threats are attacks upon governmental agencies that are non-partisan, and that provide data for the public and politicians. 

A New Way to Catch a Thief

New research, based on big data, is proven to be a highly accurate—and certainly unique—means for catching a car thief: quantify and tabulate a car owner’s posterior.

Since Aristotle there have many efforts to come up with new ways to understand and predict human behavior. But over just the past few centuries, we’ve begun to “mathematize” the subjective. We’ve tried to predict human behavior by means of (little) data.

How to Live Longer, Better. . . and Richer

 
The captive audience for this blog are the Boomers (50 to 70 year-olds), but it’s far more relevant for Generation Y (18 to 30 year-olds). You’re the ones with a future, whereas, plenty of Boomers have already killed off their future by ignoring these recommendations. If you haven’t made these five recommended strategies into your habit machine, the time to begin is now.

This health summary originally appeared in the Harvard Men’s Health Letter, but I’ve adjusted it for both men and women. Entitled 5 Ways exercise helps men live longer and better, the well-researched recommendations are familiar to many of us.

To the Givers Go the Spoils: The Hidden Dimension of Networking Success

Shift your networking orientation from getting to giving and your long term success is assured.

It’s a proven fact that those with the best networks usually get the most job opportunities, the fastest promotions and the top salaries. Yet building a great personal network is not as easy as many think. Recent research confirms what I’ve found to be true in my own business: effective networking is more about giving than getting. 

Rethinking the College Visit

A common work conversation this time of the year is about your kids’ college choices. So, choosing a college is one time when doing your homework really matters. Over this past Easter weekend, I was visiting in Washington, D.C. and spent time at the Capital Mall and its resources, as well as making an overdue trip to Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon reminded me that the European aristocracy had little over the American aristocracy. But among the many visitors at both places were parents with their high school juniors who were also visiting potential colleges in the D.C. area.

The college visit is not something to be taken lightly. In today’s world, with Harvard accepting just 5% of its applicants and Chicago just 8%, our kids are going to need several backups. And some of you will end up spending $300,000 for your kid’s education.  I recently updated my kids’ college costs to this year’s money. I don’t even want to think about how much it cost. So you’re going to need to be very thorough in researching potential colleges if you want to get your money’s worth of education for your kids.

But what’s the right way to choose a college? 

Why We (Sometimes!) Need the Nanny State

Here’s the underlying question to 32 oz sugary drinks and all kinds of other issues: are there valid reasons for being told what to do when it will serve the greater good? Put another way, what’s all the fuss about Bloomberg’s attempt to impose a ban on large “sugary drinks?”

It’s a really, really cultural thing. Americans resist being told what to do like it was the bubonic plague. It’s in our DNA. But surprisingly, the majority of world cultures don’t have a knee-jerk response to regularly being told what to do. Even our good friends, the Canadians, are far less resistant to nanny than us Americans.

So, the gloriously redneck—and mean--state of Mississippi has passed a ban on bans—its cities cannot place restrictions of any sort of food or drink.

But as Sarah Conly of Bowdoin has noted in The nanny state: why we need it, it’s not about soda.