Yesterday, I had to spend several hours on trains moving across Germany. Being an experienced entrepreneur, I obviously had prepared myself perfectly and lots of work to be done. When I arrived back home yesterday night, I had done almost nothing of it — and yet, I felt great — it’s rewarding to have insightful conversations! Most of the time during the outward run I spent communicating about a potential new venture. Not planned at all, but
“Finishability” is a qualitative term that describes the ease of being able to screed and finish concrete. But you could also use it in other contexts, such as in communication. If you’re equipped with a certain finishability, people will listen to you, understand you and coöperate with you. Think of finishability as an antidote to information overload, as the Economist’s Tom Standage suggests. One of the integral features of the Internet are links
What makes Homo Sapiens superior to other animals? We are weaker and slower, but our brains are 3–5 times bigger than those of our nearest species, the Orang Utans. Are the achievements of building the atomic bomb or inventing the internet the main differentiators? Of course not — what makes Homo Sapiens superior is his ability to communicate and to be social — his cultural foundation. About 300,000 years ago,
Today, I had a quite strange and unpleasant discussion. It was about business strategy and sales, and the both of us differed quite clearly in our views on how to ‘do it right’. I wasn’t in the best mood, and from my perspective, the other guy behaved in an egoistic, slightly arrogant and selfish manner. He used typical killer terms, such as “totally clear” or “as I’ve always been saying” to underline his
This is a guest post by Janine Pfahl, a communications and learning expert. Janine replies to my earlier post., which you might read first. While pausing for a moment in the spring sunshine to read Michael’s text „You can learn something from everybody and everything from all“, our dog positions his snout on my keyboard and starts to communicate in his own way. It’s absolutely clear what he wants to tell me. Not only
Using twitter for some time it took us months to realize the unique value of this small communication feature we launched on YiGG today: the ‘@username’-feature. From now on YiGGers get personal messages after being addressed with @username in a comment. A small feature, a big effect on communications: now, YiGGers know that they had ben addressed or mentioned in comments without rechecking news entries with own comments or using our spy-called