“You say you’ve tried Hawaiian shirt days and pizza party Fridays, and your IT department’s morale is still in the pits. Forget gimmicks and lead.”

“We’ve talked often enough about the five steps of the sales process; it’s a mandatory structural element in the persuasive architecture of your site. But at the same time you’re ’selling,’ an activity you largely control, your visitors are ‘buying,’ an activity they largely control.”

” In a perfect world, no one would ever make a mistake. Fortunately, though, most people are willing to forgive human error. I’ve certainly made my own share of them. I once wanted to send a gift to a customer at FedEx to thank him for his business. It was a nice gesture on my part-except I sent it to him by UPS. It was a careless error, but the client got a kick out of it, and sharing the joke actually strengthened our relationship.”

“Can you share any guiding principals or ‘best practices’ in the presentation of Key Performance Indicators to the senior executives of a corporation?”

“Sit in on any conversation between support staff and sooner or later the issue of users, and their often questionable technical knowledge, is likely to come up. As well as exchanging ‘the worlds worst user stories’, you’ll often hear general gripes about the user who couldn’t create a table or send an email with an attachment. The problem is, while the story might seem funny when told between tech’s over coffee, from a business perspective there really isn’t anything amusing about it. Here’s why.”