“Hey there. One of my largest pet peeves as an audience member, I have to admit, is a platform speaker who does not have his or her ‘ums’ or ‘ahs’ under control. Sure, these involuntary ‘placeholder,’ ‘filler,’ or ‘bridge’ noises are understandable in their way. However, in my opinion, one of the hallmarks of a professional teacher, trainer, or public speaker is that his or her speech just f-l-o-w-s as naturally as possible, and is relatively or completely free from extraneous filler words. In this blog post I will share a technique that has helped me to solve this problem.”

“Here’s a sample snippet of a coaching conversation I have often had with executives. To set the scene for you, it usually happens after we’ve discussed a project or strategic initiative and its value alignment for their organization.”

“Regular readers of this blog will know by now that brevity is usually not one of my talents. So, I thought I’d make an attempt at capturing a series of small entrepreneurial ’sound bites’. The idea is to have a short thought or pithy lesson from my 12+ years of working with startups. I’m hoping that the value/word ratio is reasonably high. Apologies if some of these sound trite, but I couldn’t avoid it.”

“I’m doing a lot of speaking all of a sudden, related to my pre-launch plans around a new media company. I’m finding that there are certain skills in communicating the information and building understanding that are important and useful. I thought I’d pass on some thoughts along those lines.”

“Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns where none exist. It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Who knew business people were so well read? BusinessWeek Online tapped a bevy of prominent professors and business professionals and asked them about their favorite books, business or otherwise. Browse around and discover what made those books inspirational, instructive, or influential in their thinking and their careers. What would they advise you to read if you had the chance to ask them?”

“Management portal explaining 250+ methods, models and theories on strategy, performance management, finance, valuation, change, corporate governance, communication, marketing, leadership and responsibility. Value Based Management.”

The story of Zingerman’s Deli and how the company expanded while remaining local and committed to its ideals. The author of the article wrote a book called Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big and Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig was a speaker at Taste3.

“RedRoller is a one-stop shipping solution that lets you compare rates and service options among top [parcel] carriers [such as FedEx, USPS, DHL, Overnite Express and Eastern
Connections] and then complete your shipping transactions in a snap… You choose the service you want, and RedRoller takes care of creating the shipment with the selected carrier, generating a label and arranging for pick-up or locating the nearest drop off location (whichever you choose).”

“A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a pictogram is worth so much more… A good BoND [Back of the Napkin Diagram] can also assist with employee recruitment, team alignment, sales and technology build outs. The vocal [Rick] Segal comments, that ‘As the prospective client, employee, or VC engages, both parties can use the drawing as a central reference point. It’s a very useful tool that is often overlooked in favour of mountains of text laden painful power point slides.’ In fact, BoNDs can be used throughout the business, according to the Grandfather of business visualizations, Dave Gray, Founder and CEO of XPLANE (the business visualization company behind the powerful BoNDs you see in Business 2.0 magazine).”

“When we started Sharpcast, for some unfathomable reason, I decided we needed a fax number… A couple of years and a few hundred dollars later, I finally recently had the good sense to cancel my still virgin eFax account. Little did I know what I was in for. eFax’s corporate motto seems to be inspired by the Eagle’s song, Hotel California: You can sign up any time you want, but you can never leave.”

“When I was a lad, the chief executive of a major public company was paid about 30 or 40 times what a line worker was paid. Now the multiple is about 180. What did they do in the executive suite to become so great? Upon what meat do they feed? Why, as we are being killed by foreign competition, do we need to pay our executives so much?”

“In this fast-paced and synergistic world, buzzwords get the play. Non-technical people start companies and press ridiculous deadlines to their engineers, Web 1.0 burnouts start new companies that are just rehashes of the idea they couldn’t make work in 1999, and the technology you use is more important than the value you provide. Hell, VCs are getting sick of their clients making it big, so they’re starting half-assed ‘Web 2.0′ companies of their own which are off the map 1 month after beta…”

“We’re in a bubble again. It’s not as frothy as last time, but hallelujah, this time we know what to do, right? One good thing about the dotcom implosion in 2000 is that we got lots of practice laying people off, and I’m afraid that this valuable knowledge may get lost.”

“In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.”