A recent piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer connects the plunge in newspaper readership to people’s completely false and wrong understanding and beliefs about the economy, public policy, the environment, public health and most other things that we all should know involving our government. To combat charisma without character, truth needs ...
read more →
People pay closest attention and respond to the things that scare them; we’re just wired that way. So, the people who want to get your attention and keep you responding to whatever they’re selling will continually tell you things to make you believe you’re going to lose something or get ...
read more →
Making publicly acceptable decisions in a healthy democracy almost always comes down to building consensus through some kind of negotiation. And negotiation is a skill that most people can develop and improve. It starts with learning everything you can about the needs of whomever you’re negotiating with, getting the ...
read more →
Stories make facts memorable. Research suggests that people forget nearly half of what they learn within 20 minutes (80% is gone in a month), but stories help fix that problem. So, getting people to understand and remember what you want them to know about whatever you’re planning or doing takes ...
read more →
Intentional disinformation, lies, fake news and just plain bull$%&# will be a bigger part of our future than it’s been part of our past, and artificial intelligence (AI) makes it easier and more widespread. As useful and beneficial as AI can and will be, everything has consequences – AI makes ...
read more →
You’ve let me scratch my rock & roll itch in this blog, but I thought you might be interested in Rolling Stone Country magazine’s picks for their 200 Greatest Country Songs. Country music has been described as three chords and the truth. Start with #200 and don’t let ...
read more →
I suspect that you’re aware of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance), which actually don’t just occur in some kind of prescribed, neat, predictable order; it’s more complex than that. (Trust me.) But conflict can also be defined in five stages....
read more →
We teach classes to help clients and other students understand and deal with public and stakeholder anger, emotion and opposition. Developing better emotional intelligence makes a world of difference in accomplishing things that matter. And it’s not just about them, it’s also about you and me. Emotional intelligence means understanding ...
read more →
Meetings get a bad rap and I confess that I’ve sometimes been guilty of piling on. Traditional public meetings are often the least effective way to engage a community, in light of all the other options and formats. But it’s not necessarily the meeting itself that’s the problem, but how ...
read more →
A full third of all internet traffic today is generated by “bad-bots,” computer programs designed to do bad, malicious things: SPAM, Malware, other kinds of attacks that overwhelm legitimate websites or take needed services offline, and some that just spread dangerous lies and effective bull$%&#. The bad guy ...
read more →
