The Skipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell made intelligible the "social epidemic" in his best-seller The Tipping Point.

He explained why word-of-mouth advertising could elevate a product like Hush Puppies to international stardom overnight.

A lot of marketers, hoping for a Tipping Point, rely instead on a Skipping Point.

No one's talking about their products. But they believe they can convince you otherwise by using hackneyed attributes such as "industry leading" and "best of breed."

No matter how hard you try, you can't skip to the head of the class.

Perfect B2B Posts

Inc. offers these tips for publishing perfect B2B posts:

On LinkedIn, you should:

• Use 16-25 words
• End posts with exclamation marks
• Avoid ending posts with question marks
• Post between 9 am and 1 pm
• Post at the top and bottom of the hour 
• Post on Sundays

On Twitter, you should:

• Use 11-15 words
• Use numbers and numerals
• Use hashtags
• Avoid ending posts with exclamation marks (unlike LinkedIn!)
• Avoid ending posts with question marks
• Tweet between 10 am and noon
• Tweet at the top and bottom of the hour
• Tweet on Wednesdays

Burned Out?

Too busy to perform your job well?

Join the crowd.

New research by Towers Watson reveals that, thanks to workforce cutbacks during the past five years, "employees feel overwhelmed by seemingly impossible workloads and endless demands on their time."

That stress is driving four in every ten employees to "disengage" from their jobs.

Towers Watson suggests that employers need to stop trying to squeeze more out of people and start concentrating on their fundamental need for down-time.

What should employers do?

Towers Watson says they should allow flexible work-schedules, encourage telecommuting, and permit workers to curtail the length of meetings and the hours during which they'll answer emails.

Ironically, while many employers promote wellness programs that offer incentives to employees who exercise, diet or manage chronic illnesses, the same employers are harming their employees with overwork, Towers Watson says.

Thumb Like It Hot

Marketing agency owner Dave Kerpen has followed his first book, Likeable Social Media, with a readable companion, Likeable Business.

The 200-page book sets out to prove Kerpen's thesis that, to run a successful business in chatty times, "businesspeople must be obsessed with their customers and prospects, and always do right by them." The book draws out eleven "principles for a likeable business" that if followed "together make for more likeable leaders and better, more customer-centric organizations."

None of the principles Kerpen sets forth are new (in fact, they've been covered ad nauseam by scores of other writers). But true to his second principle ("Tell great stories"), he includes hundreds of present-day examples that more than justify the time spent reading the book.

Typical of these is the tale of an "authentic" CEO who handed an employee $25,000 after the worker stole that amount in goods from the company, saying, "I must not have given you enough of a bonus last year if you had to steal from us" (the CEO grew up poor and understood the motives for theft). Or the "transparent" CEO who keeps open her firm's financials for every employee and supplier to see, to ensure that "the team maintains its democratic culture."

However, some of Kerpen's stories—namely the ones about himself—make you wonder why his clients trust him with their reputations. The author has committed some real boners. Those stories are another reason to pick up Likeable Business.

Want to Be More Productive? Sit Around.

Meditation makes you more productive, says consultant Peter Bregman in Harvard Business Review.

Meditation increases your ability to resist counterproductive urges, such as the urge to interrupt other speakers; to procrastinate; or to play office politics.

"If you can resist your urges, you can make better, more thoughtful decisions," Bregman says. "You can be more intentional about what you say and how you say it. You can think about the outcome of your actions before following through on them."

While not every urge is counterproductive, many are. Meditation helps you distinguish valuable urges from futile ones.

"Urges hold useful information," Bregman writes. "If you're hungry, it may be a good indication that you need to eat. But it also may be an indication that you're bored or struggling with a difficult piece of work. Meditation gives you practice having power over your urges so you can make intentional choices about which to follow and which to let pass."