Weasel words—defaults for bureaucrats and politicians—are qualifiers that nervous speakers and writers bank on for cover. Avoid them, because the more you water down thoughts with weasel words, the less clear and certain your speech and writing become. For example, instead of saying, IT possibly seems to have suggested that Aptly may no longer be supported after December 31, say IT may no longer support Aptly after December 31. At the same time, avoid absolutes like always, never, will not, cannotandnothing is worse than. Avoid statements like, Nothing is worse than displaying your password.Really? What about your company's recent job-cuts, the drought in California, or Syria's civil war?
I envy the grimacing joggers I pass on my way to work every weekday morning for their samurai discipline and inveterate svelteness (a quality I lack). Leadership and personal productivity experts goad us to rise above mediocrity by forming useful habits. Surpassing champs like Kant, Edison and Einstein, the king of the clockwork habit could well be Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. He wrote with such regularity, that he produced 47 novels—plus 32 plays, short stories and nonfiction books—in his spare time.
Stephen King (with 60 novels and 200 short stories, no slouch either) describes Trollope's habit in his memoir, On Writing: "His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two an a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-pound heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book."
While they puzzle over details, many event organizers never grasp the key to a satisfactory event. It has to deliver an experience. In the same way a restaurant is not about food, an event's not about tables, chairs, booths, badges, busses, signs or even speakers. An event is about an experience.
Restaurateur Danny Meyer says the restaurant's job isn't to serve food. It's to create an experience of wellbeing: to instill in each patron the sense that "when we were delivering that product, we were on your side."
Delivering an experience justifies the patron's expenditure—not of money, but of time—Meyer says. "When they leave, are they going to say, 'That was a good use of my time?'" "The most precious resource we all have is time," Steve Jobs once told a reporter. Are you delivering an experience, or wasting your attendees' time?
Washington, DC-based Trustify disrupts the burgeoning market for private eyes by offering an app that, according to the startup's website, "makes it easy for anyone to hire their own private investigator on demand and at an affordable price." The app eliminates retainers, making gumshoes no longer a luxury of only the rich. "The customer simply taps a button on their phone or computer, provides a few key details and is then linked up with a private investigator, who gets to work instantly," the company claims. Coming next: Uber adds a button reading, "Follow that car!"
In a full-page ad this week in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, Burger King called for a one-day halt to the "burger wars" with its rival McDonald's.
The Whopper shop wants to "get the world talking" about the UN's annual International Day of Peace next month. Wasting no time, McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook posted an 87-word "No thanks" on Facebook, spurring critics to call him a wet blanket. Easterbrook might have replied with one word, "Nuts," like American General Anthony McAuliffe did at the Battle of the Bulge, and proved at least that his company values efficiency.
Branding gurus are unanimous about linking your brand with a cause: just do it. Want to shake down those activist do-gooder Millennials? Wear "capitalism with a conscience" on your sleeve. But Burger King's cheesy stunt, by sugarcoating a serious issue, shows why you should take gurus' advice with a grain of salt. Easterbrook's reaction, though sound, isn't savory, either. The whole episode, in fact, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. All we are saying, is give peace a rest.
