Back when I wrote Writing Secret 5: Decide on One Ideal Reader, I suggested there was one primary reader and other secondary readers. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Nonfiction writing causes people to decide, rethink, or change their actions, all a change of some sort. That means the ideal reader for a given piece …
Do you struggle with writing? You’d like to write more and faster, but things are just not working for you. I can help. I have opened the Q2 2023 Free Your Inner Writer workshop for registration. If you want to write easier and faster, read the book. If you want my support in your writing, …
At a recent client, a senior leader, Tim, said, “We realize we can’t do everything, but we don’t know how to get a handle on what we need to do.” We talked about what they measured and how long it took them to make decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) Tim explained that they …
How to Measure All Your Work in Progress to Make Better Decisions Read More »
Alex Kourvo, of Writing Slices, just reviewed Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer. (That’s a link to her review.) She recommends it with four stars! Woo! Here are two excerpts I particularly enjoyed: “Rothman takes these brand-new writers by the hand with a guide full of wisdom, empathy, and truth.” “… is a wonderful, gentle guide” …
I wrote about general meeting problems in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid). But “hybrid” teams have much worse meeting problems. During the pandemic, most of us understood how to create nebula team meetings that worked. (Dispersed teams are nebula teams. See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for …
Rethink the Tools That Create Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid) Read More »
Meetings. We all have them. Most of us hate them. When I ask why, here are some of the responses I hear: They take too much time away from our “real work.” It’s too hard to find time to meet. Our calendars are too full. We can’t find a place to meet. If we’re back …
Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid) Read More »
I thought watermelon status was something “everyone” knew about. But it’s not! Read No More Watermelon Status Reports: How to Use Stories to Explain Project State. That’s a persona-based approach to help other people understand the project’s reality. You also might like Velocity is Not Acceleration to see charts and data I use and recommend. …
Consider Persona-Based Stories to Explain Project Status Read More »
Twenty years ago today, I wrote my first blog post. I was nominally on vacation in Lake Tahoe, where my family was skiing. Since I’d stopped skiing by then, I used my vacations to write and read. And Esther Derby and I were writing some version of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. We …
How to Celebrate 20 Years of Blogging (Write More!) Read More »
If you, as I, write frequently, you might wonder where is the “best” place to publish your writing. You might think social media, especially Medium or LinkedIn, is the “best” in terms of eyeballs. (That’s people to the rest of us.) That’s possible the day, or maybe the week, you publish the piece. That’s because …
About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. During that workshop, the participants all had the same question, “How do we engage our stakeholders?” For years, I explained that the more …
How to Create Partnerships Instead of Using Stakeholders Read More »