Tim, a fellow consultant, explained he’d taken a transatlantic flight to deliver a keynote at a conference. I asked, “How was the business class on that airline?” He said, “I don’t know, I flew coach.” It was at least a nine-hour flight for him. Surprised, I asked, “Why?” “The conference told me they could not […]
In several recent conversations, new nonfiction authors and consultants asked how to best use their time to promote their book or consulting business. Some people asked if they should run ads or otherwise promote their books. (Promotion works differently for fiction. This post is just for nonfiction.) That’s when I asked if they knew the
When I published Writing Secret 9: Keep Your Writing Clean As You Write, the feedback surprised me. Many of my fellow nonfiction writers write a lot before they get internal feedback. That might be right for them. It’s not right for me. I finally understood why I write differently. I think of each iteration as
Some writers suggest you write sloppy, “vomiting” the words onto the page. They think all writers need to start with “shitty first drafts.” But sloppy writing means you need several drafts to clean up the sloppiness. To me, that’s like waiting until the end of coding to write and run any tests at all. (Been
How to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence Do you ever wonder how to describe the value of the changes you’ve led or want to lead? Fred, a project leader, needs a new job. His company—despite his project’s success—laid him off. He needs to influence hiring managers to look at his resume
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
On the ANE panel last night, an agile coach asked, “What’s my path forward as an agile coach? What do I do next?” That’s a great question and one each coach might ask, to make sure they continue to add value to the client. (Internal or external, all coaches have clients.) I said that if
I returned from my almost two weeks of vacation at 1:30 this morning. (Travel. Sigh.) Since I’m jetlagged and not thinking clearly, I thought I’d start a new thread in this blog: newsletter recommendations. I read a ton of newsletters to learn from the writer’s content. However, because I’m a consultant and use newsletters to
Part 1 was mostly about unintentional plagiarism. Part 2 was about copyright and when to reference other people’s work. Now, you’re pretty sure someone has used your words. You’re not talking about someone scraping your blog for your posts. You really mean Person A has stolen your words and passed those words off as Person
Many of us writers integrate other people’s ideas. Or, we use those ideas as inspiration for our writing. Can we avoid plagiarism and still acknowledge other people’s work the right way? And, if you can, get “credit” for your “thought leadership?” There’s a lot there to unpack. Let’s start with copyright. Start with Your Copyright As