Imagine your retirement. What are you doing? Traveling around and hanging out with grandchildren? Sounds boring to me. Sure, after the end of a frenetic work life, it sounds attractive to have few actual responsibilities. You can think of it as a longer vacation. But people who are active workers, thinkers, and problem-solvers aren’t likely…
Newsletter 21: Challenges beat bribes to get problems solved, cheaper audiobooks, Michael Lewis’ antiheroes, woman of the year, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and a holiday discount on the top manual for authors. How to motivate smart people I love to solve problems. I have always loved to solve problems. I’m…
Take a close look at what has happened in the last few months and at OpenAI, in the last few days. The Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, and the entertainment industry companies were forced to yield to their demands. Because without writers or actors, there is no entertainment. Movie theaters, streaming services, and…
If you are creating a draft of a book chapter, essay, blog post, or other content that others must review, it’s tempting to just assemble something quickly and fling it out there. After all, people are just going to criticize it anyway. Alternatively, you may be tempted to make your draft as complete and polished…
Whether you’re writing in a corporate setting or as a freelancer, you’re likely to face this common issue: multiple “client” individuals that you must satisfy before the project is complete. How can a writer serve more than one master? In my experience, this is both extremely common and very tricky. In the business writer survey…
This article was originally published in Ragan’s PR Daily. Will AI tools like ChatGPT write your copy and take your job? Or will they just make you more productive? I recently tapped social media to connect with some of the world’s most effective business writers: authors of successful business books. They shared tips on how…
Today I analyze a piece of promotional writing from a small business. Here’s the new copy for the home page of Oldsmar Air Conditioning of Oldsmar, Florida. The same copy appears on the company’s Facebook page. Oldsmar AC is no longer in business, Thank You for your support over the last 10 years. Unfortunately, Eric…
Last week, I received a request to connect on LinkedIn with a woman named Mara, a senior executive from McKinsey. Since the profile matched the sort of people I tend to connect with and work with, I agreed. Pretty soon after we’d connected, I got a direct message with one word: “Hi.” Not very McKinsey….
Yesterday (Saturday), Twitter users found themselves unable to see Tweets for extended periods of time. There was no explanation for many hour until Twitter executive (and former CEO, and owner) Elon Musk tweeted that the social network was throttling users because, apparently, some organizations or users were “scraping” lots of tweets and causing excess traffic….