You may recall when you were a kid or when playing with your kids the activity of connect the dots.  The fun of this game is that as you connect the dots, assuming you do it correctly, the dots come together to reveal a bigger picture. The same thing goes for communication.  In fact, if you want people to really “get” what it is you’re communicating, you have to connect the dots. People only understand ideas in relation to ideas they already have.  All memory and knowledge is built this way. When we were young, we were shown a dog and ...

The best form of customer service is getting it right the first time. But as we know, that doesn’t always happen. In doing training and consulting, I get to fly all over the world. And as unbelievable as it may be, when it comes to commercial travel, sometimes things don’t go as planned. Shocking…I know. But on this particular occasion, I had to call Delta customer service to get an itinerary issue resolved. I called after hours and worked with a representative for about an hour. At the end of that time, she informs me that she can’t solve the problem because ...

Certainly success is a good thing. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have negative consequences. (Is that a triple negative?) Anyways. In the real world, success is not always clear cut. Could we have been more successful? How might our current success impact future success? What tradeoffs did we make? In the academic world, success can easily be evaluated based on grades. I sometimes teach university classes and when I do I am always fascinated by how students evaluate their success and respond to feedback about their performance. As you can imagine, when someone gets a 100% on an assignment, ...