When brainstorming in a group setting a good technique for keeping the discussion going is to adopt the phrase “yes…and” instead of “but” or “no…but”. A good way to put this into practice is to decide beforehand to use “yes…and” whenever the conversation moves from one person to another. It might feel a bit strange [...]
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Category Archives: Tip of the Month
Using Net Present Value to evaluate long-term projects
June 22, 2009 – 3:06 pm
Definition
Net present value (NPV) is defined as the total present value (PV) of a time series of cash flows. It is a standard method for using the time value of money to appraise long-term projects.
Formula
Each cash inflow/outflow is discounted back to its present value (PV). Then they are summed. Therefore NPV is the sum of [...]
Benefiting From Change – Cross Functional Work Teams
May 20, 2009 – 3:20 pm
The idea of cross-functional work teams – where employees from different parts of a company work together to develop new products – often conflicts with the status quo. But it doesn’t have to.
Business firms tend to organize people by skill areas: marketing people work together, finance people work together, and production people work together. So [...]
Professional Selling
May 12, 2009 – 3:49 pm
Managers often say they need help teaching their salespeople to close–they just aren’t converting prospects to customers. As many of our Executive MBA participants pointed out in last month’s session, closing often isn’t the problem.
Professional selling is a series of steps and many models, such as the one below, indicate that “closing” is a very [...]
Bad Slide vs. Good Slide
May 12, 2009 – 3:47 pm
Make your presentations memorable by improving your PowerPoint slides. In an attempt to provide information, presenters often create cluttered slides. This distracts the audience from your message; they try to decipher the slides instead of listening to you. Create powerful, simple visual slides and put number-heavy tables and wordy descriptions in a handout. The audience [...]
Positive Cross Cultural Communication
May 12, 2009 – 3:46 pm
When dealing with clients, employees, or colleagues from other cultures the best advice is to not assume their culture is the same as ours. Americans use idioms a lot and people from other countries have no idea what we are talking about. For instance, suggesting “Going Dutch” for lunch would be very confusing to a [...]
Remove “I” and Improve Communication
May 12, 2009 – 3:38 pm
You can improve the effectiveness of both your written and oral business communication by framing your messages in the perspective of your audience — by making them ‘audience-centric.’ An easy way to make messages more audience-centric is to reduce the use of “I” and increase the use of “you” or “we.” To illustrate: instead of saying, [...]