Story telling is a leadership skill. When you argue, people get their defenses up. When you tell a story, people listen. Learn more on my blog.
Today is the 25th anniversary of Sleepless in Seattle, and my husband, Gary Foster, was the driving creative force behind the film. Of all the people I’ve learned from in my life, I’ve learned more from him than anyone else about the ability to collaborate, be tactfully assertive, and build a great team in order to realize a common goal and vision. Read his piece on what it took to turn a good script from a then-unknown writer into a…
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“I have a dream.” It’s rightly famous, perhaps one of the most memorable lines ever spoken. So, why do we remember some phrases and not others? More importantly: How do we say something in a way that other people, like our teams, remember our message? Martin Luther King knew exactly how to write so that people will remember the key message. Repetition, he knew, was important. And a lot of it. He’d used it in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,…
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Actually, I have no idea how Amazon.com got its name. Imagining how it got its name illustrates the power of an image–painting a picture in words. An image is something you can perceive with at least one of your five senses. It helps convey something abstract you have in mind in a way that is concrete to others. So, I imagine that Jeff Bezos goes to his marketing firm and says, “I need a name and corporate identity for my…
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