Steve Neiderhauser

Write like you talk

At one time, we all wrote like we talked. Of course, we were only six or seven years old when we had this amazing talent. Years of formal schooling have chased the gift away. Still, conversational writing can be found in movie scripts.

You'll see contractions and sentence fragments when you read a movie script. Why? Because that's how we talk. So if you wanted to learn how to write in this fashion or learn more about story, you might take a class called Writing Dialogue for Emotional Impact at the Writers University taught by Karl Iglesias. And his book, Writing for Emotional Impact, is an excellent read that serves up fresh writing techniques.

For those who are interested, here's a dramatic scene I've written for a short story after taking one of Karl's lessons.

Cirque Du Creative

When change moves at the speed of light, business strategies that once worked are no longer effective. Ways to create advantage are explored in the article, How to Hit a Moving Target.

Cirque du Soleil has an advantage because it creates new markets. Cirque's president, Guy Laliberte, originally founded the company based on the combination of circus and theatre. Today, Cirque is so creative they are able to build ships that sail to pristine, uncharted waters. How do they do it? They study different disciplines.

To keep shows fresh and get a read on shifting public tastes, an in-house group called New Tendencies studies what's new in restaurants, car design, fashion, and other unrelated industries. One result: The group noticed the ascendence of Asian themes, so that flavor was injected into Cirque's hit MGM Grand show Kà.

tags: Marketing, Product Management

The Daily Drucker

Lately, I've been busy and haven't had much time to read so I bought a copy of The Daily Drucker. The Daily Drucker distills the teachings of Peter F. Drucker into one page concepts with action points. And because Drucker's early career was spent as a journalist, one page of his writing has more nutritional content than ten pages of sugar-coated business fluff -- one page from the master has enough fuel to keep your business fires burning bright for a week.

Compared to a zen poet, Drucker's writing provides insights that can make your business better. He writes that the distance between leaders and the average is a constant. When leader performance is high, the average will go up. The savvy manager knows it's easier to raise the performance of one leader rather than raising the performance of the masses.

"The task of an executive is not to change human behavior... the task is to multiply the performance capacity of the whole."

Action point: To raise the performance of a business unit, put a strong leader at the helm.