If you want your talk or presentation to be impactful you have to build it around a hook that is memorable. That’s actually quite difficult. Ask director James Cameron. His 2009 blockbuster Avatar cost 100s of millions of dollars and is one of the highest grossing movies of all time…

Juggling many projects at the same time challenges your time management skills, so I have tried many different methods. …

Watch carefully almost any movie today and you will notice that the sound of the next scene sometimes starts before you see the picture. Often this overlap is a sound effect — maybe you hear the sound of a noisy street before you cut from a quiet interior to a…

By far the best way to make your talks and presentations more impactful and memorable is to speak from memory. If you have to read from slides or from a script you will distract the audience and fail to create a connection between you and the audience. Memorizing content is…

Many people avoid networking because they are introverted or just shy, but a much better idea is to simply avoid the “artificial” networking opportunities like cocktail-hour mingles. You can get much better results anyway by networking organically through activities. When you are working with other people you naturally build strong…

How do you monetize an elephant? This question comes from an activity I used in a digital marketing course I taught in a French business school. On my way to lecture there in September 2015 I saw a New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens showed someone sitting beside a city…

Things go wrong. Your plan might be brilliant, well resourced and deftly executed, but there will always be obstacles in your path. Learning how to deal effectively with these unexpected difficulties is an essential leadership skill, and also an effective way to stay calm in a crisis. Back when car…

In every organization, project or community, the reliance on written messages can lead to conflicts that impact both productivity and wellbeing. But by adopting easy-to-learn strategies, anyone can reduce or avoid these conflicts, minimizing their impact, smoothing interactions and reducing stress. …

You have an important presentation coming up on Monday. But now it is Sunday and it is still not ready. From the beginning you had planned to work on it for weeks and make the best presentation of your life, but then came an unplanned project, a few days of…