by Ted Cuzzillo
A friend who’s deep in the financial applications world goes into a lot of sales presentations intending to buy something. But he complains to his wife later, “About 30 seconds into it, I just about couldn’t keep my eyes open.”
Once in a while, though, some salesperson tells a story. Then it sticks. Then he can overlay the story onto the product’s features. Then it’s real. What a relief.
by Ted Cuzzillo
If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, this is an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, and it should aim at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.
by Ted Cuzzillo
Three years ago, I spent four months in my Sicilian grandmother’s home town editing a book I had begun to hate. Time cues were sparse: church bells four times an hour, a nearby friend who dropped in for coffee once a day, and cannoli once a week. I could easily come to the end of a week without having made a single edit. So I built myself a timekeeper in FileMaker Pro.
At first, the dismal results came in every day: When I felt that I had put in a good five or six hours of steady work, the end-of-day tally—with all the breaks for email, meals, snacks, and quick walks—usually amounted to about two hours of actual work.… Read the rest “BI for the lone wolf”