Nicholas Bate

Brave New World 29

The best presenting, the best selling, the best brain-storming often requires people to be ‘in the room’. Eye contact, body language, infectious enthusiasm and above all every kind of peripheral nuance are easier to register as collective energy moves towards the goal.

But in a Zoom world, a ‘working-from-home’ world, a ‘too-many-windows-on-my-screen’ world, this subtle force field disappears. And so the written word will become important: to grab attention, to engage and to cajole.

Practising your pitch will be as much practising the writer’s craft as staring into and articulating to the mirror.

Bonus: Love Presenting, Hate (badly used) PowerPoint.

100 Words

Stay strong. It’s wearing you down: news that isn’t news; reporting that isn’t journalism; Zoom meetings which lack soul and real let’s get this done eye-ball to eye-ball contact. Desperate sameness: eating, sleeping, playing and working in the same habitat. No true hunter-gatherer ever on planet earth did that. Of course it’s getting you down: synapses are over-loading at bandwidths which are exceeding recommended capacity. Of course you are feeling tired and frankly need a holiday. But wait: those are not allowed. Stay strong. Get brilliant at what is under your control. Stay pragmatic and zen-like about the rest. Stay strong.

Brave New World 28

“be naive enough to start and stubborn enough to finish”

Ross Edgley.

Monday Melange 8

Just say NO to PPT

Who are the rogues?

Post Covid Business Essentials.

Redundancy

Hunter-Gatherer 21C

Manage that career

Be Bold 101

Lock-down goals.

Productivity 68

A powerful transition in the quest to manage productivity is to realise so often less is more and thus to subtract rather than add. Meetings generally run more effectively with fewer people, ‘to do’ lists are more approachable when significantly pruned and getting fit is so much easier with one or two simple rituals.

The Brave New World in which we all inhabit can make the urge to add even tougher. Once, many meetings were physical and the dimensions and/or availability of meeting rooms argued natural limits. In a Zoom world that helpful inhibitor disappears. 

Subtract rather than add. Less is so often more.

2020

The story so far.

You Don’t Like

Paul’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Nor did the rest of the Beatles.

Brave New World 27

The world is getting more crazy.

Fortunately, you are getting wiser.

All will be ok.

Coffee

Banana smoothie.

You’ll shout, you’ll cry, you’ll

Certainly disagree. The UK’s 100 greatest number 1s.