Craft

Does It Matter If I Know What I’m Doing?

[If you're reading this via email or RSS, you might need to click through to watch the video.] In this vlog, I raise a counter-intuitive problem: there are cases in which knowing your craft well changes people’s perspectives about what you’re doing. What’s also interesting is that our evaluations change depending on which craft is [...]

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Why I’m Scared To Get Into The Habit of Video Blogging

[If you're reading this via RSS or email, you might need to click through to watch the video.] Mark’s personal video challenge got me thinking about why I’ve been scared to get into the habit of video blogging, so I decided to share it with you – in an impromptu video. I haven’t done any [...]

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Why I Leave Comments Open

Should you allow comments on your blog? I get asked this question a few times a month, but most recently, Kelly Livesay asked it via Twitter and wrote about blog commenting and your community. Every once in a while some influential blogger closes the comments on her blog and it causes a stir, and this [...]

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It’s Time To Show Up Again

I don’t have a whole lot to say today, at least not right now. Actually, that’s not true – I have a whole lot that I want to say, but I haven’t gotten the clarity I need to figure out what I should say, when I should say it, and how I should say it. [...]

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Productive Flourishing is…Flourishing!!

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been quiet on the posting front here at Productive Flourishing for the last few weeks. I’ll take a second and let you know what’s going on. I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work to update this blog – I’ve learned that it’s best to [...]

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What’s a Project Coach?

The hardest thing about being a project coach is not explaining what I do – it’s marketing myself as a project coach precisely because no one knows what a project coach does. So I’ll give the simple answer first, then come back to it: I help creative people develop actionable, doable plans for the many [...]

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When Email Messages Are Mini-Products

Something has always bugged me about the common advice about email correspondence. It was only when I was talking to Naomi yesterday that it really hit me: for many of us, email messages are a mini-product. They’re connective tasks that are also creative tasks. Not every email is like this, of course. Some fall within [...]

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How to Spread Teamthink Throughout Your Organization

If you’ve been following this series, you’ve no doubt noticed that I view organizations more like teams than mere collections of people. There’s both a positive reason for this and and a realistic one. The positive reason is that people like being part of successful groups and being praised for what they do. People are [...]

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When Selling Gets in the Way of Sharing

There has historically been a bias against money-makers among intellectuals. Being an academic, I inherited this bias without really thinking about it. It’s only recently that I began thinking about it again – and as normal I got there via a weird route. I’ll spare a lot of the historical details, but I’m not saying [...]

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