He had a natural way with words ….. brought to our attention the confusion of the English Language. Or course his most famous dialog was The 7 Dirty Words, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Somehow, George Carlin made them sound funny, not nearly the nasty words (more…)

I was talking with a coaching client recently about their department policy. He was following the policy, only to be told by his boss the President that “Our department policies are guidelines only. It is ok to deviate from the written policy.”

Think of the confusion this would cause! A policy such as “Travel expenses over $75 must be accompanied by receipts”. If this policy is only a guideline, then who determines how much you can expense without a receipt? And does it apply to everyone?

How about performance appraisals … let’s say department policy is to review performance appraisals quarterly. Your performance appraisal is an integral part of your raise and promotion. If you don’t meet your performance appraisal targets, do you get zinged on your raise? Or is that one of the department policies that is used as a guideline? If you miss your targets by, say, 10%, and someone else misses their targets by 15%. Are they treated the same when raise-time comes along? If that’s the case, why even set policies?

Are you consistent with your communications?

I was watching “Deal or No Deal” recently when the banker offered the female contestant $266,000 for her briefcase. To tempt her more, he offered to double the size of the offer if she would kiss a huge ugly frog. She had only two $1 million briefcases left (more…)

Overheard in IFR Magazine’s “On the Air”

While flying practice approaches at Sioux City, Iowa I heard:

Tower: “Skylane XXX, cleared for the approach; caution, waterfall in the area.”

[a short silence, presumably while the Skylane pilot questioned passengers on the transmission]

Skylane: “XXX, say again?”

Tower: “Skylane XX cleared for the approach; caution, waterfall in the area.”

[again, a short silence]

Skylane: “Ah, cleared for the approach – but what do you mean by the waterfall caution?”

Tower: “Waterfall. You know, ducks and geese – water fowl.”

Remember it isn’t what you said, it’s what you think you heard.

As you may know. I am an adjunct faculty member in the School of Leadership and Professional Development undergraduate Organizational Leadership degree program. During the fourth semester, the class, in teams, had to do a weekly report and an overall report due the last week of the session.

Because all the students did well with this same team scenario [with a different topic] the previous session, and because I wanted them to focus on the overall report, I told them they didn’t have to do the week 5 team report.

There seemed to be some confusion over this …. In fact, one of the students, Paul Joseph, emailed me:

Shari,

I was looking back over chat archives and mail and I found the reason for my confusion. (more…)

Line of sight …. what an interesting visual that provides. It is used in a variety of industries. “Line of sight” applies to radio frequency identification tag [RFID] technology. This means that the reader, the ‘laser eye’ line, has to have an unimpeded path to the code (more…)

A recent article in the Houston Chronicle talked about eco-friendly items and what ‘green’ really means. Because of the ambiguity of the word, “greenwashing” has occurred. This is what many advertisers are doing …. spending more time and more money trying to convince consumers that their products are ‘green’. Put (more…)

We’ve all experienced this at some point in our lives …. The economy is not looking good, you are stressed because of your high bills, you have little job security … You pass a store and something in the window catches your eye.  You stop, look it over, feel (more…)