Articles By: James Krouse

James Krouse is a marketing in PR consultant with over 15 years of experience helping a wide range of businesses to communicate effectively and achieve their business goals

A Manager’s Guide to Social Media Policy

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are all terrific ways of marketing a company…but they are also terrific ways to waste time. Social media accounts for approximately 22% of our online time according to the social media examiner. It’s doubtful that all that time is spent after work hours...

July 30th, 2010 | Communications, Employee Satisfaction, Leadership, Management | Read More

Could Creativity Save the Economy

In a recent interview on NPR, Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein spoke about how big nonbanking companies have been sitting on huge cash reserves, rather than making capital investments. Pearlstein says CEOs love to blame regulation, but there are a host of reasons companies are...

July 16th, 2010 | Featured, Leadership, Management | Read More

5 Tips for a Better Relationship with the IT Guy

The IT guy in your office might be a perfectly likable member of the team. But in many offices, he or she is an odd, introverted person that pops up every once in a while to tell you what you’ve done wrong with your computer. The gap between IT and the rest of us has turned into a cavern as...

July 8th, 2010 | Office Politics, Technology, Workplace | Read More

5 Ways to Make a Shorter Work Week Work

Sounds like a dream doesn’t it? Every weekend a three day weekend. No hump day. Two Saturday nights! It actually turns out that the dream of a shorter work week isn’t such a dream so much as a debate we are having with ourselves. Experts tell us that the average worker would have...

July 2nd, 2010 | Communications, Employee Satisfaction, Management, Strategy | Read More

6 Tips For A Great Prezi (The PPT Alternative)

The idea behind Prezi is simple: let’s build an alternative to PPT that isn’t difficult to use, looks great, and is sharable. Prezi has definitely accomplished a lot and you should give it serious consideration for your next presentation for the ‘Wow’ factor alone. You can...

June 14th, 2010 | Featured, Technology, Workplace | Read More

The Marshmallow Challenge

In this TED video, Tom Wujec explains the Marshmallow Challenge and why kindergartners perform better at it than CEOs or business school grads. Wujec focuses on it as a design process, but it really applies to any business situation. Basically, The Marshmallow Challenge gives teams some sticks of...

May 25th, 2010 | Workplace | Read More

PowerPoint makes us stupid…

…I didn’t say it. A General in the Marines said it. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander to be exact. He was quoted in a story on the US Military and its use of PowerPoint earlier this week in the New York Times: “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen....

April 29th, 2010 | Communications, Featured, Management | Read More

Internal Meetings Part IV: Someone’s Got To Make a Decision

No one makes decisions anymore. OK, people make hundreds a day, but there is a culture of consensus that has evolved slowly in the background of workplaces. It’s so pervasive in how we work that hardly anyone notices that people in meetings generally don’t disagree or agree. They build...

April 22nd, 2010 | Featured, Leadership, Management | Read More

Internal Meetings Part III: 9 Tips for Better Conference Calls

In today’s global mobile world, people just aren’t around for regular meetings. So often the only way for people working in the same place to actually talk is during a conference calls. Here are some quick tips on making this communication tool effective for internal meetings. 1.) Just...

April 15th, 2010 | Communications, Featured, Management | Read More

Internal Meetings Part II: 5 Ways to Buck the Blackberry

There’s nothing more contentious than meetings. Internal meetings. We’ve all been in the gatherings where blackberry typing, pastry eating, and PowerPoints both seem to suck our time away, but in such a passive, friendly way that we don’t mind. How do we make this workplace institution better....

March 31st, 2010 | Office Politics, Technology, Workplace | Read More