Commit to Communicate.
According to the cliché, you can never be too thin or too rich. We’d add another idea: You can never communicate too well.

If you’re a senior manager, you know that your view of your company can be substantially different from those in middle management, and profoundly different from your front-line employees. Why? Because of the quality and quantity of information available to you and not to them.

If your people don’t know what your company’s doing and why, they’ll fill that vacuum with their own interpretations. That’s never productive. But if they understand your goals, they can help make them a reality. That is a powerful resource of kinetic energy waiting to be focused.

Of course, it’s not always appropriate, convenient or advantageous for everyone to know everything — and certainly not at the same time. But saying nothing, or next to nothing, when everyone knows something is happening can cause more harm than a tornado. Assumptions become reality and houses fall from the sky.

Don’t act as though your people know what you know. Make sure they do. Take the time to share your vision of the company in regular e-mails, newsletters, speeches, lunchtime conversations, planning meetings and more. You may be pleasantly surprised how many others have a similar view. And even if they don’t, you’ll be helping them understand where you want your organization to go and how you plan to get there.

Effective communication is a management tool as important as Harvard’s Management by Objectives, just-in-time delivery, team building and quality assurance incentives. The mutual trust and respect gained through aggressive communication will be returned in cooperation and productivity.

The Annual Report of Reports
The holiday catalogs that filled our mailboxes are giving way to another annual paper onslaught this spring—the annual report.

Organizations spend millions of dollars and hours each year to tell their stakeholders how they did and what they’ll be doing next. Some of these communications are supremely effective. Others are dismal failures.

What makes a successful annual report? For the past 10 years, Essex Two, representing the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, along with the Investment Analysts Society of Chicago and the Chicago chapter of the National Investor Relations Institute, have reviewed and evaluated more than 1,200 annual reports, each year, submitted to the Triad Awards by publicly traded companies in the Midwest.

Year after year, these truths about how to produce an effective annual report assert themselves:

• Say something, make a point, have a point of view or take a position.
• Focus on what’s distinctive about your organization and demonstrate it in every word and image.
• Don’t let lawyers and accountants write your message. Listen to them, and then say what you mean.
• Trust your instincts, and your employees, shareholders, customers and suppliers will trust you.
• Be who you are. Be consistent. Change only to reflect an organizational or policy change.
• Don’t miss an opportunity to present your organization to your audiences unedited and in context.

Read more about the Triad Award at our website.

Work and Working.

Don’t do what you do just to make money because you will never make enough.

Don’t do what you do just because it is available because you will never do your best work.

Don’t do what you do just because you can do it because you will never discover what you love to do.

Do what you do only because you want to and success is available.

Do what you do only because you enjoy the doing and passion is available.

Do what you do only because you can’t imagine doing anything else and satisfaction is available.

A person's work is more about finding love than sustenance.