From sense to nonsense, talking heads were on hand at Web Summit to dish out their thoughts on how companies and employees might make the best of their time and resources to stay formidable competitors in the business landscape. Attendees were on hand to capture their observations and tweet them, of course.
Twitter provides a beautiful live, scrolling commentary on nearly any topic you could want. Given the number of hyper-connected tech aficionados in Dublin for this year’s Web Summit right now, it’s no surprise that some curious observations are bubbling to the surface.
Some are wonky, some are weird, and others are just plain true.
1. BONO IS A FEATURED SPEAKER.
Sure, he sang lead on 1987’s incomparable “The Joshua Tree,” but he’s also the voice on the irrelevant album that Apple somehow forced everyone to download to their iPhones earlier this year. We love solid music and Bono’s various campaigns for social good, but we also kinda wish he would…do it quietly? Yet here’s the man in his Dublin hometown, commenting on the world of tech, media, and whatever else some panelist is sure to ask him about.
How often do you find yourself checking in with your employees to get updates on their projects? Before you do it again, you might want to reevaluate your approach.
No one likes being babysat while at work. If you’ve hired the proper people, they’ll buckle down and get done what needs to get done without needing to be pinged by a superior. Instead of emailing a worker to see what’s the latest, just check out the task you’ve assigned them to see what kind of headway he or she is making.
Meetings can quickly become the bane of the workplace. It’s a great way to simultaneously take up time that could be spent doing real work while still feeling like you’re actually getting things done. But before you know it, you’ve lost an hour of your day and you only have more things on your to-do list.
Ed Zitron is founder and CEO of EZ-PR.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Ed Zitron and I run a small three-person PR firm in San Francisco, Portland, Boston and NYC. We have a distributed team, on different timezones, doing vastly different tasks that mostly emanate from me. I also have many clients that I need to get to do stuff so that I can do things to make their campaigns work. This also occasionally means I have 2-3 people that I have to check something off with. While my main thrust is getting coverage for clients, that requires a fair amount of research.
Communication is the engine that gets work done — how fine-tuned is your engine?
Here’s a roundup of tips from Psychology Today that might be just what you need to take your communication to the next level in the office.
Beware of universal statements, especially when they’re aimed at others.
For example: “You never do this,” or “you always do that.” Not only does this suggest unpleasant thinking toward the person you’re speaking to, it says that you’ve already made up your mind on an issue and can’t be convinced otherwise. There’s no room left for discussion on improvement, and that’s hardly an appealing personality to find in a colleague. (Besides, all it takes is one counterexample to disprove such lofty statements.)
Your organization uses Pyrus and productivity is through the roof. Great! But the rest of the world is still using email. How do you get the two services to talk to each other?
You only need to do is install the Pyrus Gadget for Gmail. It makes it a snap to manipulate an email as if it were a Pyrus task, letting you comment on it, send it for approval, set a due date, and so on. The data is instantly passed to Pyrus without your even needing to log in.
As it always goes, the latest and greatest Apple device is here, and this time there are two of them. Apple’s iPhone 6 has a larger 4.7” screen and the iPhone 6 Plus a still-larger display measuring in at 5.5”. The larger screens right away mean that you can use this not-quite-a-tablet as a more heavy-duty productivity tool. It’s much more comfortable to edit a document or spreadsheet on a screen any size larger than the previous generation iPhone. These new iPhones will feel more like working on a tablet than on your cell phone.
