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Creativity in your work is selling up, not selling out

Mar 1, 2016
4 min

Creativity in your work is selling up, not selling out

If you read this blog, chances are that you're a business-minded go-getter like my fellow contributors. You probably also have a decent-sized creative streak. Not me. I'm nearly all creative streak and not so much about the business sense. But I'm lucky enough to work for Present Tense whenever they need a researcher, editor, or niche blog post because they can see the opportunities to add a unique element to their clients’ projects. And while I usually believe that the work

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Tales of a recovering engineer: there's a little creative in all of us

Mar 6, 2015
4 min

Tales of a recovering engineer: there's a little creative in all of us

- Elana Duffy There is a point in our business lives where we can all set aside our pre-supposed differences and get along. Reaching that point should be a goal for all of us, not just because it’s nice to think we can all sit and have coffee together, but because we need to do this for the betterment of business and productivity. I am an engineer. Engineers build. We think logically: we have a train of thought that boards at a station, travels a defined path, and disembarks

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Writing Creatively: The hard part

Feb 13, 2015
5 min

Writing Creatively: The hard part

- Paul Mooney Creative writing is not something reserved only for those dreaming of selling their first literary masterpiece to the world at large. Storytelling is a key element of many things we do in business, from presentations to white papers (to stories at the water cooler, but we are trying to stay in the non-fiction realm here). I'll clear up any mystery right off the bat: the hard part is actually writing something. Not all that mysterious of a revelation, I grant you

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Lessons From One of the Greatest TV Shows Ever

Jan 8, 2015
4 min

Lessons From One of the Greatest TV Shows Ever

- Paul Mooney Let me begin by directing you to the earlier post from Present Tense partner Elana Duffy highlighting the good business sense to be taken from Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22. It inspired me to write a similar article about my favorite novel, but since that's also Catch-22, that was a no-go. And since my second favorite novel is Frank Herbert's epic Dune, I figured I'd choose a different medium as I'm not quite sure how to tie a tale of space witches, sem

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Positive Vibes to Positive Profits: Professional Development that Works

Dec 3, 2014
4 min

Positive Vibes to Positive Profits: Professional Development that Works

- Stacey Ebert Professional development can be a trial. No one wants to sit through monotone presentations or worse, click-through online training that takes them away from the mounting pile of work sitting on their desk. That’s true no matter how strong our love for broadening horizons and expanding our knowledge. The irony is that professional development is critical to employee engagement, yet it often comes across as dull, mindless, and lacking energy. If those presentati

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What I learned while making a TV pilot

Nov 26, 2014
5 min

What I learned while making a TV pilot

Paul Mooney As someone who spent four years as an officer in the Marines, I'm no stranger to large, complex operations. Weeks, months even, of hard work comprised of long, slow periods of planning punctuated by intense moments of stress that can last for days. Since leaving the service I’ve thankfully not encountered similar situations, but the last few months I've spent producing a TV pilot I wrote has come extremely close. While this particular task is by no means a commonl

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From the Big Screen to the Conference Table

Nov 5, 2014
4 min

From the Big Screen to the Conference Table

Paul Mooney A screenplay probably looks like a strange piece of work from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with how scripts are written. The text is in widely-spaced blocks of varying widths, some words and lines are in all capital letters, and most of the pages look pretty sparse compared to the average essay or book. But screenplays are actually written with some very simple and specific objectives in mind that are applicable in any form of writing. Every word has purp

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Literary Lessons: The positive Catch-22 of characters in business

Oct 16, 2014
4 min

Literary Lessons: The positive Catch-22 of characters in business

- Elana Duffy My favorite book is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Between the sardonic humor, sarcasm, and - however ridiculous the book may seem - truisms of military life, it has captured my attention time and again. It is different; it emulates none of the other stories of its time, and continues to challenge me as a reader to notice something new with each reading. Not to mention its accuracies that apply to other aspects of life, such as business. Having left the military and

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More Lessons From Advertising: Business Culture Laziness

Oct 1, 2014
5 min

More Lessons From Advertising: Business Culture Laziness

- Paul Mooney In my last post I covered one of the biggest impediments to creativity in advertising and business: fear. This time I'll be addressing an even more universal hurdle to creative progress: laziness. While it’s certainly not as daunting a word as fear, laziness is an equally pervasive problem. So how do you identify it, prevent it, and stop it? Obviously, laziness is a pretty broad term widely used to describe personal faults. Lazy people or groups of people are, b

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Leadership without leaders: Lessons from disaster relief

Sep 23, 2014
6 min

Leadership without leaders: Lessons from disaster relief

- Frank Luby One week after an EF4 tornado destroyed Marysville, Indiana in March 2012, I performed clean-up work as part of a United Way effort. As the sun set through the mangled trees on that Saturday afternoon, another volunteer made a comment that has stuck with me ever since. “You know, it’s amazing how much you can get done when there are no leaders around,” he said. His comment triggered questions I’d never thought to ask before this experience. How can a group of tot

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Music Lessons. Or, how to not bore your audience

Sep 19, 2014
5 min

Music Lessons. Or, how to not bore your audience

- Elana Duffy Understanding what makes a band sync well together on stage has nothing to do with the style of music, in the same way that understanding what will best build your teams and put your best story before your customers has nothing to do with what you are building. Good business is an art form, and one that follows the same general rules of consonance and dissonance that make sculpture or novels or a concerto pleasing. Allowing your customers and employees to get lo

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Replacing Fear with Freedom: Lessons from the advertising environment

Sep 12, 2014
4 min

Replacing Fear with Freedom: Lessons from the advertising environment

- Paul Mooney When was the last time you saw a television commercial that really made you laugh or, even less likely, positively affected your feelings towards a product? If you can actually recall that happening, I imagine the experience was so extraordinary that the ad in question springs immediately to mind. Most of the time, we either ignore ads or spend the time on something more interesting and less annoying, such as using the restroom. Ads share the same themes and gim

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