#understanding

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

Elana Duffy

Mar 5, 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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Buyer be weary (or, how camping companies can save customer service)

Elana Duffy

Feb 26, 2015
4 min

Buyer be weary (or, how camping companies can save customer service)

- Elana Duffy Serve your customers well and they will serve you in return. That concept sounds so easy, right? Two run-ins lately have made we wonder whether some companies care at all about customers or what their customers think. Delayed packages. Rude employees. Double charges on credit cards that take 53 minutes to resolve on the phone. And of course, it is always our fault, not theirs, as if we should diligently plan for every possible way they can let us down. In 2015,

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Elana Duffy

Feb 12, 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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Elana Duffy

Feb 4, 2015
4 min

The value of valuing employees

- Stacey Ebert Companies have many similarities to schools, only now we are all grown up. Jobs replace assignments, bosses replace teachers, and paychecks replace grades on report cards. Just as students want to impress their teachers, today it’s adult employees feeling the same about their supervisors. Valuing employees benefits all parties and might just be the secret to maintaining the best talent. Regardless of age, we all like to feel valued. Whether it’s public or one-o

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Reply, Reply All, or No Reply at All: Tips and tricks for managing responses

Elana Duffy

Jan 21, 2015
4 min

Reply, Reply All, or No Reply at All: Tips and tricks for managing responses

The response was perfect. Your cubicle buddy is going to laugh at your slightly snarky but still informed response to his recent push of the latest company memo. You threw in a pun, an inside joke, and a clever barb at middle management. You can formulate your real response after lunch. Wait. Oh. Oh no. You hit reply all instead of reply. And there is no recall option on most web-based email servers. Middle management is not going to have the same appreciation for your clever

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Post-Modern Work: What Millennials recognize and Baby Boomers don't

Elana Duffy

Jan 14, 2015
4 min

Post-Modern Work: What Millennials recognize and Baby Boomers don't

- Frank Luby The Economist welcomed us to 2015 with a handful of intriguing articles on the future of work. In “Workers On Tap”, they framed up the growing free-lance economy as a battle in workers’ minds between job security and time flexibility. The article implied older workers (which include me) place greater value on the former while Millennials prefer the latter. Other recent articles confirm that Millennials want even more than flexibility, they want input and interest

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Lessons From One of the Greatest TV Shows Ever

Elana Duffy

Jan 7, 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

Elana Duffy

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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Elana Duffy

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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Elana Duffy

Nov 11, 2014
4 min

The Battlefield of Leadership

Elana Duffy Veteran’s Day, Armistice Day, whatever you call it in your country, the idea is the same in many countries that took part in the First World War: honor and remembrance to those who fought for freedoms, and those who laid down their lives to protect their countrymen. It is a day of peace and respect. Being a veteran, it seemed prudent to address the concept of expanding some timeless leadership techniques from the battlefield to management. Love or loathe the milit

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Elana Duffy

Oct 30, 2014
5 min

5 Tips on Market Segmentation

- Frank Luby An Inc. article this week asked whether Apple could kill the freemium music model when it relaunches Beats Music. It also cited some data and interesting analyses from Venrock’s David Pakman on how much people spend on music. Think about that phrase for a moment: “how much people spend on music”. Music spending and music pricing are third rails that I usually grab eagerly with both hands. Instead of letting those sparks fly again, though, I would like to use the

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

Elana Duffy

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

Elana Duffy

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

Elana Duffy

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

Elana Duffy

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

Elana Duffy

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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Elana Duffy

Aug 27, 2014
5 min

Business lessons of a music legend

- Frank Luby The call came as midnight approached, along with my deadline. I was in the office of the Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper. On the other end of the line was Stevie Ray Vaughan, sitting in a downstate hotel room. He sounded exhausted, but said he was ready to talk for an article that would run on the front-page of the Maroon’s arts supplement. And talk he did. He took me behind the scenes of his hectic schedule and his band’s upcoming album. He

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Elana Duffy

Aug 11, 2014
3 min

What's In a Story?

All great stories share the same components and follow the same guiding principles that allow us to communicate. This makes the story – regardless of language, purpose, or topic – one of the best methods of communication. You can hardly make it through a workday without someone encouraging you to “tell a story” or “become a better storyteller”, even if those aren’t their exact words. They are asking for clarification, to understand the topic at hand, and you have to be able

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Elana Duffy

Apr 10, 2014
4 min

Frank's Story

This is to serve as an introduction, a way to eliminate the feeling of being strangers. The founders of Present Tense want you to know their stories, where they come from, why they do what they do, so you can see deeper and, in turn, let them help you find YOUR story. This is Frank: Founder, writer, editor, CEO. I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember, creating and illustrating worlds that grew more elaborate the older I got. Most of my earliest childhood memo

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