In Leadership is an Art, one of my favorite business books on leadership, Max DePree writes about two kinds of leaders—those who live within the hierarchical structure, and those he refers to as “roving leaders,” which he defines as the “ indispensable people in our lives who are there when we need them.” DePree notes, “In special situations, the hierarchical leader is obliged to identify the roving leader, then to support and follow him or her, and also to exhibit the grace that enables the roving leader to lead.”

Think of when someone has handed over leadership to someone else, who turns out to be the right person in the right place. Often, it is emblematic of the saying that special times call for special leaders.

A Quick Story on Roving Leadership

SETTING: A couple riding inside a rented car in a new city. You can feel the
dramatic tension in the car.

John: Where’s that restaurant?

Iris: Over

there? No, over there. Nope. I think it’s over there. (Now
screaming) That other street!

John: Let’s cut through this alley.

(Pan to alley, lined with metal dumpsters, the car turns and proceeds into alley. A mangled dumpster’s twisted metal punctures the sidewall of the tiny car’s tiny tire.)

Iris: Let’s park the car in this dark, deserted lot. I’m hungry. Let’s eat.

(John and Iris exit the restaurant, scene in alley is dark and desperate. They proceed to pull out the car’s tiny lug wrench and tire jack from the tiny trunk.)

Iris: This tiny tire jack can’t possibly work on this tiny car, can it?

(Roving Leader enters scene: From the dark depths, a tall man climbs out of a muddy ‘60’s era jeep.)

Roving Leader: Hey do you need a hand?

Iris/John (in unison): Yes!

(John turns to face the audience)

John: I handed over authority, and participated appreciatively, as he took over
with the tiny tools, and within 10 minutes had raised the car the
requisite number of inches to perform the task. (John looks down at his
feet, acts embarrassed but relieved. Looking up again.) The
smartest—and maybe, some would argue the only—thing I could do at
the time, was to hand over leadership, to the right person at the right
time.

For whatever reason, someone has stepped into the role of roving leader. These roving leaders often emerge from a wider circle of colleagues than one may have originally considered as essential to your team.

A true leader knows when to lead and when to follow.

Dull pencils simply don’t work as well. Sure, you can write with them, but what results is muddy and unclear. A sharpened pencil is clean, decisive, and crisp. Take a moment and think—which of these depicts your brain right now?

How sharp is your brain?

Our brains can also become muddy and unclear, but you can take steps to get yourself back to clean, decisive, and crisp! Here are four things you can do today to help turn your mind from dull to sharp:

1. Inspire yourself
We feature a new list every month of books, websites, and anything else you can think of that inspires us individually and as a team. You can also take note of the little things that inspire you in your day and contribute your comments to ours, or share with your friends.

2. Keep up with industry trends
Are you subscribed to the latest blogs and podcasts in your field? Be in the know about what is going on

and stay on trend.

3. Nourish it
If your brain is feeling sluggish, have that coffee, but don’t forget that the best way to stay hydrated and alert is with water! Drink water throughout the day and get a good eight hours of sleep each night to help keep you alert (and healthy). Have a water bottle with you, flavor it with fruit and herb infusions or cucumber slices, anything that gets you to drink it. (We even have one colleague who uses a splash of apple cider vinegar.)

4. Excercise your mind
Studies suggest that playing board games can help ward off Alzheimer’s. So pull out the chess board, Monopoly, or Scrabble; do a crossword puzzle, or get out that deck of cards. Find a challenging interactive app like Letterpress to keep you interactive and sharp. Learning a language or a musical instrument works too. Be open to new things and new challenges, and always be ready to learn something new.

And for Pete’s sake, if you have any dull pencils on your desk, get up and sharpen them now.

I know I love that new software that gives me remote control over the lighting, heating, and air conditioning in my house. Maybe the software works great with my new iPhone, but is the required wiring compatible with what currently exists—or will I need to make extensive modifications in my 150-year-old building? If you don’t ask, you might not know until it’s already been ordered.

Prepare a detailed requirements document, and responsible vendors will provide a detailed scope of work to match your needs. Specific and to the point. But the requirements document can be flawed if the right questions were not asked in advance. And the more specific they are, the greater the liklihood that your vendors will assume that you’ve done all of your due diligence in advance. When these mistakes happens, the client may well get what they asked for, but it may be a suboptimal solution, or worse. It may be no solution at all.

In “Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask The Right Questions,” Gary B. Cohen reminds us of the following, which applies to leadership, just as it does to effective business communications:

History is not always a good teacher

What we believe to be the truth is often a product of having a bias. There are five biases that can unduly influence leadership and decision-making:

1. Negative bias: When you have a negative experience, it has a larger impact on your memory and leads you to believe that certain roads are to be avoided, to a greater degree, than a quantitative analysis would demonstrate.
2. Frequency bias: When you hear or see something repeatedly over time, you will be more inclined to believe it.
3. Recent Bias: When making a decision, something you learned just recently will often carry more weight than information you learned a while ago.
4. Attachment bias: Leaders can very easily become overly conservative and avoid making the right decision, simply because they don’t want to disrupt the status quo, which they helped achieve.
5. Escalation bias: When you start down a path, you look for evidence to support your direction and at your peril, choose to ignore warning signs.

One obvious way to circumvent this problem of the unknown, or escaping our own bias, is to include an open-ended question in your requirements document, for example: Is this a complete solution, or are there additional [services, software, hardware, installations, etc.] necessary for implementation?

A second preventative is to include both your technical experts and  your nontechnical users to prepare the request for proposals. One will complement the other, to search for a solution is a good fit  for your organization.

For example, in requesting a content management system, or CMS, for your firm’s website, a technical response might specify the most robust system, but the nontechnical end-user may provide a more pragmatic interest on the way the CMS will be used by your staff.

Specifications documents can help avoid the black hole of specificity by using a number of different voices to identify various requirements: technological/engineering, design, usability, testing, end-use, and end-results.

Asking the right people to ask the right questions may help avoid costly and time-consuming results whereby

you get what you asked for, but not what you need.

Recently I had to scan in a document to share over email. It needed to be readable and it was quite text- and table-heavy, so I scanned it in grayscale. The original file was 11 pages and weighed in at over 11 MB. It wasn’t even at a high resolution, just 150 dpi—good enough to read on screen and print out, but nothing to write home about. I didn’t have the original file, it was getting late, and I really didn’t want to try noodling with my scanner settings and do it all over again.

Enter Adobe Acrobat.

1. Open your big document
2. Locate File/Save As/Reduced Size PDF
3. Choose “Acrobat 10.0 and later”
4. Click “OK”

1. Save
2. Pop that reduced-file size PDF into your email and hit send.

Uh oh. What happens in Las Vegas . . . gets written up in a blog post? Quick. Someone call legal!

PRI returned last week from the Legal Marketing Association’s 2013 annual conference. We introduced ourselves to legal marketing professionals from across the country.

Our notes:

1. The action items on the to-do lists of marketing and communications professionals is not limited to the legal industry. Marketing directors were looking for creative, and it didn’t matter
   generic viagra price

   if our current clients were in the legal industry or not (which some are!).

2. Testing, metrics, and measurement of marketing initiatives is more important than ever.
3. An integrated approach helps leverage tight budgets and protect a firm’s brand with clear and consistent messaging across public relations, sales, marketing, and human resources.

We heard from our marketing colleagues about the need for editorial content, and the importance of social media. The obvious tension within a law firm is a function of time and billable hours. Attorneys are the final word, but the challenge to get a partner to put pen to paper, is ongoing.

There was a lot more. We took our own notes, and we handed out PRI branded notebooks, which everyone seemed to treasure.

There is a lot of talent among our colleagues, both in-house and the firms that serve them. We love being part of this vital community!

Fans of The Princess Bride are well familiar with Vizzini’s cry of “Inconceivable!” He uses it so many times that his henchman, swordfighting master Inigo Montoya remarks, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

That’s the issue we, as designers, run into on a regular basis with our clients. Sometimes, your client is talking about one thing, when what they actually mean is something different altogether. They just may not be able to articulate exactly what that precise thing is.

This is what I like to think of as The Ultimate Resolution. Though a client may not be able to spell it out, it’s our job to cut straight to the heart of the matter, figure out what their goal is, and produce it. It’s why we’re their designer: to make

things clean, simple, and to express an idea cleanly and succinctly.

So the next time a client asks for something you find inconceivable at first glance, or becomes overwhelmed with minute details about making things incrementally larger or smaller, brighter or shinier, remember what the ultimate goal of the project is. Is it for the user to click a button? Fill out a response? Request more information? Take their concerns into consideration and design in the true spirit of what they mean. And then explain how and why you arrived at that conclusion so everyone’s on the same page. They’ll be

glad you did!

Check out this “Inconceivable” montage:

3. Awesome Screenshot

Price: Free

Most of us are familiar with what a screenshot or screen cap (i.e., screen capture) is. It’s essentially a snapshot image of what you see on your screen. Awesome Screenshot allows the same screen capture function, but within the view of your browser window. It allows you to capture the whole page or any portion, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines, and text, and then allows you to save the image locally, or share the URL. This is my go-to tool for pointing out small on-screen issues and making commonly used notations.

2. Cross Browser Testing

Price: $19.95–$199.95 per month

When it comes to Web browsers, the Big 4 (in no biased order) and their market usage (as of February 2013) are Internet Explorer (13.5%), Mozilla Firefox (29.6%), Google Chrome (50%), and Apple Safari (4.1%). With each of these top-used Web browsers come the pains of designing and developing for continuity across each platform—and in some cases designing and developing for multiple versions (IE 7, 8, 9, and 10). In most cases you won’t have access to all the browsers you need to account for on your local machine, that’s where Cross Browser Testing comes in. With over 1,000 combinations of browsers, operating systems, and plugins, this service is a must have for anyone looking to ensure quality across Web browsers without running multiple machines.

1. BugHerd

Price: $29 – $190 per month

In my experience, the real work on any project is once it goes live. As clients and end users begin to submit errors and feedback and your project becomes a target to hackers and malicious scripts, it’s good to have a streamlined method of dealing with arising issues. For development teams, Web agencies and website owners, BugHerd provides a slue of features for staying on top of issues as they arise. Allowing clients and website visitors to submit feedback right on the website is my favorite feature, which also lets them know automatically when you’ve fixed the problem. Quality assurance is now assured!

What cool tools for quality assurance or otherwise tops your list? Please let us know in the comments or shoot us an email!

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

—Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

The four attributes of an effective communicator are the ability to be flexible, focused, responsive, and calm. Combined, you are viewed as trustworthy and approachable.

Flexible

A good listener will hear—and possibly see—the nonverbal cues that enable you to tailor your communications. Your flexibility, “I understand that your children are home early because it is a snow day, shall we talk later?” shows consideration, often appreciated, and returned later with the other person’s more

complete attention. Providing flexibility establishes an equitable exchange of that most precious of precious commodities, time.

» Flexibility serves you and those you are communicating with.

Focused

It is rare when we have only one thought to communicate. Multi-tasking breeds multi-messages. The focused communication does everyone a favor. It says, “Let’s prioritize, and take this one issue at a time.” By doing so, your focus is contagious. Others will appreciate not being forced into multi-tasking an answer.

» Being focused serves you and those with whom you are communicating.

Responsive

Just because you initiated a communication does not mean that there won’t be questions. Your willingness to provide a ready response is another quid pro quo that leads to building trust and depth to your relationship. In business as in our personal relationships, trust engenders good will.

» Being responsive serves you, and those with whom you are communicating.

Calm

We have a choice. We can be calm during stressful times. Or not. The calm communicator is telegraphing all sorts of positive signs: Yes, I can handle this crisis. Yes, I am focused on the crisis, not on my emotions. Yes, I’m listening, watching. Yes, I can communicate with you and others, and I expect the same from you. Yes, you can trust me.

By maintaining calm, we can run through the checklist of information required for decisive decision-making. And we are more likely to make an informed decision. You will be known as the one who can be relied on in times of crisis (we all experience varying degrees of urgency), and as a go-to person, a leader in your area.

» Being calm serves you, and those with whom you are communicating.

People will listen to you, because you listen to them.

People will trust you with information and decision-making because your calm, responsive style leads to a greater percentage of success. And they will trust that you will not create a new issue out of a crisis, which only makes matters worse.

The practice of these elements becomes part of your brand as a great communicator.