You must get the last person on board sooner or later (From Machines Are the Easy Part)

From Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part. 
Illustrations by Brady Johnson

 33. You must get the last person on board sooner or later.

Let’s call him Bob. When everyone else was reading the building’s bulletin sent as an e-mail, Bob was still insisting on a print copy.

You know the reasons. 

• Too much effort. 
• I don’t have time. 
• I was never taught how.
• It’s not what we’ve always done.

We continued to print a bulletin for Bob, but made him walk to the office to pick it up each morning. Bob started reading it on e-mail. 

The only way to deal with resistors is to make sure the new way of doing things is more convenient than the old way.

34. Work a little humor into every communication effort.

What did Ole say when the Kinsey Sex Survey called and asked him if he smoked after sex? “Don’t know. Never looked.”

All right, it’s an old joke, but it made you keep on reading. There is really no excuse whatsoever not to inject at least a little humor in to every communication effort you make. It’s a mistake to confuse dryness with professionalism.

If you want the head paying attention, you have to get the heart involved. Humor is probably the easiest way to evoke an emotional response. (A groan is an emotional response, right?) You can elicit anger, fear or sadness to get attention as well, but for my money smiles do the job better.

Oh. I wouldn’t make my jokes any racier than the one above.

 35. You can never have 

• too much white space
• too big a font, or 
• too many bullet points.

My Success Strategy:

• Veni
• Vidi
• Vici

from J. Caesar’s PowerPoint presentation

Written communications that look accessible are more likely to be read. I could condense this entire book into about ten densely packed pages of type. You going to read it? Didn’t think so.

My absolutely favorite book on layout and design is Robin Williams’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book (Peachpit Press, 1994). 

• Buy it. 
• Read it. 
• Follow its advice.