Communication

Step slightly outside your comfort zone to deepen relationships without overwhelming yourself or others

Ask genuine questions from curiosity, not confirmation—suspend judgment and use what/when/where/how instead of why

Validate positioning language by role-playing two target customers having drinks—if you wouldn't say it out loud, rewrite it

Build your brand foundation with three components: why you exist, how you want to be understood, and how you show up

Fight hard for business where you're the best fit; walk away from everything else

A systematic approach to deciding when and how to create a new product category

Leadership impact happens exclusively through creating artifacts and verbalizations that affect other humans

Define your audience in narrowing circles from TAM to target audience to a specific model persona at the center

Spread your vision from core team to stakeholders to leadership in expanding rings

Apply product-market fit thinking to content strategy

A great name creates advantage before launch and compounds over time

Respond to disagreement with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness

A four-point exercise to define your naming strategy around winning

Specific language patterns for navigating performance feedback, promotions, and terminations

When category creation fails, elevate the value of the existing category instead

Three-sentence pitches with clear intent and exclusive offers

Start at chapter one, not chapter six—find the last obvious point and go from there

Choose two of five research-backed personality dimensions, then add tension with 'X but not Y' attribute statements

Signal conviction level with hashtags to prevent founders' opinions from being over-indexed

A classic template for articulating how you want customers to understand your product in one sentence

The three-step process for defining and owning a new market category

Add specific, concrete details to create shared understanding and open up possibilities

Structure stories with a mystery to intrigue, content to inform, and success to inspire

Position against known incumbents rather than claiming category creation

Optimize communication for maximum valuable takeaways per unit of time

Strategic use of language to change thinking and create new value perceptions

Measure and optimize talk effectiveness through humor frequency

Build brands people emotionally connect with, not just recognize

Prioritize messaging based on what customers say matters most, not what you think is coolest

Choose names along a spectrum from descriptive to empty vessel based on how much marketing work you want the name to do

Imagine the future press coverage of your success to craft a compelling winning aspiration

Mad Libs-style storytelling template for crafting compelling product visions

Address small irritations early before they compound into major relationship problems

Team disagreement about a name signals it has power

Easy-to-process names win because brains are lazy

Velocity of information is far more important than perfection—perfection is an outcome, not a starting point

Match your story type to the right publication for realistic coverage

Treat rebranding like product development with sprints, agile, and stakeholder feedback

Shift from 'selling yourself' to 'educating others about your team's work'

A two-part structure (setup + follow-through) that answers 'why pick us over the alternatives'

PR's primary value is validation and credibility, not direct growth

Evaluate potential company and product names against seven universal criteria using red/yellow/green scoring

Three speeds of influence—from letting people fail to cognitive dissonance in the moment

Each letter of the alphabet evokes specific feelings and associations

Preface bold ideas with a declaration of your motivations to prevent misinterpretation

Give feedback by describing behavior and your feelings—never attribute intent or motives you can't know

A five-step structure for positioning your product as part of a movement, not just a solution to a problem

Synthesize diverse viewpoints to move conversations forward and build strategic credibility

Help overwhelmed buyers make confident decisions by painting the market landscape for them

Give creative teams different contexts to unlock unexpected ideas

Every exchange has three distinct realities—intent, behavior, and impact—and we only have access to two

Apply improv's foundational principle to build rapport, enable collaboration, and drive progress