Most corporate communication emails from HR start off with something along the lines of, “The ability to effectively leverage human capital is our greatest asset.”

Here’s the thing: If your company really believes that, and does “effectively leverage human capital” (buzzword bingo, anyone), you don’t need to say it. Your employees already know.

And if you don’t? Well, your employees know that, too. And saying it doesn’t make true.

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Photo by Paul L. Nettles

Last week, we talked about how you can use surprise to get people’s attention. But how do you keep their attention once you get it?

Today, we’re going to talk about another emotion: curiosity.

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Photo by caribb

If you’ve ever been on a plane, you’re familiar with the safety announcement that flight attendants are required to make before the plane takes off. And if you’re like most people, you probably tune the flight attendant out. The information is pretty important, but no one cares.

What if you were asked to make the safety announcement? And what if you actually needed people to listen to you? What would you do?

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Herb Kelleher, the longest-serving CEO of Southwest, once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”¹

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I have a guest post up on Know HR this morning – Seven things marketing can teach you about HR. Here’s a quick teaser:

1. It’s a lot easier to market a great product. Rather than pushing a crappy HR program on people, make the program so awesome, so helpful to people, that they not only want to use it – they even tell a friend!

Check out the other six (and subscribe, if you’re not already) at KnowHR. Special thanks to Frank Roche for letting me post on his site!

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If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ll notice that many of them have what’s called a blog-roll in their sidebar. This is basically a list of other blogs that the writer of another blog finds interesting.

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has turned me into a bit of a simplicity nut, so I don’t have a blog-roll on my site. I hate having too much crap cluttering up my sidebar.

That said, I thought you still might be interested in what’s in my RSS reader, so today, I wanted to share with you the list of blogs that make my short list.

Many of them are less about technical HR skills, and more about how to market and spread ideas. Since Renegade HR is about transforming our profession into something way awesomer, I think those are pretty important skills to have.

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You may or may not have heard that Zappos, the online retailer, was recently purchased by Amazon.com for a ton of money. One of my favorite things about the sale was the way Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, told his employees.

Read Tony’s email

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