Sometimes the daily grind of herding corporate cats in some semblance of a direction that makes sense becomes too much to bear. And we take out the frustration on one or the other of two key targets: the folks who sign our paychecks, or the folks who tell us how things ought to be. Because both groups appear to reside in an ivory tower with little to no connection to what happens at ground level every day.
We read books and follow thought leaders and then espouse a philosophy on how content should be created, manipulated, produced, published and reused. And I suspect that a pretty large number of us fall back on the bad habits and inadequate tools at hand. The boss and the c-suite like to remind us that it’s what we’ve got, so live with it. But the ivory towers of the content creation and management fields do serve useful purposes, as my weekly scouring of the web for cool stuff proves.
Climbing into the ivory tower gives us an opportunity to look beyond the immediate and mundane. Whatever’s really on that far horizon is worth going after, at least for a good look. And, the view from up there can help put things in perspective when the PHB and snarky SME have irritated your last nerve. Even if you have to climb back down after a few minutes, hold that picture of those scurrying ants that are your work “superiors” in your mind’s eye. The ivory tower reminds us that “it’s all small stuff,” when it comes to that daily grind. And it can inspire us to drive towards elusive but worthy goals of unifying content strategy, optimizing content, and building great customer experiences.
So on this week’s climb I uncovered a dizzying array of both practical and aspirational posts on tech comm, content strategy, user experience and customer experience, including:
- The thing about explaining things
- The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America
- Building a content strategy for the internet of things
- Accessibility and Low-Powered Devices
- Which is a better investment – Customer Experience or Brand Management?
Climb up and take a look around; the view is pretty impressive in the latest edition of Tech Writer This Week.
