Stories by Diane Schwartz

Meetings are both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, great ideas and solutions abound when you bring people into a room, face to face.  People learn from one another and also get to know their colleagues better.  Ideas, concepts, hot-button issues …

As you were waiting for the lights to go back on in New Orleans last night, were you thinking to yourself: if this were my Super Bowl, what would I be saying to my team? What would I be doing to keep my team on the winning side? And is some poor worker…

“It’s PR’s fault!” This is what a reporter acquaintance for a daily publication recently exclaimed to me, as she was lamenting the inability to set up a meeting with a top executive at a major conference. “They didn’t get back to me, and th…

Is your Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) flaring up? Are you anxious because all your friends are hanging out and you are at home scarfing down the last spoonful of Ben & Jerry’s? Or perhaps you have FOMO because you haven’t tweeted in three hours or…

It was with a heavy dose of predictability that the country waited to hear Oprah interview Lance Armstrong on Thursday night. We knew he was going to admit that he was doping. He prepared the world for this weeks ago, though there was speculation that …

Now that your personal New Year’s Resolutions are sealed, it’s time to think about what sort of impact you plan to make this year for your company, your stakeholders and, just as importantly, for yourself. To help, I’ve compiled 13 action items, …

The story goes that journalist Clare Booth Luce once asked President John F Kennedy what his one sentence was, that a “great man is a sentence”. Concerned that Kennedy was more “a paragraph” than a sentence, Booth (one of the first females to s…

When a reporter starts calling you a flack, you might want to rethink your approach. But even before that cringe-worthy moment, there are adjustments you can make to your media relations strategy – and they’re as basic as the core tenets of Public …

Ever notice that the Thanksgiving turkey tastes better the next day and the days after? Millions of people look forward to Friday lunches, and Saturday dinners of turkey sandwiches, turkey soup and turkey (or tofu) concoctions.  Yet last Tuesday’s c…

The media’s coverage of David Petraeus has been telling, and instructional. The former CIA director and decorated general who stepped down in early November after admitting to an extramarital affair had been a media darling. Not only did he have the …