Blog

By Nicole Goldstein, Project Coordinator, Jovanny Rosado, Account Executive, and Jayda Leder-Luis, Vice President

Every Spanish kitchen we know is well stocked in onions and garlic. The flavors are the start to almost any meal, sweet cebolla and fragrant ajo. But just adding these two ingredients to your meals won’t make it a Latin-style dish. The secret sauce is the cultural connection, the nostalgia that has transcended for generations, and the fact that they come from the ground – a reminder that roots are worth digging for.

*Cartoon by Joel Pett
One of my favorite cartoons appeared in USA Today before the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. It shows a presenter on stage listing the benefits of a carbon-free future – green jobs, livable cities, clean air – and a man interjecting from the crowd: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

Global Pride Month is well underway and organizations — long-term and recent LGBTQIA+ supporters — are going rainbow everything to show their allyship for a community that has come a long way with marriage equality being the law of the land and some consistent and explicit anti-discrimination protections in place. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has shifted the media landscape in more ways than one. News about the virus and its societal impacts first took place in the publishing lineup. Beat reporters that usually focus on other areas have been pulled away to cover testing site deployment and vaccine rollout.

More workers are telecommuting in these past few months than ever before. Employees working from home are quickly learning the ropes of hosting virtual meetings and webinars over Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Skype Conference, or Zoom. Whatever your preferred online platform, there are best practices for making sure you appear professional and communicate clearly during any video conference or video project.

Whether you’re speaking in front of a few of your colleagues, clients, or industry experts at a conference, public speaking is always a bit scary. Your palms sweat, voice shakes, and you can only imagine the worst: forgetting everything you’ve prepared. Although the common bit of nerves might happen at first, public speaking doesn’t have to be a frightening experience. In fact, it’s an important skill in the communications field that can take years to master. Here are Denterlein’s tips and exercises for mastering the art of public speaking.

What does it mean to be a thought leader and why is it such a strong platform from which you can build your own brand or that of your clients? These days it feels almost impossible to read about strategies and tactics for career advancement without reading about the importance of becoming known and recognized as ‘a thought leader.’ Just what that means is open to wide interpretation.

In 1942, advertising executive Alex Osborn laid the foundation for cooperative group-thinking when he coined the phrase “brainstorming.”  His work as a creative theorist was unprecedented in American enterprise, and landed him advertising work with some of the era’s biggest industries including General Electric, Du Pont, and Chrysler.  However, 21^st-century psychologists have caught up to Osborn’s original technique, stating many shortcomings in his problem-solving strategy.  What they found was rather than triggering cooperation to “think up”, group-thinking can be restricted into converging on one idea rather than diverging into multiple ideas.  It took over half a century for scholars to agree that the outlines for brainstorming have changed, and executives everywhere are reinventing Osborn’s original design.  Here are five modernized practices for resourceful collaboration that go beyond brainstorming.