I have fre­quently found myself talk­ing to reform-minded indi­vidu­als in the Middle East. Many like the idea of demo­cracy. They admire it. Per­son­ally they are lib­eral, pro­gress­ive, secular.

And yet the closer they are to power — or when hold­ing office — the more they con­cede that the time is not yet ripe. Their work is too import­ant, and the people are too eas­ily led, too poorly edu­cated, too rad­ical, too sectarian.

Speak­ing yes­ter­day at the BBC, I had that feel­ing of Middle East­ern déjà vu. Con­tinue read­ing →

Author Stew Fried­man had to drum up an audi­ence at Google HQ. Did he Twit­ter? A Face­book event, per­haps? Gmail? Nope.

So, in this defin­it­ively 21st cen­tury work envir­on­ment, how do you grab employ­ees’ atten­tion to entice them to attend a one-hour ses­sion with an author talk­ing about his new book? This was the chal­lenge for my hosts and, being cre­at­ive Goo­glers, they found a way that cut against the grain, and it worked.

They cre­ated small posters on paper and taped them on the glass door entrances to vir­tu­ally all of the build­ings on campus.