Holtz Communications + Technology

The director of the Parkland Regional Library in Lacombe, Alberta, had some doubts about the productivity of one particular employee. Being the progressive manager that she is, she decided to assess the worker’s productivity by installing keystroke logging software. This application does just what its name suggests: It records an employee’s every keystroke so it can be reviewed later by Big Br…er…the…

Warning: Long post follows.

T.J. Larkin is an excellent presenter. He’s entertaining, engaging, witty, and charming. At the end of his presentation at the IABC Research Foundation luncheon today, the crowd of about 500 gave him a standing ovation. His performance deserved it. The substance of his presentation? Well, that’s another thing altogether.

I first became aware of Larkin when I read “Communicating Change.” In this…

Thank God for Constantin Basturea’s list of CEO bloggers on his NewPR wiki.TheNewPR Wiki. (While we’re at it, thank God for everything Constantin does for the rest of us.) Sadly, the list did me no good when a colleague and sometime client asked me for examples of CEOs who are blogging to employees on their companies’ intranets.

“Well,” I said, “there’s Paul Otellini at Intel, and then, um,…

Among the letters Business Week received in response to its cover story on blogging came this one: “What you nail is that blogs have become a killer app for public relations and marketing. But it’s less clear that they are effective for internal communications. For that, the blog format is very much overhyped.”

I’ve been engaged in employee communication for 28 years. When I started as an…

The full-page ad on page86 of the June 2005 issue of PC World features a large headline screaming from a red background: “Record Everything Your Employees Do On The Internet.” The bottom features the heads of three employees. On their foreheads are these words:

“I pass company secrets via the web.” “I surf porn websites from behind my cubicle walls.” “I shop online after closing my office door.”

The ad is from

Here we go again. Will nobody stop these idiots?

An article in the Maryland Business Gazette succumbs without challenge to the same stastical nonsense that is cited by hundreds of other publications and which has led thousands of businesses to embark on engagement-killing programs of monitoring employees’ online activities. Are these business writers hypnotized by numbers? Do they never question what they’re told?…