Is Compliance a Crutch to Blogging?

By on August 23, 2006 in Blog Coach, Blogging, Conversations with 4 Comments

Here in Central Iowa, we have an abundance of Financial, Pharmaceutical, Insurance and Health Care professionals. If blogging comes up in a conversation, the crutch fear of compliance is leaned on heavily.

Using analogies and metaphors, stories and hypotheticals to make a point, then bringing it back to business in a general way could be one way around the compliance, but still develop relationships and engage in conversations.

Let’s imagine your you’re a Financial Planner and a ski enthusiast. Water and Snow. Even skateboarding. Share stories about your passion.

  • Timing
  • Balance
  • Knowing the Terrain
  • Forecasting the Weather

Sounds like you can bring that back around to business in a generic way, no?

A great example of this is what Jeff Angus does on Management by Baseball.

An advantage for Jeff is that he’s both a baseball writer and a management consultant.  So rather than using this as another crutch (caught you!), see Ann Handley’s wonderful story on Fly-Fishing and how she brings it back around to business.

With some imagination and creativity, you can engage without walking on compliance egg shells.

Besides, how does one walk on egg shells without breaking them? I never understood that phrase.

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  • http://managetochange.typepad.com ann michael

    Slightly off topic – I never got that phrase either.
    Another one that has always perplexed me is the idea of “going to hell in a hand basket”. Why a hand basket? What makes that so much worse than simply going to hell in the first place?

  • http://cmdr-scott.blogspot.com jeff angus

    Walking on eggshells…
    I think it supports the point of your post completely. The meaning, if I remember correctly, used to mean trying **and failing** to navigate without making a mistake because the situation is intrinsically untenable. I looked it up in both my great resources for word and phrase origins (both my Mary & William Morris, “Dictionary of Contemporary Usage” and “Morris Dictionary of Word & Phrase Origins”). Not there.
    But I think it’s a lesson to managers everywhere…there are situations where caution in any quantity is no solution to getting to your objective.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Thanks for your comments on this Ann & Jeff. We could have some fun with how some of these old phrases have worked their way into the corporate sector and don’t fit at all.
    Jeff – some great books on your library shelf. I looked up Robert Hendrickson’s Word and Phrase Origins, which points to ‘Walking on Eggs – to walk warily’
    Ann – I heard once that the phrase may have originally been ‘go to heaven in a handbasket’, the theory being that it be done quickly.

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