Weekend desk clearing: Recommended posts/articles on business communication

Here are a few articles and blog posts that we think are worth reading (mostly on data visualization with an intriguing post on communication processes at NASA). Have a terrific weekend!

• What you can learn about communication from NASA. “Say what you want about the bureaucracy and waste in a large institution such as NASA; these folks know how to communicate well in a complicated deployment (launch), and there seems to be much we can learn from them in managing large IT programs.” Not just IT project management, but business communication in general. Great post on communication during NASA launch process by Scott Booher at CIOpedia.
• Free data visualization tools from Tableau. We rarely do product endorsements, but this one is definitely worth it. Tableau Software just released Tableau Public, a free application that allows you to develop sophisticated charts and graphs for your web site, blog, twitter feed, etc. Most data visualization professionals use the enterprise version of Tableau, and we think it’s terrific that a free version is now available to a wider audience. Check it out!
• Google also launches new web-based chartware. Not sure if it’s a coincidence (probably not), but Google also launched free data visualization tools so users can create, embed, and share charts and graphs with others. To be honest, we haven’t downloaded or evaluated the Google application, but it may be something worth considering.
• Bill Gates vs. Steve Ballmer: Who is the better communicator? Surprise! It’s Bill Gates according to Nancy Duarte, the presentation guru. She skewers Steve Ballmer’s launch presentation for Windows 7 and heralds the TED 2010 presentation by Bill Gates. Although Bill Gates’s presentation is not yet available on the TED site (as of this posting), Nancy includes several pictures of the slides he used in her blog post.
• The annual report of your life. There was a recent blog post from the New York Times on Nicholas Felton and his unique, internal spin on the annual report. Edward Tufte furthered this discussion by asking others how they use data analysis and data visualization as path to self-discovery — the comments submitted by others are thought-provoking. Not exactly within our scope of business communication but it’s interesting to look at annual reports as an assessment tool as opposed to a marketing vehicle.

- A.B.