One week before the application you have been working on is to be delivered, your client asks you to make a small change to a drop down menu. He knows there isn't time to process the change through change management so asks you to bypass it. You try to reason with him that a last minute change is a bad idea. But he insists the change is important to the business and it would mean a lot to him personally. You want to please him so you say yes.

Do you have a pattern of saying yes to requests when you would like to say no? What's the secret to saying no and making it stick?

It's ironic that the Baseball Writers Association of America named Joe Girardi the National League's 2006 Manager of the Year. Giardi was recently fired by the Florida Marlins despite managing a young, low-rated team into contention. It seems his problem wasn't performance but rather communication. 

Are you overwhelmed by a mountain of email?

I suggest you take a page out of the playbook of my colleague Eric Sperley who knows how to ask for what he wants.

My article Drawing Out the Facts: The Art of the Discovery Interview was published in the July, 2007 issue of Better Software Magazine. The article explores how to conduct effective client interviews.

Does management reject your ideas? A typical cause for rejection is a failure to frame the idea effectively. Frame your idea effectively and it becomes a proposal, which will demand consideration by management. What is the recipe and key ingredients for an effective proposal?

There are different types of meetings. Each type requires a different structures and supports a different number of participants. For instance, a status (feedforward) meeting has no limit to the number of participants while a decision-making meeting produces results faster with a small number of participants.

If you want to help your teams have more effective meetings, set the participants expectations about the meeting by stating in the agenda --

• the purpose of the meeting.
• the type of meeting

What vital element of business communication is the most forgotten?

You transmit and receive meaning through a communication system that uses tools, such as words, sounds, tones, rhythm, touch, movement and so on. Words are a powerful tool within the system. They are used more consciously than any of the other tools.

"You're too good of a speaker." I've heard those words and they depressed me. Now they put a smile on my face.