Decision Lab

Being good is not enough

You’re good at what you do. Probably very good.

Then you explain it, and you watch the face in front of you go somewhere else. The investor checks his phone. The client says “interesting” and never writes back. Your colleague repeats your idea two weeks later, worse, and everyone nods.

None of that is about how good you are. It’s a communication problem, and communication is a skill, not a personality trait. Like everything else, it can be learned.

Who I write for:

People who are excellent at something and lose the room the moment they open their mouth. Scientists, engineers, doctors, consultants, makers, anyone whose work is hard to explain in a sentence.

And people who haven’t worked out yet what their work is actually worth. You’d be surprised how often those two are the same person.

Every Tuesday you get one true story and one thing you can use the same week. Real people, real rooms, and my own mistakes too (there’s plenty of material).

Some of what you’ll pick up here:

How to open so they put the phone down in the first thirty seconds.

How to answer “so, what do you do?” without turning it into a lecture.

How to make your idea survive in a meeting you’re not sitting in.

How to say your price out loud without sticking a discount in the same sentence.

How to be remembered. Being understood is step one. Being chosen is the point.

Me, quickly. PhD in chemistry, years in biopharma, then ten years making large European companies work, from Merck to Decathlon, IKEA, Bauhaus and Essity. Twelve years of walking into rooms and asking people for money, which teaches you more about communication than any stage ever will. Now I do this full time, with people who are brilliant at their job and invisible everywhere else.

No textbook theory. A story, and one thing to try on Thursday.

More at www.donatodetullio.com. If you want to talk it through, the first step is a coffee. Thirty minutes online, no strings.