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This & That

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The Voice of E.T.

E.T's voice was created by combining the voices of three people, a sea otter and a dog. But the person who spoke the most famous lines - "E.T. phone home" and "Be good" - was Patricia A. Welsh, a former radio soap opera star who'd only been involved in one other movie (Waterloo, with Robert Taylor, in 1940). By contract, she was forbidden to say her lines (which are copyrighted) even casually in conversation; Steven Spielberg said he "didn't want kids to get confused about E.T.'s image." Her name isn't even listed in the credits.

Helping Your Group Gel

For teams to succeed, say Michael Robert Fox and Colin L. Howe, authors of Diary of a Team, they must go through these eight stages:

• Design. Decide on the team's structure and vision. Involve and empower employees. Note: Devote 80% of your time to this stage and you'll need only 5% to fix problems and 15% to implement the design.
• Implementation. Have the team begin its work, but be ready to deal with naysayers and rumors.
• Anarchy. Negatives begin to outweigh positives. If you've communicated and marketed the vision well, you'll survive this stage.
• Motivation. Even the naysayers begin to contribute because they see how the team approach can help them.
• Basics. At this point, employees backslide to old ways of working because they expected too much too fast. Strategy: Stress the positive changes.
• Business. Morale improves and innovation soars as all employees see how teamwork aids the organization's success - and theirs.
• Data. Sharing confidential information with employees becomes common.
• Motion. The team reaches the point of no return to the old culture.

Source: Executive Excellence, Executive Excellence Publishing, P.O. Box 50360, Provo, UT 84604.

Use Paper Color To Influence

Keep these paper-color ideas in mind the next time you prepare a report or a proposal:

• Use black ink on a yellow background for a report cover. Reason: Yellow is the first color the eye sees, and yellow and black score highest for memory retention, according to a Pantone Color Institute study.
• Print your report on gray paper with black letters for a "gray flannel suit" look that will appeal to many managers.
• Select calming colors such as cobalt blue, blue violet or forest green if your report contains lots of bad news.

Source: Morey Stettner, writing in Investor's Business Daily.

"Quotables"

On Language:

I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom.

President Ronald Reagan on why Russia was still-and presumably always would be-Communist, overlooking the world svoboda, or freedom.

Source: The 176 Stupidest Things Ever Said, by Ross and Kathryn Petras,
Doubleday Publishing, 1996.