The Election Game by Joseph Napolitan

This 1972 manual on political consulting explains why your fact sheet isn't moving anyone.

May 20 • Joseph Lavoie

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Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt

The reason most public affairs strategies fail isn't that the team didn't have time. It's that no one in the room was willing to inflict the pain that…

May 6 • Joseph Lavoie

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April 2026

Influence, by Robert Cialdini

Most influence isn't persuasion. Cialdini's classic book 42 years later, and what we're still learning from it

Apr 22 • Joseph Lavoie

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Positioning: the mind is not an empty vessel

What a classic 1981 advertising book teaches public affairs practitioners about where communication breaks down

Apr 8 • Joseph Lavoie

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March 2026

Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini

Why the moment before the message is the must underused variable in communication

Mar 25 • Joseph Lavoie

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Change, by Damon Centola

Why the most important variable in public affairs isn’t the message, but the structure through which it travels.

Mar 11 • Joseph Lavoie

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How can we design for judgement, not just information?

Our tools are getting smarter. What about our decisions? My take on what's missing

Mar 8 • Joseph Lavoie

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February 2026

It's not what you say, it's what people hear

Frank Luntz gives a classic primer with his Words That Work

Feb 25 • Joseph Lavoie

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Last weekend I built an app

What vibe coding taught me about the future of public affairs

Feb 19 • Joseph Lavoie

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You cannot change someone's mind

All persuasion is self-persuasion. How Minds Change, by David McRaney

Feb 11 • Joseph Lavoie

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Decision architecture

A visual explainer of the three layers that determine whether you sense the shift in time to respond

Feb 6 • Joseph Lavoie

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The gap between pictures and reality

Walter Lippmann saw something in 1922 that most people still don’t understand.

Feb 1 • Joseph Lavoie

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