You know my philosophy: Great ideas for enhancing your employee communication program can be found everywhere you go.

For instance, this morning recently I opened an issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, which describes itself as leading  "the discourse among academic researchers, business executives and other influential thought leaders about advances in management practice that are transforming how people lead and innovate.”

That sums up the style and tone of the publication, actually: smart, academic and quite geeky.

The publication offers a brilliant idea for providing snack-sized content. On this page, called “Quick Takes,” the editors provide a taste of the smart ideas found in articles that follow. Here are three examples:

1. “By prompting a rule on how the decision will be made—by unanimity, majority or delegation—you can significantly influence what will be decided.” (From Csaszar and Enrione, “When Consensus Hurts the Company,” page 17.)
2. “An important strategy for handling uncertainty in projects is creating buffers of extra time. But if buffers are applied at the task level, task owners sometimes hide behind them and almost always use them.” (From Sting et al., “Accelerating Projects by Encouraging Help.”, page 33.)
3. “The notion that one mentor can meet all of an individual’s developmental needs is often inconceivable.” (From Shen et al., “Assembling Your Personal Board of Advisors," page 81.)

Isn’t this cool? MIT Sloan’s articles are serious and comprehensive, yet the publication has captured the essence in just a few words. It’s a technique you could easily leverage by:

• Including a Quick Take tidbit as a callout next to each article
• Creating a section on your home page or newsletter front page with your Quick Takes
• Creating a digest newsletter of Quick Takes for the week

Can you think of other ways to use this idea?