Monthly Archives: April 2010
Having looked at history and done theory on happiness in recent blogs, here’s a Top 10 from Dr Mike Pratt to pin to your wall:Progress towards meaningful goals using ‘signature strengths’ contributes significantly to happiness.Happy people take time to do things that give them pleasure.Quality time with friends and family is top of the happiness list.Doing altruistic things for others creates enduring happiness.Expressing gratitude enhances your own well-being and that of the recipient.People quickly adapt to material advances.Beyond satisfaction of needs, more money does not make people significantly happier.Positive experiences tend to provide more enduring happiness than tangible purchases (social benefits).We get little enduring pleasure from short cuts.Regular exercise increases happiness.A conversation and buzz around happiness is innately optimistic, healthy, and I think the more inquiry the better. Here’s a recent take from the New York Times “Talk Deeply, Be Happy?” by Roni Caryn Rabin about the work of University … Continue reading
by Mike BrownIt is important to keep a creative and innovative perspective going amid dramatic change. The seven lessons below, originally shared in an abbreviated form on Twitter, were written across several days of thinking strategically about how Brainzooming is progressing and how to move it ahead even more dramatically.If you’re in a situation where you’re contemplating making a dramatic change, consider these ideas and how you can get a head start now, before the change takes place:Flexibility is freeing. Design your life strategically to create future options for yourself. You never know when you’ll need them.Create situations where you can make as many of your learning mistakes as possible before it really matters. While the intensity will naturally be less, you’ll be that much more ready when everything counts.It’s one thing to build a network. It’s quite another to effectively use it to benefit others and yourself. Beyond simply … Continue reading
Just a reminder that you still have a chance to add your voice to April’s Innovation Perspectives.This monthly feature presents our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place – from several different authors. It gives our innovation community the opportunity to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and with the 2,750+ people in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn.Here is this month’s topic for publishing the week of April 26-May 2, 2010:What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)Thank you to Brightidea for sponsoring Blogging Innovation this month. Find out more about Brightidea here.The submission deadline is midnight GMT on April 24, 2010Several contributing authors will be writing articles on this topic, but you are also welcome to submit an article. The process is simple:Submit your article using our contact formI … Continue reading
Are you sick and tired of hearing about the constant need to innovate in today’s markets?If so, I have some bad news. Innovation is not just another catchphrase of the day. It’s a new business imperative, and it’s not going away any time soon. The good news is that most leaders and managers are finally starting to accept this fact, although some more grudgingly than others. They understand the need for innovation, and they see the wisdom in coming up with new products and services that add more value to their customers as well as in gaining efficiencies for processes and approaches.The problem is that most leaders and organizations don’t know how to do innovation very well. At least, not on a consistent basis.I recently came across an insightful report from the consulting firm A. T. Kearney, entitled “Best Innovators: A Synopsis of the Second Annual European Best Innovators Roundtable.” … Continue reading
Increasingly people who pony up tuition, also question current MBAs ability to upgrade business. Yet, within social media’s pool of people, prater and performance, business schools too often dig for everything but innovative brainpower with quality paybacks. What a waste of social media’s ability to power-up innovation. I’ve sensed that novelty, human intelligence, and social media can offer assurance to MBA leaders, like those I teach and mentor, who go for gold. Imagine entire MBA programs joining those prized brainpower strands in social media to stoke dendrite innovative brain cells. With a few social media approaches, business schools could spark brainpower that ignites an entire generation of global leaders. It means building better bridges between brains, social media and business leaders though. Skilled entrepreneurs intricately weave their wisdom through well crafted social media meetings, and those who’ll lead our current creative era, are making mental notes daily about how to … Continue reading
If you’ve spent any time around innovators, you’ll know that a lot of good happens right after someone utters the phrase “what if”. There’s so much potential and possibility in those two words. With a sentence beginning ‘what if’ we can release ourselves from preconceived notions and the way we usually do things, and explore a different reality. ‘What if’ is powerful. ‘What if’ is liberating.So, I was thinking that often innovation is considered to be the exception in a business, and that got me thinking – what if we flipped the hypothesis? What if innovation was the regular course of business, and some boring status quo constraint was the exception? Today we run our businesses based on a don’t vary, don’t fail, don’t risk constrained model. What if our business model was infused with innovation, and we looked with surprise when someone wanted to retreat to safety and security? … Continue reading
