Strategic Efficiency Enrolment – Gaining Efficiencies Without Reducing Headcount

In a downturn people are more important than ever. The challenge for 09? How to make your business efficient whilst looking after your people. In previous downturns, many employers focussed heavily on reducing labour costs as a way of maintaining bottom line performance. Some of these labour reduction strategies lacked dignity and were in retrospect poorly managed. As a result, when the economy recovered, the organisation was left with a major labour problem. Existing employees left as the job market picked up, and the company having developed a reputation as an employer who had failed to look after their employees, found it difficult to attract good people. But of course we can learn from this experience. Reducing head count is not the only, or even often the best way, to reduce expenses. There is a new way – it is called Strategic Efficiency

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Think what No-one Else Thinks

The Thinker How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? The answer is by deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. There are dominant ideas in every field. The brilliant thinker purposefully challenges those dominant ideas in order to think innovatively. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who discovered Vitamin C, said, ‘Genius is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no-one else has thought.’ If you can identify the standard viewpoint then survey the situation from a different viewpoint you have an excellent chance of gaining a new insight. When Jonas Salk was asked how he invented the vaccine for polio he replied, ‘I imagined myself as a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.’ Ford Motor Corporation asked Edward de Bono, who originated the concept of lateral thinking for some advice on how they could clearly differentiate themselves from their many competitors in car manufacturing. De Bono gave them a very innovative idea. Ford had approached the problem of competing from the point of view of a car manufacturer and asked the question, “How can we make our cars more attractive to consumers?” De Bono approached the problem from another direction and asked the question, “How can we make the whole driving experience better for Ford customers?” His advice was that Ford should buy up car parks in all the major city centers and make them available for Ford cars only. His remarkable idea was too radical for Ford who saw themselves as an automobile manufacturer with no interest in the car parks business.

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10 Secrets For Creating Viral Content

I’m frequently asked the question “how exactly do you create content that goes viral?” I always try and explain that while it isn’t lightning in a bottle, it isn’t something exactly formulaic either. I’ll usually start answering the question by explaining whether you’re creating blog posts, images, videos, online marketing campaigns, web apps - you name it, it’s really all about the content. But all other things being equal, there is still a ton of great content out there you’re competing with. How exactly do you get your idea to replicate in the petri dish of the web and accelerate out of control between real users? I’ve been successful at creating viral content both with posts on my own blog as well as with client projects including web applications, community building projects, new products, etc. I’ve also created plenty of stuff that didn’t go anywhere, which is all part of the process. The web is the ultimate scratchpad for communications professionals. If you’re not failing, you’re not succeeding either. There is not necessarily a science to viral, although I’ve been able to reproduce it enough times to have picked up on a few secrets. Today I’ll share just 10 things I’ve learned from personal experience creating viral content:

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Crowdsourcing : The new weapon of cyber war

The power of thousands of individuals acting en masse has become a weapon of war. While politicians, revolutionaries, and totalitarian governments have long known how to send crowds of protesters to the streets to parade in front of the television cameras, the new trend is to mobilize forces over the Internet to engage in the equivalent of mass online protests. In some case the results can be humorous. In others, not. Remember Mr. Splashy Pants? In an attempt to garner sympathy for its cause Green Peace posted a poll to choose a name for a whale. A call to the members of Reddit , the hugely popular social bookmarking site, was put out. It read: Greenpeace are having a vote to name a whale they have ‘adopted’. All the options are the names of ancient gods of the sea. And then there’s ‘Mister Splashy Pants’. Please vote ‘Mister Splashy Pants’.

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What to Do if your Startup is about to Fail

A lot of CEOs with less than 12 months of capital left have been asking me for advice about what to do, given the massive economic turmoil we're facing. I thought I would take the time put these various conversations into one email to help those who are "up against it," as we say in Brooklyn. Rock out To This While Reading: Don't Stop Believing Forward To: Startups that are hitting the wall

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