When did you win an argument lately - Argue with us here...

Here is a way to argue on a professional level - that creates results... Let's view the question "Do senior leaders need to understand how to think creatively before they can lead creatively?" Contact us to discuss how to commercialize this project with your staff and clients

How to Innovate through Standardisation...

Andrew White is a Gartner Blogger. In the article I excerpt below he refers to the work of Andrew McAfee. That reminded me to go and take a look at McAfee's blog, which I hadn't checked since the end of 2008. McAfee is one of the main thinkers behind the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and a professor at Harvard who contributes on the subject of Enterprise 2.0 to MITSloan Management Review and the Harvard Business Review. Below is an extract from Andrew White's blog post: New Research Published – How to Innovate through Standardization… "The authors believe this acceleration in competition is a result of companies’ standardization and digitization of business processes, which makes those processes easier to replicate widely through the use of enterprise IT. "The ‘trick’ is not that standardized processes lead to innovation – that is not the point of the research. The point is that business leaders have figured out how to use IT as a platform in order to simplify and speed up the deployment of innovative/unique business processes across the entire enterprise. So the real message behind the research is, “how to leverage one’s innovation more quickly”." Many Gartner consultants post articles to the company's blogsite. They don't give you the company's latest research for free but the blog articles give a good sense of recent

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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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Guy Kawasaki 10-20-30 Presentation Rule

Simple, but true...

Real Advice Hurts

In the wonderful Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about the incredible, ripping pain she felt after having her tonsils removed. All she wanted to do was chug pain killers and let the stupid thing heal, but, Anne’s doctor gave her some advice that she found as unbelievable as it was painful: he told her to chew some gum. Turns out that, as with a lot of injuries, the entirely sensible impulse to protect and baby a wounded area was the opposite of what Anne actually needed in order to fix the problem. So, by enduring the excruciating pain of chewing gum for just a few minutes, the muscles in her throat suddenly unclenched, and Anne’s pain went away forever. The advice Anne wanted wasn’t the advice she needed. And, like we all eventually learn, the best advice you’ll get in life hurts like hell at the time. Because it has to.

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