The secret to great work is great play from Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen Blog is without doubt consistently the world's leading blog on creativity in presentation and design and here is his latest offering in full. The secret to great work is great play We were born to play. Play is how we learn and develop our minds and our bodies, and it's also how we express ourselves. Play comes naturally to us. I was reminded of this while listening to a cool little jazz gig near the beach in Maui a couple of months ago. I snapped this photo below of a little girl enjoying the simple beauty of that musical moment by dancing happily all by herself.I love this picture above because it shows both adults and a child at play. The adult musicians are expressing themselves through jazz, a complex form of play with rules and constraints but also great freedom, freedom that leads to tremendous creativity and enjoyment for the players and the listeners.

Click to read more ...

Management's Dirty Little Secret

A great piece from Gary Hamel's Wall Street Journal blog on Management. How would you feel about a physician who killed more patients than he helped? What about a police detective who committed more murders than he solved? Or a teacher whose students were more likely to get dumber than smarter as the school year progressed? And what if you discovered that these perverse outcomes were more the rule than the exception—that they were characteristic of most doctors, policemen and professors? You’d be more than perplexed. You’d be incensed, outraged. You’d demand that something must be done! Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it? Consider the recent “Global Workforce Survey” conducted by Towers Perrin, an HR consultancy. In an attempt to measure the extent of employee engagement around the world, the company polled more than 90,000 workers in 18 countries. The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including:

Click to read more ...

Cabaret At Work

Last night I attend the second Ignite Sydney event as guest of the organiser Stephen Lead and discovered the future world of business presentations. The new environments for business presentations are cabaret venues in the gay areas of a city where the audience stands and sips cocktails and hard liquor as live twittering about who is attending and who is not screens on the audio visual-screen usually reserved for video clips or karaoke. There is male on male, male on female, female on female action but instead of music and bands, the entertainment is innovative business presentations. Work and play is the new singles dance!! The evening opens when a beat box performer jumps on stage and delivers the Ignite Sydney music theme complete with scratching and explosion affects to rapturous applause. What follows is

Click to read more ...