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Business strategy and information technology are not providing sustainable competitive advantage anymore! Â If You Want your Organizational Culture to be a Strategic Weapon You Must Read This Book!
“Visual thinking is the foundation for being creative and solving some of the most complex problems,” explained author and founder of Innovation Studio Lisa Kay Solomon. Solomon and Emily Shepard of The Graphic Distillery discussed the key role of visual thinking in innovation at a recent Stanford GSB Mastery in Communication Initiative talk. Below, they share five visual-thinking based skills that disruptive innovators must master:
1) Observe Set your phone down and actually pay attention to what’s going on around you. You can’t come up with new ideas unless you observe the world with fresh, empathetic eyes. Keep a design journal and document what you observe at least once a week.
2) Question Once you have a look around, review your design journal and ask: “What’s going on here?” Questions allow for space in the brain. If you’re not curious about something, then there’s nowhere for your observations to go. As an innovator you should ask questions to nail down the problem you’re trying to solve.
3) Associate Combining ideas leads to new insights. In the book Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson proposes that innovation comes from places where half-baked ideas can bump up against other half-baked ideas and together create something even better. Doodling is a way to cultivate these seeds of ideas.
4) Experiment Visualization makes your ideas tangible and concrete. “If you can’t draw your ideas in stick figures, you don’t know what you’re saying,” says Solomon. Drawing by hand is a method of prototyping that allows you to test out the core essence of your idea in a low-res way before you spend more time on it.
5) Network Get access to people in diverse universes to expand your opportunities and areas of expertise. What are some big areas missing from your knowledge bank? We often end up just having a deep network of people like us instead of a diverse network.
For more insights on visual thinking, follow #GSBVT on Twitter: http://stnfd.biz/liMyC
Via Sharrock, Mark E. Deschaine, PhD, Stephania Savva, Ph.D
Here are some networking tips to help make these business slightly less awkward and perhaps even enjoyable.
Curated from socialmediaexaminer.com.
Let’s face it, LinkedIn is a very underutilized social media network. Most people believe that it’s too hard to make connections, and therefore use it more as a résumé site.
Via TechinBiz
The cover story in the current Fortune magazine (July 1, 2013, issue) by Jessi Hempel is “Everything you need to know about LinkedIn”. The article points out the growing need for all businesses to participate on LinkedIn. The six-page commentary brings up a number of great points and some excellent background, but six pages is not going to cover “everything you need to know.” It is what Hempel wraps up with that is most telling. She refers to the “confusion” about how to leverage the network more fully, which has spawned an industry of those who teach others how to use LinkedIn, myself included. While many feel that once they reach that magic 500+ connections, they have reached a major milestone, it simply is not so. It is actually pretty easy to reach 500+, but this has no value unless you have a strategy. So here is your jumpstart program for LinkedIn, whether you are a novice or have some experience on LinkedIn.
We've looked high and low to find the Internets best social networking sites specifically designed for small business, entrepreneurs, and startups. Here's the ultimate list!
Via TechinBiz
Twitter has quickly become a favorite part of content marketing strategies employed by most businesses. The 140 character limit means that it doesn’t take much work, users have little inhibition about following quality profiles and it’s already optimized for mobile. Curating a quality Twitter feed lends itself to an answer for so many marketing questions that it would be hard to list them all here. Still yet, lots of users have no idea how to make 140 characters count. What we end up with is Twitter feeds consisting primarily of links and quotes. Quotes are an obvious place to start when you want concise snippets of text that convey wisdom and evoke strong emotions. In fact, the most successful Twitter users are almost always inspirational, funny or educational in nature. However, followers don’t want to follow a copy of someone that’s already in their feed, and as an online influencer you don’t want to be pigeonholed. Read more: http://bit.ly/KkfOb7
Via Martin Gysler
If you’ve recently launched your job search, you likely know about the importance of networking to uncover opportunities. But can you name any specific steps you’ve taken to grow and connect with your network? Or do you answer that question by saying something half-hearted, like: “Well, I called a few people to let them know I’m looking, and asked if they knew about any openings.” Networking should be a fully integrated component in the life of every business person. It will lead to stronger contacts and friendships that can help in every aspect of your work. And during the early stages of job hunting, networking for information about career opportunities should become your primary interest and given more attention than any other aspect of your search. It isn’t until you start interviewing that networking can take a smaller, but still critical role...
Via Martin Gysler
Social networking sites have each a unique protocol and don’t usually provide members with practical how-to advice to help use their sites effectively. They let us figure out the how-tos on our own. I share in this article my basic LinkedIn how-tos that may shorten your learning curve and save you time and frustration. They are merely suggestions, not rigid guidelines. If you have an idea or advice you find helpful, please share it with us in a comment. Here are ten tips for maximizing your LinkedIn social networking success:...
Via Martin Gysler
If you search the best social network for you and your business, here you'll find an amazing list
with few information about the niche that use it. [note Martin Gysler] This is a list of major active social networking websites and excludes dating websites (see List of online dating websites). For defunct social networking websites, see List of defunct social networking websites.
Please note the list is not exhaustive, and is limited to notable, well-known sites.
Via Martin Gysler
Want to create an expansive and powerful network? We asked LinkedIn's power users for their best tips. The rules of engagement on LinkedIn are fairly clear: first and foremost, you should only connect with people you actually know. Yet millions of people—yes, we're looking at you—are broadening their networks by connecting to people with whom they've never even had a discussion. The rules aren't black and white, but if you want to expand your LinkedIn database make sure to choose the right shade of grey. "One major pet peeve of mine when it comes to LinkedIn requests is when people who don't know you say you're a 'friend,' or that you have done business with them at their current company," says social media strategist Scott Swanay. "First of all, that's not true, and second of all, it's just lazy on their part—those are generally requests that I'll ignore."...
Via Martin Gysler
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If you are looking to scale your business' online presence, these social media apps are your go-to tools for success.
Business leaders must balance short-term financial performance with investments in capturing and crediting their company’s Relationship Capital account.
I am back on my soapbox... ...because I continue to see great things happening in classrooms, but get blank stares, when I ask, if these things are being shared beyond the school building. ...becau...
Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)
Inspire your community by increasing their confidence, helping them connect to others, and pushing them to challenge themselves.
Via TechinBiz
Top Reasons why your business can benefit from Cloud Computing http://su.pr/9Nr6AR #Virtualization #Networking #Cloudcomputing #Cloud
Via TechinBiz
Networking advice from Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media, and Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council.
Via TechinBiz
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Everyone tries to network, but few people do it well, often making the same basic mistakes. Here’s what not to do when you’re trying to expand or leverage your network: 1. Try to take before you give. The goal of networking is to connect with people who can help you make a sale, get a referral, establish a contact, etc. When we network, we want something. But at first, never ask for what you want. In fact you may never ask for what you want. Forget about what you can get and focus on what you can provide. Giving is the only way to establish a real connection and relationship. Focus solely on what you can get out of the connection and you will never make meaningful, mutually beneficial connections. When you network, it’s all about them, not you...
Via Martin Gysler
With the rise of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, it has never been easier to build and maintain a network. One quick press of a button can bring a new person into your network, or remove one permanently. Make a quick scan of update feeds and you can feel up-to-date on what everyone around you is up to. Gone are the days when you had to set aside several hours a week to call connections to ask how their vacation was or how their family was doing. All the pictures are right there for you to peruse and comment on. MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY Facebook is about interaction, it's not about sales Developing a social media plan for your business How to build a great reputation online
Via Martin Gysler
It’s hard to tell whether it’s a case of correlation or causation, but according to a new study published this week, employees who are super active on social networking sites have a very different idea of what is appropriate workplace behavior than other workers. For starters, active social networkers — defined in the 2011 National Business Ethics Survey, a study published this week by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center (ERC) as people who spend more than 30 percent of the workday participating on social networking sites — are much more likely to view their current jobs as temporary. 72 percent of active social networkers polled said they plan to change employers within the next five years, compared to 39 percent of non-active social networkers.
Via Martin Gysler
Understand social networking websites, how they work and what tools will make them easier to manage, so that you can put social media to work for you and your business. Helping you to understand social networking so that you can put social media to work for you and your business. Social network sites are growing popularity every day. Businesses can no longer ignore this social media trend. Instead, we should embrace these opportunities as affordable marketing tools for both online and offline businesses. Whether your business is large or small, you can make social media work for you. By engaging customers or potential customers through an online presence on a website, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn or YouTube...businesses can spread the word about themselves to their target audiences. They can also cultivate a more interactive relationship with their current customer base and have more control over their online reputation...
Via Martin Gysler
The following interview is with Dave Gowel, who has been recognized as a “LinkedIn Jedi” by Inc.com and the Boston Globe, is the CEO of RockTech, and author of The Power in a Link: Open Doors, Close Deals and Change the Way you do Business Using LinkedIn (Wiley, December 2011). Gowel co-founded RockTech with Mark Rockefeller to build software tools that help corporations increase productivity through quicker adoption of underutilized technologies. The interview has been edited for clarity.
A lot of people see LinkedIn as a recruiting or job hunting network. What are some of the other ways professionals can put LinkedIn to work, once they’ve landed that dream job? I think one of the key ways to think about it is really a relationship filter, that when you put in all the relationships that you already have, it allows you to see the ones that you could have more easily, or get information about potential ones...
Via Martin Gysler
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