The Daily Blog Has Moved to Brainzooming.com!

As of February 1, 2010, all new Brainzooming posts will be at Brainzooming.com.

To View the Daily Brainzooming Blog: You can go right to the up-to-date daily Brainzooming blog at this link.

To Sign Up for a FREE Email Subscription to Brainzooming, click here. You'll be asked to enter your email address and will then receive a confirmation email to complete your subscription.

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If You Have a Blogroll or Links to Brainzooming on Your Website, please update it at this time with http://brainzooming.com/?cat=47

To Learn More About What Brainzooming Does, please visit this link.

Thanks to all of you for following and reading the blog! We appreciate your support and readership and are excited for you to join us at Brainzooming.com!

Important Update for Those With Brainzooming.blogspot.com Favorited or Viewing through RSS - Moving Time!

I've mentioned a few times about moving the blog to a new website. Well, the time has come!

After this Friday, daily blog publishing on Brainzooming.blogspot.com will stop. Starting today, you can begin to find new, daily blog posts at Brainzooming.com! (Note: Brainzooming.blogspot.com will still be online for now, although archived content has moved to the new site.)

This move has been a long time coming and with the change to the Wordpress platform, the website will now contain the blog plus information on Brainzooming service offerings, presentations I do, and tools that have been previously scattered across other websites.

I'm still learning about the new website and there are more features to be added, but it's been functioning well the past couple of weeks (i.e., it's been feeding email blog subscribers since January 18), so it's ready for the transition.

Here's what you can do to stay current with daily Brainzooming posts:

• For People Who Visit the Website Directly: Please favorite the new site at http://brainzooming.com/. The latest Brainzooming blog post will be located here.


• For RSS Subscribers: The new RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainzooming/ZWKr


• You can also click here to sign up to receive the Brainzooming blog by email. If you're a current email subscriber, there's nothing you need to do to continue receiving Brainzooming daily.

Thanks to all of you for following and reading the blog! My goal with every post is to provide something of benefit to you on how to better incorporate strategy, creativity, or innovation into your business and personal lives. Since this is about providing value to you, please let me know your thoughts on the new site.

Thanks particularly to Seth Simonds who has been instrumental in creating the foundation and structure for Brainzooming.com!

Again, I appreciate your support and readership and am excited for you to join me at the new Brainzooming.com!

Whenever I Call You Friend

A year ago, a “friend” was someone I’d almost certainly met in person. We had come to know one another through shared personal experiences. Keeping in touch was enjoyable, even if through infrequent phone or email exchanges.

One year later, having used Twitter and the Brainzooming blog in a strategy to “meet” people globally, my concept of friendship has been dramatically expanded.

Now, there are “friends” I have:

• Never spoken to directly and may never speak to via phone, and certainly not in person.
• Come to know through shared online experiences, typically in messages of 140 characters, that have nevertheless provided memorable insights into their personalities.
• Been excited to see show up (via their avatars) and communicate with on Twitter, the blog, or in my email.

This expanded group of friends has enriched my life tremendously. They’ve shared their expertise, talents, ideas, creativity, reading lists, suggestions, and personal cheerleading so generously. I communicate with many of them weekly, and know them better than IRL people I’ve been around for years.

All this is a remarkable transformation in perspective, especially considering for a number of these new friends, I don’t even know their full names.

In what innovative ways has your definition of “friend” been changed by social media? – Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Tools to Improve Your Success

With 2010 looming and the importance of approaching the year with creative business and competitive options, here are links to a variety of tools to help if you're under the gun to get a successful plan completed.

A Foundation on Strategic Thinking

• An Overview on What Strategic Means, Who to Involve in Strategy Development, and a Few Strategic Tools

Creating a Strategic Focus

• Steps to Re-evaluate and Focus on Important Elements in Your Business


• Better Understanding What's Strategic in Your Business

Contingency Planning

• Thoughts on Dealing with Uncertainty


• Steps to Deal with Planning Amid Uncertainty


• Quickly Developing Options When Your Current Plan Isn't Working


• Having to "Wing" Your Strategy Because of Uncertainty

Updating Your Current Plan

• Re-checking Your Marketing Plan for Completeness


• Reviewing and Modifying Your Strategic Direction


• Updating a Marketing Plan Under Tight Resources

Implementing Specific Strategic Thrusts

• Generating New Ideas When You Need Them


• When A More Aggressive Competitive Strategy Is Needed


• You're Fighting an Uphill Battle and Need a Contrarian Strategy


• Developing a Low-Investment Marketing Strategy


• You Have a Turnaround to Fix

Wrapping Up with a Smile on Your Face

• The Ultimate in Flexible Strategy

Additionally, Trendwatching.com has released its briefing on "10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010" covering impacts arising from (among other things):

• Urbanization
• Fragmentation in what constitutes luxury
• Increasingly complex online presences
• A push for mass IRL interactions emanating from online networks

There are certainly other Brainzooming articles touching on these planning topics, but ideally this short list will get you jump started for current planning efforts you have to complete. - Mike Brown

What's He Doing?

Big shifts are taking place personally. They're sure to affect the direction and content on Brainzooming™, and it's appropriate to let you know what's happening.

For the past five years, I've been working a personal branding plan designed to grow my network, increase learning, and build a stronger presentation and writing repertoire. Important activities have included:

• Speaking and facilitating with groups internationally on developing strategic thinking, innovation, branding, and social media


• Starting multiple blogs, including one on humor and another on spirituality


• Introducing Brainzooming as a "personal" brand


• Employing a social media strategy to grow the brand

It's been an aggressive effort, and especially recently, I've described myself as doing two full-time jobs. The personal branding effort for Brainzooming takes place early mornings, late nights, weekends, and vacation days away from my primary job in a corporate role.

During my career, my day job has allowed incredible opportunities to grow and contribute beyond my original market research position:

• Developing the strategic understanding and planning behind a dramatic corporate turnaround


• Running an industry leading, award-winning, decade-long NASCAR sponsorship program


• Producing a series of transformative customer meetings with some of the best speakers in the business


• Creating culture changing internal and external branding efforts

Through it all, it's been amazing to work with incredibly talented and wonderful people. It's actually quite staggering to contemplate the incredible opportunities I've been provided.

This Friday though, after a difficult decision, I'm leaving my corporate position. Despite all the news suggesting it's a ridiculous time to do it, nearly all indications suggest it's exactly the right thing to do.

As a result, next Monday my priorities flip: Brainzooming moves to the forefront and pursuing a potential next corporate position becomes secondary.

While I've made a point to keep nearly all references to my corporate position out of Brainzooming, its daily learnings and challenges infuse the blog content all the time. With a different routine and new interactions, what gets covered here will change. Together, we'll find out exactly what that means as the future unfolds.

Welcome to the new phase of Brainzooming, as it grows into a full-time strategic innovation consulting company! The Brainzooming team looks forward to your ideas, business leads, and guidance as the changes take place!

P.S. Especially the business leads! More on that later! - Mike Brown

Make Mistakes Week

Amid dramatic changes in my professional life, and Brainzooming™ in particular, I'm deliberately forcing myself into uncomfortable areas necessitating rapid development of previously underused skills.

Understanding the importance of diving in and not holding myself to an unrealistic performance standard, I labeled last week, "Make Mistakes Week."

When undertaking changes and growth, do yourself a favor and establish a "Make Mistakes Week" for yourself. Doing so acknowledges the need to get started, consciously practice, learn from experience, and continuously improve.

In addition to trial and error, I tried listening and observing others more intently as they offered absolutely fundamental counsel. It's always amazing how clearly others can see things you should find obvious yet completely miss!

Through the concurrent development and implementation of new messaging for Brainzooming, I did get better at delivering it during the week. But the improvement wasn't all in a straight line, and it fell well short of where it needs to be.

As a result, this week is "Make Mistakes Week - The Sequel!" - Mike Brown

A Brainzooming Creativity Manifesto

Getting Ready for This!

Today includes a lunch presentation at the Fort Hays State University Business and Leadership Symposium. The presentation title is "Getting Ready for This," and it focuses on six vital success competencies for graduates coming into the workplace amid a dramatically changing business world.

The premise is that it's fundamental for new graduates to own skills in co-creating, contorting, and abandoning ideas and strategies based on what's relevant at any time. It's not so much "what" they know, as "how" to continually deconstruct and reassemble their knowledge in dramatically new and relevant ways throughout their careers.

It starts with several amazing factoids from the video "Do You Know 3.0?" recounting dramatic demographic, technology, and information-based changes worldwide. It's been viewed millions of times, and in the event you haven't seen it, take a few minutes to watch it.

As a brief overview and reference for the presentation, here are the six areas for educators and students to more concertedly embrace:

1. Knowing Answers Is Good - Knowing How to Find Answers Is Vital

Since facts change and information deteriorates, it's vital to be able to know how to seek and vet potential answers since no one can be expected to have a full command of all available knowledge.

2. Balanced Thinking Allows You to Be More Strategic

USA Today featured an article in July on retraining a left brained orientation to a right brained one in order to cope with a changing job environment. We talk plenty about the importance of knowing your thinking orientation, surrounding yourself with a complementary team, and the strategic impact of being able to work with contradictory points of view.

3. Possibilities and Emotion are Important in Business

From someone whose more natural orientation centers on facts and logic, this has been the most challenging of the 6 areas to retrain my own view. The best place to go on this topic is Benjamin Zander, who has been mentioned frequently here. As a homework assignment for attendees at the FHSU presentation, I asked them to watch these two Zander videos and get a genuine sense of the importance of emotion and possibilities thinking:

• Benjamin Zander on the Art of Possibilities


• Benjamin Zander on Emotion and Possibilities

4. You Have to Be Able to Communicate in Multiple Ways

Communication is in the top 10 topics addressed on Brainzooming so far because it's so critical to successful creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking. Students need to be pushed to go beyond the typical team presentation that summarizes a semester-long project. They need to be adept at using formats of varying lengths (simple recommendations, elevator speeches, tweets, etc.) and mediums (songs, video, acting, etc.).

5. Leadership Starts Day One on the Job

Leadership is about service, not titles. That means day one is the time for new graduates to start leading on the job. Taking on a strategic leadership role can be simple. You just have to be willing to do something about it!

6. People All Around You Are Making Decisions Based on Personal Branding

Personal branding isn't a meaningless concept authors dreamed up to sell more books. It's truly the driver behind why anyone gets hired, advances, and has intriguing opportunities develop. Step one is understanding your talents and exploiting them. Here are two great books to read on how to further develop and sustain a personal brand:

• "Radical Careering" by Sally Hogshead


• "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by Gordon MacKenzie

I look forward to comments from those in attendance (and non-attendees as well) with thoughts on the topic since it applies to all of us as dizzying changes occur around us. Stay close to the Brainzooming blog for more on change and dealing with it in the near future! - Mike Brown

A Career-Changing Business Quote - 10 Years Later

“Forecasters who extrapolate from today inevitably get tomorrow wrong…(but) by pitting multiple scenarios of the future against one another and leaving many different doors open, you can prepare yourself for a future that is inherently unpredictable. Brainstorming pays off. And the more possibilities you can entertain, the less likely you are to be blindsided.” - Peter Coy and Neil Gross, Business Week, August 30, 1999

I use this quote often in presentations because it has so dramatically shaped my thinking. It's at the heart of the philosophies, disciplines, and tools I've sought to learn, compile, and develop in the past 10 years.

And when nothing is getting more certain, there's even greater value in bringing smart, multi-disciplined people together to expand your view of the future, work through possibilities, and act on them.

Ideally, you're finding that's what Brainzooming is all about. - Mike Brown

So You Wanna Write Something? Become a Brainzooming Guest Author

One objective emerging for the Brainzooming blog is to create a place for cool creative and strategic thinkers to share perspectives. It's always great to have new and different voices on Brainzooming, and it's very humbling to see the number of great guest authors regularly grow!

If you're interested in writing a guest blog, let me know your subject idea via email at mike@mikebrownspeaks.com. Be sure to include "Brainzooming Guest Blog" in the subject line.

Writing & Publishing Overview

As you think about a topic and approach, here's background info I use for doing Brainzooming:

• The broad topic areas for Brainzooming include innovation, strategic thinking, and creativity. Anything within and around those areas that isn't a commercial is potential fair game for an article.


• Articles are typically 300 - 500 words. Please include links to other relevant sources of interest to readers. Similarly, include image ideas that will help convey the article's message.


• The material should be new content or, at minimum, a new variation (updated, freshened, modified) on something you've personally written and published previously.


• You can forward your article in Word or the body of an email. Also include a brief bio.


• I edit the article so its style fits with the blog and includes links to related topics. Should there be a need for significant editing, you'll receive a copy in advance to ensure you're okay with the changes.


• Guest articles typically run Thursdays. Since there's generally a queue of future guest articles, there's no particular deadline. I'm usually able to give you a sense ahead of time about what future Thursday your article will run.


• You'll get a link to your guest post early on the Thursday it publishes to share with your network on Twitter, your blog, via email, etc.

Please consider sharing your expert perspective and joining the Brainzooming creative team! - Mike Brown

What Has Social Media Done for Me? Plenty

A January post highlighted the plan to broaden Brainzooming through social media. Specific tactics included Twitter, capturing story ideas with Flip video, and participating elsewhere online.

Since many readers have asked, here's a progress update: the opportunities, connections, and possibilities from implementing the plan have been beyond my expectations. For those considering using social media in your personal brand efforts, here are some highlights:

• Since grabbing the @Brainzooming Twitter name in January 2009, it's grown to a focused network of several thousand, including great thinkers globally on innovation, creativity, marketing, and branding.


• BrainzoomingTM blog activity is up 3 times for the biggest month in 2009 vs. 2008. It's increased through Twitter, answering questions and updating activities on LinkedIn, sharing links on Business Week Business Exchange, and commenting on other blogs.


• Twitter led to connecting with @sethsimonds, who's helping revamp Brainzooming, moving it to Wordpress (and Brainzooming.com).


• Posting "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" on Slideshare, being selected as a feature ebook, and sharing the link broadly generated nearly 3700 views in six months to broaden the Brainzooming audience.


• I worked with a talented team to live tweet, blog, and video the Business Marketing Association conference in June 2009. We'll build on the experience for the October 2009 American Marketing Association Market Research Conference I'm chairing. We're building a Twitter presence with @amamrc, recording webcasts, bringing live tweeting into presentations via ParaTweet, and exploring unconference and Pecha Kucha presentations (which yes, I learned about through Twitter).


• A request came through Twitter to participate in a Sydney, Australia innovation event with two stories shot on the Flip and posted on YouTube. There have also been new speaking opportunities on social media and innovation (in person, on radio, and the internet) and writing connections with 24 Hours of Innovation, World Creativity and Innovation Week, and Braden Kelly's Blogging Innovation website.


• Brainzooming is listed among top innovation blogs on IdeaConnection. (If you have a minute, please go there and vote up Brainzooming!) Brainzooming has become more of a recognized outpost for innovation thinking, with a wonderful group of Twitter-based guest bloggers contributing and PR outreaches from people wanting to be featured on Brainzooming.


• Finally, Googling "Brainzooming" in December 2008 would have yielded about 40 hits. Doing it just now, "Brainzooming" returned thousands.

One learning has been that taking a strategic approach to social media for me means concentrating efforts on only a few sites. That's why there's little presence from me on Facebook or Plaxo. I will be trying though to make a concerted attempt to get back to some high impact sites and explore new ones. One is Bulbstorm.com - a crowdsourcing beta site allowing individuals and businesses to solicit input on ideas while still protecting fundamental, proprietary elements of the ideas through varying access levels.

What a partial year so far of learning, meeting new people, and discovering new opportunities! Email or DM me with questions on your social media effort or suggestions for mine. - Mike Brown

Off-Blog Brainzooming

Beyond sharing creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking ideas here on the Brainzooming blog, I've had several opportunities recently to be involved with other channels to get ideas out. These are free and available for all of you to download!

"Fascination" - An Interview with Sally Hogshead

I recorded a webcast interview with Radical Careering author Sally Hogshead on Fascination and the triggers that make brands, ideas, and people fascinating. The webcast, in support of Sally's keynote speaking appearance at the American Marketing Association Market Research Conference (which I'm chairing by the way) debuts Tuesday, July 21. It will be available on-demand for one year afterward.

Having known Sally for several years, it rocked to get the opportunity to talk with her about fascination since it's the topic of her upcoming book. Her discussion on why Michael Jackson is fascinating is worth the listen alone!

And if you're involved in market research, you should really attend the Market Research Conference. We have a tremendous lineup of speakers addressing how market researchers and intelligence-based marketers need to prepare for "What's Next" to drive business success. Beyond traditional conference approaches, we'll be incorporating social media heavily into the event to extend & deepen the learning experience. For updates, http://www.twitter.com/amamrc.

Hosting Eye on Small Business

Kelly Scanlon hosts the "Eye on Small Business" radio program on 1510 Hot Talk in Kansas City. I've been on Kelly's show previously talking about "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation." She asked me to substitute host for her on the topic of “What Can You Do When You Can’t Do What You’ve Done Before” with guests Jan Sokoloff Harness and Kate O'Neill Rauber. You can listen to the broadcast and grab the guerrilla marketing tools questions we discuss later in the show.

Some More Brainzooming Stuff

Here are a few more free Brainzooming download sources:

• High Velocity Radio appearance on "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" with Stone Payton
• Live with Jay Liebenguth radio appearance on Strategic Thinking
• "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" ebook on SlideShare - 8 perspectives for more innovation

Hope you find these beneficial, and let me know if you have questions on any of them. - Mike Brown

Brainzooming – Re-think Your Challenge

Here’s a 3-step approach when you’re stuck for a viable solution to a challenge:

1. State the assumptions being made about the challenge.
2. Specifically remove each assumption, one at a time.
3. Ask and answer, “Without that assumption in place, what new possible approaches are there to the challenge?”

This technique can be just the thing to eliminate the stumbling blocks you’re facing.

Time Is Always Short

Reviews in Delta Airline's in-flight publication used to end with a section called ITIS. Within the reviews, this portion called out one particular chapter to read or song to listen to "If Time Is Short."

It's a cool idea. Yet, who remembers the last time you came across anyone enjoying a leisurely pace at work? A more appropriate acronym is TIAS: Time Is Always Short!

One implication of this more frenzied pace is the increasing difficulty in getting people to read everything put in front of them. Or more specifically, reading what you put in front of them. That's why it's vital your communication is as easy as possible to process.

Building a presentation recently on strategic thinking for researchers prompted rummaging through the Brainzooming archives for material on communicating information with greater impact. Here are 12 posts to help streamline your communication so something gets done with it even when TIAS:

Matching Your Communication to the Audience's Interests

Focusing on What Your Audience Cares About

Making Your Message More Memorable

Categorizing Information

Narrowing to the Really Important Ideas

Structuring Your Writing As a Reporter Would

Forming a Recommendation to Drive Action

Grouping Information with the Rule of Threes

Shortening Your Writing

Writing Complete Headlines

Alternatives to Written Communication

Pitching Your Idea

And here's a bonus link to "A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods," a unique way to get a quick review of many different ways of presenting information in a graphic format. The table is constructed so as you roll your cursor over a cell, it pops up a specific example of the visualization method. It's well worth checking out!

World Creativity and Innovation Week - Asking a Question to Spur “InYESvation”

Even amid positive energy from activities during World Creativity and Innovation Week, we all may experience times when we become self-destructive to our innovative instincts by telling ourselves, “No, I can’t _____________.” You can fill in the blank with whatever negative self-talk you usually use.

One way to fight this tendency is to ask, “If I tried _____________, what’s the worst that could happen?” When viewed in this light, so many activities that initially fill us with apprehension show themselves to have far more dramatic upsides than negatives.

Try this approach as another way of “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” and creating a sense of “InYESvation.”

InYESvation? I’ve been talking about “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” for 4 years and had never finished the idea by replacing the “NO” with a “YES.”

Credit for this new word goes to @rainesmaker (Glenn Raines) who tweeted this great word to me last Friday. Yet one more example of the benefits of being hooked up with so many wonderfully creative people on Twitter. Thanks Glenn for doing my work for me!

Everybody Must Get Stoned on High Velocity Radio

It was a pleasure to do a segment Monday on High Velocity Radio with hosts Stone Payton and Lee Kantor talking about a variety of innovation topics. I met Stone initially via Twitter back in January, and appearing on Stone's show was part of the prize for winning the IDEF140 contest he sponsored.

We covered a range of issues, so beyond a link to the radio show, here are links to many of the topics we discussed during our conversation.

• Slideshare link to "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" ebook


• Getting comfortable with sharing credit for innovation and the power of "we"


• Why it's important to have diverse perspectives among an innovation group


• Why it's helpful to be forgetful when it comes to innovation


• Ways to be more strategic on a personal level


• Making sure you're able to prioritize ideas


• My creative instigation partner, Jan Harness, her Creative Instigation blog and our upcoming book


• Appearing at a Sydney, Australia innovation event as a result of Twitter


• Following me on Twitter: @Brainzooming


• My Most Memorable Business Mistake

Thanks again Stone and Lee for the opportunity to be on the show, and I look forward to being able to do it again in the future!

Brainzooming - Coming to Your New Senses

PBS recently aired a September 2008 performance of George Gershwin's music featuring the Nashville Symphony. The show's closing piece was "Rhapsody in Blue," perhaps Gershwin's most well-known piece. I've enjoyed the song for a long time but never had the opportunity to "see" it performed and videoed to such great effect.

It was incredible to SEE guest soloist Kevin Cole's performance - his hands were up and down the keyboard in such commanding fashion. In the video excerpt below, you get some sense of the wonder of his performance.

For today's challenge - while we usually think of listening to music, in this case, being able to watch music was as impressive as the audio experience.

For other sensory experiences you encounter, identify a different dimension to begin to experience them: Maybe listening to a dog being petted or feeling the texture of the ingredients in a home cooked meal? You decide and come to some new senses of your own.

Update Note: Because of Good Friday, there won't be a post on Friday, April 10.

Random Inputs Week

Speaking and travel are both great sources of inspiration for blog topics. Twitter has become another one as well. This week, we'll feature posts inspired through each of these sources.

Brainzooming - Being Perceived as a Strategic Leader

Last Thursday I spoke at Max Utsler's Innovation in Marketing Communications class at Kansas University, debuting the new version of "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" summarized here a number of weeks ago. It seemed very appropriate since the first version of the presentation came from speaking to Max's class 5 years ago!

One topic we discussed was the idea of very subtle ways to demonstrate a strategic perspective. This includes taking notes and recapping meetings to allow you to shape the conversation as it happens and afterward. One student voiced the concern that taking and typing notes can get you cast in an "administrative" role. It's a valid concern, yet one that's easily avoided. Here's how:

1. Don't just take notes - take on a facilitation role. That means being ready to interject open-ended, probing questions to help the group explore the topic being discussed. Your active questioning and involvement provides equal footing with other participants even while you're displaying the characteristics of servant leadership.


2. Don't just type up the notes - add value through summarization, structure, conclusions, and recommendations. When someone approaches note taking and follow-up as an administrative task, the report out is typically chronological, with the notes coming back word-for-word, space-for-space as they were recorded at the meeting. When approaching a recap strategically, however, it provides the opportunity to move beyond a chronological playback. Instead, you can group notes based on similar themes, organize them with a logic flow that a live meeting doesn't allow, fill-in information gaps, form conclusions, and even begin to suggest recommendations.

Employ these two approaches and meeting participants will notice the difference. You won't be mistaken as playing an administrative role. Trust me - I've seen it work time after time.

Brainzooming - Get Out of the Office

Don’t believe great ideas and fun are intertwined?

Here’s a quote from Parade Magazine by John Kirhoffer, the challenge producer for each of Survivor’s 17 seasons:

“My team and I go surfing in the morning before work – we call it ‘board meetings.’ The best ideas don’t happen in a cubicle. They happen while we’re having fun.”

So get out of your office this afternoon, find a fun place, and create new solutions to your business challenges!

Let Other People Talk Week - Quotes and Links from Twitter

Wrap up for "Let Other People Talk" week features a few more quotes and links on various Brainzooming-oriented topics, nearly all from Twitter.

Quotes
@CynthiaY29: "Creativity takes courage." Henri Matisse

@artrox: Charles Handy "The modern economies will not be constrained by lack of resources but only by lack of creativity & ideas.”

RT @boxofcrayons: RT @joevans: From Sir Ken Robinson: “If you are not prepared to be wrong — you will not come up with anything original....

RT @CreativityBoost: Action is the best way to give doubt the middle finger. via @johnhaydon
Best quote heard so far this week: "Slow down and think so you can go fast."

RT @Orrin_Woodward: "The successful leader gets superior performance from ordinary people". ~Al Kaltman

RT @sallyhogshead: We were born w/ the ability to do 1 thing better than anyone else on earth. Trick is to find out exactly what YOURS is.

@AdamTheHutt: Some interviewee on NPR just declared that "motherhood is the necessity of innovation"...funny idea if you think about

@Zindella: Aristotle once said: Today I am short of time, so I am going to write you a long letter.

Links

Free Ideas Ready for You to Implement! Wacha Waitin' For? RT @plish: Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas http://post.ly/1Yb

50% of companies look for strategic thinking RT @davidharkleroad: Best Companies for Ldrs, Chief Exec Magazine: http://tinyurl.com/bhuc5p

The importance of group dynamics RT @stef: The qualities that make a successful innovator are actually ones a group shares http://is.gd/juOB

Also from Heart of Innovation - 100 Lamest Reasons Not to Innovate in 2009 http://tinyurl.com/79t3t3

Heart of Innovation on "56 Reasons Business Innovation Fails" http://tinyurl.com/5df2mm
RT @mindfulmimi: Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity - Bo Bennett http://ff.im/13vPD

Comment: New way of presenting food groups RT @plish: Mindmap of foods to boost productivity (and creativity!) http://tinyurl.com/cz5h4c

Cool cust exp mktg! RT @gabysslave:..sometimes wish i had clients prepared 2b challenged w/ really great ideas like this http://bit.ly/Po7Fp

Read the Great Springboard Blog! RT @kevinfullerton: Follow Your Connections to the End http://tinyurl.com/cxad3u

Hope you've enjoyed the variety this week. See you back here next week!