Using Failure to Spur Innovation

It hurts to fail. The feeling of defeat can make even the hardest of workers feel worthless. It’s hard to face the reality that your work or dreams won’t live up to your expectations, and giving up might seem like the next step. However, failure teaches important lessons, and though it seems contradictory, it can often lead to success. Failure gives you the necessary experience you need to improve, but more importantly, it teaches you to get back up.

The Doom of Multitasking: Don’t Force Your Employees into It

Did you know that you’re multitasking at least several times a day? That’s right! It’s enough if you cook, listen to music, and check your Facebook at the same time. Fortunately, it’s not fatal.

6 Benefits of Ongoing Employee Development

In many organizations, work is pretty consistent and predictable: go into the office, perform your tasks, and go home. Many people spend years doing their jobs without much advancement or ongoing career development.

7 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged All Year Round

When your employees are directly and fully engaged, you will notice that their morale and overall level of job satisfaction are high. They are motivated to work harder and smarter for your company, and the result is high productivity and perhaps less employee turnover.

Do Open-Concept Offices Promote Innovation?

Do open-concept offices live up to their hype when it comes to encouraging innovation and collaboration? Or do they hinder productivity by sacrificing privacy - and in some cases, comfort? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.

6 Potential Roadblocks to Innovation

Does it feel like your efforts in innovation lately have been…lackluster? Are you finding that your team just isn’t coming up with the great ideas you know they can produce? If your business is feeling stale and stagnant, you obviously want to know why, so you can make changes. Innovation efforts aren’t always simple and easy—and there are definitely some roadblocks that can come up along the way. Don’t get discouraged if you run into any of these common problems—you just have to be determined to prevent and work through them whenever possible!

Seven Good Reasons Not to Innovate

Innovation is risky. Customers are not asking for it. We are already successful… Getting momentum behind significant innovation is difficult, and sometimes it’s easier for a business to stay in what they deem a safe spot. Let’s look at seven arguments that inhibit innovation as well as their counter arguments.

Optimizing Meetings to Maximize Individual Brainstorming Time

Are you overwhelmed by unnecessary meetings? We’ve all been there: one more meeting, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You’ve been trying to make some real progress on your creative project, but the constant meetings have really been cutting into your individual brainstorming time. If you feel like the number of meetings you’ve been attending is cutting into your productivity, you’re not imagining it.

The Most Powerful Question In The World of Business

Michael Bungay Stanier, Founder of Box of Crayons, teaches the principles of how to do less hard work and more good work to managers around the world. In this interview he explains why coaching can transform not only the person receiving the coaching, but also the coach; he reveals what he believes is the best coaching question in the world, and why it is so powerful and AWEsome. And finally, he unpacks habits, how to develop new ones, and their importance in the world of work.

2019-11-28T09:24:11-08:00November 11th, 2016|Categories: Innovation Ecosystem, Leadership, Podcast|Tags: , , , , , , |

Top Diagramming Techniques for more Efficient Meetings

Do you ever find yourself stuck in a meeting that’s stalling? Does the agenda seem to accomplish no tangible outcomes? Perhaps you find yourself wondering what’s next after an important summit, or frustrated with the lack of direction after a meaningful brainstorm or discussion.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017

The Global Competitiveness Report assesses the competitiveness landscape of 138 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity. Switzerland, Singapore and the United States remain the three world’s most competitive economies.

Are Results Based Work Environments the Future or Fantasy?

Results-based work environments, also known as results-only work environments (ROWE) aim to increase productivity by giving employees the freedom to work in the manner that suits them best as long as they produce results. The old paradigm of coming in to work at a set time and leaving at a set time hasn't been the standard for quite some time. Employees regularly have to work long hours, and there is research that shows these long hours may be better spent working from home. The Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College notes that this shift represents a dramatic change from the traditional 40-hour work week.

The Creativity Delta: How to Come Up with New Ideas

In a study of 5,000 adults in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan conducted by Adobe about creativity, they came up with some interesting findings. To begin with, they asked every participant if they felt creativity was valuable to society and two-thirds of the respondents said “yes.” Perhaps even more significantly, 80% of them felt that unlocking creativity was critical to economic growth.