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Inspiration

We Need Time with Wonder

How often do you daydream or even allow yourself to get bored?

It turns out there’s a lot of value in letting our minds wander. Daniel Goleman calls this “open awareness” and says when our minds wander we’re free to constructively envision our future—essential for planning and goal setting, and we can reflect on our thoughts and actions—central in making new and creative associations between ideas.

Our brains aren’t designed to go nonstop. When we drop into neutral, ideas flow on their own, memories sort themselves out, and we give ourselves a chance to rejuvenate. If we eliminate this natural rhythm, we won’t be more productive. And we won’t get ahead. We’ll start falling behind.

What could happen to your creativity, energy, and attitude if you took the time to wonder?

October 12, 2018 by

Staying Relevant Requires Learning

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein

Continuously learning is how you will stay relevant at any level of an organization. Consider stepping outside of your comfort zone, diversifying your areas of knowledge and establishing rituals and habits that support learning.

Lifelong learning has long been understood to be a critical success factor. But today, it’s taken on even greater importance. The pace of change continues to accelerate, and the level of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty means that what you knew yesterday may be irrelevant today. The half-life of technical skills continues to shrink.

Try the following actions to enhance your growth mindset:

Cultivate Curiosity

Curiosity is a spirit, intention, and skill we can bring to our work, interactions with others and the world in general. It involves a genuine inquisitiveness, desire to understand, and willingness to step into a void with nothing more than questions and a receptive mind.

Stay Social

Traditional learning models rooted in the educational system rely heavily on individual research and study. A growth mindset, however, is based in large part on learning through and with others. Intentional connections offer a range of benefits, including the sharing of knowledge, insights, and experience. Consider the power of dialogue in your business to uncover new ideas.

Illuminate the NOW

While deliberate, scheduled efforts to learn are essential, it’s equally important to recognize that learning frequently doesn’t occur on a schedule. Life offers a range of moment-by-moment opportunities to gain experience, tap wisdom, push boundaries and try new approaches. A learning mindset means being open to and ready for these ad-hoc possibilities. It means mining the routine for richness.

Investing in learning today can help address current day-to-day pressures while building long-term, a sustainable capacity that will contribute to future effectiveness and satisfaction — at work and beyond.

October 5, 2018 by

How to Create a Vision and Build a Roadmap for Success

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,’”Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Organizations that last know where they’re going. They know how they want people to perceive their business and they know what they want to achieve.

In short, they have a strong vision.

Creating a strong vision is a key to long-term success: it gives you clarity on what you should and shouldn’t do for the continuing health and prosperity of the company.

The vision, however, is only one of the keys to success, you must also have a purpose that drives the vision; and, you must have missions, strategies, and tactics to achieve your vision.

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September 22, 2018 by

Embrace Discomfort, Create Change

If something is comfortable, it won’t lead to progress.

Growth was seen as an endless series of daily choices and decisions in each of which one can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.Abraham H. Maslow1

If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. It’s the uncomfortable things that make us grow.

The same is true of business: companies that embrace discomfort as a regular part of business life are more likely to achieve their goals and move closer and closer to fulfilling their company vision than those that don’t.

Companies that stay comfortable—which feels great in the moment—end up losing in the long run, which doesn’t feel so great.

Discomfort is a prerequisite for change.

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August 31, 2018 by

Love The Customers You Have

You’re a better designer if you love the people you’re designing for.
Fred Dust, IDEO Partner, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful

I’m surprised how many companies don’t love their customers.

They talk about being customer-centric or even customer-obsessed, but they don’t love the customer they have. Instead, they fall in love with the customer they want.

Their customers aren’t cool enough. They aren’t young enough. They’re too weird.

I’ve heard these comments in the back of interview rooms. I’ve seen the look of disappointment in people’s faces when we’ve delivered presentations, looks that clearly said: “That shouldn’t be my customer; my customer should be….”

These companies are all driven by a faulty line of thinking: focusing on what the people are like instead of what the people need—what tensions in their lives need to be solved.

Great brands solve needs; that’s how they attract customers.

A brand that doesn’t solve a need—a tension in customers’ lives—is a weak brand.

Instead of trying to understand their customers and figure out their tensions, these companies focus on trying to attract the types of customers they want. They attempt to create surface-level appeal instead of the type of appeal that drives customer decision-making: appealing to higher human needs.

I think this is one of the reasons you see companies constantly changing their advertising or trying to reinvent themselves: desperate attempts to attract the types of people they want to love them.

No one falls in love with a desperate person. No customer will love a desperate company.

Love the customer you have, not the one you want. Make it about them. Solve their tensions. That’s the only way they’ll love you back.

August 24, 2018 by

Build A Campfire: How To Succeed On Social Media

Today the campfire is called a computer or a television … Drama goes back to the beginning of civilization around the campfire, where the tribe comes together, and they say, “My God, did you see what blah blah did with that mountain lion today?” And the other guy says, “I’ll tell you one better than that.” … [W}e tell stories that unite the tribe. We reinforce our tribal unity. We say, this is how we do things here.
David Mamet, MasterClass.com

If the computer is the new campfire, social media is the biggest campfire ever built.

Most companies invest a lot of money in social media because they know they have to. But, few know what to do with it.
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August 17, 2018 by

Delivering Magic

Magic has long held a special place in the nation’s history. American magicians perform in arenas, theaters, and even backyards. No matter how big or small, a magic show will always inspire wonder.

Today as a member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, I am honored that the United States Postal Service delivered these Forever stamps.

This reminds me, let’s learn some magic for your brand…

Brands are a unique combination of a set of ideas and inanimate objects that serve as an ideal platform for relationships. When people feel bound to a group or community of shared beliefs around a brand where at least part of their identity is tied to the group, it’s a phenomenon known as participation mystique.

These brands spark magical participation with their customers; they embrace a particular way of being, aligned to a specific set of beliefs.

When brands attract customers to come together something magical happens, now let’s make that happen for you and your team.

Creating Magic: A mini workshop

To help you think more magical thoughts try these juxtapositions:

If my company was Zappos how would we WOW our customers?

If our company was Disney how would we give our customers a magical day?

If our brand was Houdini what problems can I help my customers escape?

By thinking like other great magical brands, you will discover magic of your own.

August 3, 2018 by

Cult Brands are Inclusive

In Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, the Macedonian King upset his military compatriots and childhood friends by marrying Roxana.

Roxana was the daughter of a minor Persian baron. That is, she was not from Macedonia; she was not of Greek blood.

This outraged Alexander’s men who felt that he was disrespecting his homeland. But Alexander didn’t identify himself exclusively as Macedonian or Greek. This great military strategist had a grand vision to create an empire that united the world as one people.

Alexander understood one of the Seven Rules of Cult Brands: Be open and inclusive.

The ideals of Vans shoes, for example, probably aren’t going to speak to you if you’re not in the skateboard community. IKEA isn’t going to draw your attention if you aren’t in the market for affordable furniture that gives your home a sense of style.

The annual, week-long, Burning Man event now attracts over 65,000 attendees to the Black Rock Desert each August. Anyone can participate. As written in their ten guiding principles, “Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”

And the full range of attendees from artists to billionaires, to Silicon Valley CEOs, demonstrate that the not-for-profit is true to its word.

How To Be Inclusive

The more inclusive you are, the more customer groups you open your business to and the larger your market potential becomes.

To become a more inclusive brand requires diligence. Being inclusive means gaining insights into new customer groups and then collaborating with your teams to discover ways of relating these new customers to your business, and serving them with respect.

How inclusive is your business today?

How inclusive do you want your business to be tomorrow?

July 13, 2018 by

Putting Archetypes to Work in Your Organization

How do you put archetypes to work?

Start at the center.

The center is unique for each organization.

Your strengths hint at it.

Your organization’s passions point you in the right direction.

The forces that drive your customers to do business with you provide invaluable clues.

This center should be expressed in your ultimate vision, your core values, and the language of your corporate culture.

How will you know when you’ve found your center?

Your heart will awaken.

Your employees will come together as teams. Innovation will increase by the passions of the men and women guided by archetypal forces deep within them. Your stakeholders will observe it. Your customers will hear the call to adventure.

Remember: the more archetypal, the more essential, and the more human your center is, the more cohesive your organization will become. And, the more easily you’ll attract customers who want to join forces with you.

Onward!

June 8, 2018 by

Creativity In The Workplace

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.George Lois, Damn Good Advice

When Leon Battista Alberti declared, “A man can do all things if he will,” he condensed the ideals of the Renaissance into the figure of the Renaissance Man—a person with knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Since then, knowledge has become very specialized and having the breadth of knowledge in the wide range of subjects embraced by Renaissance Men is impossible.

The Renaissance man still walks among us, but we now call him groups. A group can have a collective knowledge that far exceeds the knowledge of any individual.

Brainstorming, invented by advertising executive Alex Osborn, was designed to maximize effective and creative group problem-solving. Research on brainstorming initially failed to show an increase in the number and quality of ideas when compared to individuals working alone; but in the last two decades, research has revealed that brainstorming can be productive if the procedures guard against impediments that naturally occur like conversation being controlled by a limited number of individuals and shared data being disproportionately represented. When small groups of individuals attempt to collectively arrive at a solution through discussion, great solutions can be uncovered.
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May 18, 2018 by