7 Power Teams That Can Super-Charge Any Project | Inc.com. If you've ever wondered where creative ideas come from, here's a one-word answer: combinations. Specifically, ideas emerge when "someone sees a problem in a new way--often by combining disparate elements that initially seemed unrelated," writes marketing and strategy consultant Dorie Clark in her new book, "Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It.
" How can you tap into the power of combinatorial thinking? One way is to make sure your project teams include open-minded people whose personalities and strengths are in disparate areas. The blending of their traits is bound to yield creative fruit. 1. Kate Dill, head of experience design at Airbnb, recently explained to Fast Company that designers and MBAs make "perfect power combos. " I saw how MBA students would tackle problems a designer could tackle, but in a different way. 2. 3. Most projects don't get done--or even started--without deadlines. The fast deadline is bound to jumpstart creativity. 4. 5. How to Manage Your Freelancers into 2016 and Beyond | Inc.com. Freelancing is a highly beneficial way to offer your expertise and supplement your income. If you scale successfully, you can even replace your day job with a full-time freelancing gig and start working for yourself with the perks of being your own boss and having flexible hours.
According to a 2014 study by the freelancers union, over 53 million Americans in the workforce are now freelancing. According to a study by Intuit, in 2020, 40 percent of the workforce will be freelancers. As I work to make a profit from my own business projects, I can see why a small business owner would hire freelancers. Of course, hiring freelancers comes with risk as well. More Freelancers = Sifting Through the Talent Pool With an increase in the number of freelancers, as well as large numbers of available overseas workers, you may be tempted to hire as rates may be lower for certain segments of the talent pool. The Need to Manage Freelancers Wisely Risk and Litigation Issues Co-Working Spaces will Be the Norm. Your Company’s Networks Might Matter More than Its Strategy. In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Abraham Zaleznick contrasted two very different styles of authority.
Managers, he argued, take a rational approach and seek order and control. Leaders, on the other hand, are more emotionally driven and seek to drive change. Every organization needs both. Managers provide the continuity needed to execute efficiently and leaders drive the kinetic energy needed to respond dynamically to the needs of the marketplace. Today, however, the most important capabilities and resources often lie outside of an organization. Consider the case of Blockbuster, whose CEO John Antioco had proven himself as both a manager and a leader. He was also innovative. When Netflix emerged as a disruptive threat, Antioco met it head on. He then launched Total Access, a service that allowed customers to use the Web and retail stores interchangeably. The problem wasn’t that the Blockbuster couldn’t compete, but rather that its internal networks rejected the changes. Airbnb Design Head On Why Designers And MBAs Make Perfect Power Combos.
Doreen Lorenzo: What do you think influenced your career path and becoming a designer? Katie Dill: Growing up my sister and I were chopping wood, helping to build the extension on the house, taking down trees, driving cars when we were nine years old, and just playing outside in the Adirondacks, making things, like forts and whatever would come to us. And so it was very hands-on—if you see a problem, fix it. I think that kind of approach took me onto the design route, which is all about problem solving and making things. I’d never even heard of the profession of design, outside of interior design. My roommate recommended I talk to industrial designers, and when I did, I realized it sounded like a dream job come true.
I saw how MBA students would tackle problems a designer could tackle, but in a different way. Later when I went to work at frog design, I came in as what they called a design analyst. You’ve worked both on the agency side and on the business side. The Internet of Things Is Changing How We Manage Customer Relationships. Steven Moore Just as it’s hard to remember what life was like before the iPhone, it can be hard to remember business before there was CRM software — back when you still had to explain that it stood for “customer relationship management.” Today, CRM pervades the way many companies track and measure how they interact with other organizations, across many departments: marketing, sales, customer service, support, and others. CRM made it possible to determine precisely who responded to a specific marketing campaign and then who became a paying customer, which customer called the most for support, and so on. It gave companies some overall measure of revenue compared with marketing spend — something described in this 2007 article in The New York Times.
But now that Big Data and the Internet of Things have come along, we can go beyond the transaction to every little detail of the customer’s actual experience. With every passing day there are more examples of Internet of Things adoption. The One Habit Great CEOs Need to Master In The Next 5 Years. Warren Buffett, Arianna Huffington, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson have built great companies. But the reason you know their names is because they also created great content, which developed their personal brands. Does this make them attention-seeking CEOs courting personal celebrity? You may think so if you've read the classic academic study turned bestselling book, Good To Great. Jim Collins and his research team uncovered a surprising feature of wildly successful CEOs: extreme humility. Almost all of the CEOs he found who built great companies are unknown to the public.
That being said, in today's age of social media, things are different. But what exactly should we write about? Our response to this will impact everything else. I interviewed top content creators with millions of fans to help you find the solution that works best for you... 1. Step 1: Ask them to ask the question on Quora Step 2: Turn the question into an article Step 3: Keep a questions master document 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. Preparing for 2020. This is a synopsis of my opening keynote for the workplace learning & VET stream at EduTECH15 in Brisbane today. We cannot look at the 2020 workplace merely from the perspective of what will be different from today, as if these five years will pass in splendid isolation. How we think of work has changed over the millennia and one major factor has been our communications technologies.
When communication changes, work does too, as well as our understanding of what is knowledge, and what it means to be knowledgeable. When our various civilizations shifted from a predominantly oral society to the rule of the written word, we saw the rise of kingdoms and institutions. The age in which Socrates was able to guide discourse in the open agora was slowly replaced by structured academies, in the spirit of Plato. But Socrates felt that men who relied on written words would be a burden to their fellow men, as these artifacts would give them the ‘conceit of wisdom’.
Use Co-opetition to Build New Lines of Revenue. Examples of high-profile failed business collaborations are everywhere. From the WordPerfect-Novell acquisition that led to bankruptcy, to the misfires of the Target-Neiman holiday experiment, it’s clear that despite the plethora of management literature on how to launch a successful partnership, collaborations often go bust. It turns out, where there is money to be made, self-interest prevails, thus trumping cooperation in the process.
Traditional collaborations fail because deep down, stakeholders assume their success must come at others’ expense, which is clearly a zero-sum game. The way forward is co-opetition, in which entities in the same industries act with what everyone recognizes as partial congruence of interests. As management professors Adam M. Brandbenburger and Barry J. Unlike traditional collaborations, instead of coming together to do something and pretending you’re not competing, co-opetition leverages your competitor’s strength in order to thrive together.
This Is What Your Grocery Store Will Look Like In 2065. Grocery stores aren't really known for innovation; 50 years ago, a supermarket down the street might have looked basically the same as it looks today. But 50 years in the future—as the food system reacts to a changing climate, water shortages, and shifting technology— you might find things at your corner store radically changed. In The Future Market, a pop-up grocery store that will be built in New York City next summer, a group of designers will work with the food industry to demonstrate what the bodega of 2065 might look like. You might, for example, walk into the store with a digital food ID that tells the store your allergies, food preferences, and dietary needs, and then you might shop on a touch-screen shelf that automatically delivers your order—possibly picking fresh vegetables from an in-store hydroponic farm on the way.
The pop-up store will also include details about each fictional product inside. Designing A Happier Office On The Super Cheap. When Google set up shop in New York City in 2012, the Internet was flooded with pictures of its stunning new $1.9 billion space. The world marveled at lounges with deck chairs and slides, eco-friendly kitchens stocked with healthy food, and rooms designed to look like the inside of a tiny Chelsea apartment—complete with fake bathtubs and stovetops—for employees who like the idea of "working from home" at the office. Most companies don’t have Google’s budget; they can’t simply buy a new building, gut it, and redesign it from scratch. Business leaders who are tight on resources and stuck with an existing space may find it easier to ignore the question of office design altogether. After all, there’s no way to compete with the cutting-edge offices that Google, Facebook, or WeWork are building around the country.
But according to Elliot Felix, founder of Brightspot, a strategy firm that helps organizations rethink their space, this is entirely the wrong approach. 1. 2. Welcome to Inc.com. 3 Ways Adidas Plans To Take The Sportswear Industry By Storm. Sheryl Sandberg on What's Wrong With the Workplace.
Linda Hill: How to manage for collective creativity. IDEO’s Culture of Helping. Artwork: Freegums, Celestial Plane, 2010, fully tileable ink drawing, 24″ x 36″ Few things leaders can do are more important than encouraging helping behavior within their organizations. In the top-performing companies it is a norm that colleagues support one another’s efforts to do the best work possible. That has always been true for pragmatic reasons: If companies were to operate at peak efficiency without what organizational scholars call “citizenship behavior,” tasks would have to be optimally assigned 100% of the time, projects could not take any unexpected turns, and no part of any project could go faster or slower than anticipated. But mutual helping is even more vital in an era of knowledge work, when positive business outcomes depend on creativity in often very complex projects.
Beyond simple workload sharing, collaborative help comes to the fore—lending perspective, experience, and expertise that improve the quality and execution of ideas. Leadership Conviction. How Netflix Reinvented HR - HBR. Artwork: Freegums, Good Vibrations, 2011, acrylic on wood, 8′ x 15′ Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we’d pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them).
But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides—no music, no animation—would become so influential. People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The first took place in late 2001. “OK,” I said. Welcome to Inc.com. Slack. More than a decade ago, Stewart Butterfield set out to create an ambitious online game with his wife at the time, Caterina Fake. It didn't go anywhere. But the photo-sharing service they invented on the side, Flickr, turned out to be a keeper. History repeated when Butterfield again tried to create an online game and ended up producing Slack, a collaborative messaging platform for business use that has become a phenomenon since its launch in August 2013.
Slack entered a crowded category, competing against established players such as HipChat, Flowdock, and Campfire. It immediately stood out, both for its potent features (you can tell it to notify you whenever a particular keyword gets mentioned) and genial, quirky personality (when you log in, it greets you with deep thoughts such as, "The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience"). Only 24 hours after Slack launched, 8,000 companies had signed up.
Exponential Organizations - Why new organizations are 10x better, fas… Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf. Which Works Better: Unlimited Vacation Or Mandatory Time Off? What High Performers Want at Work. A high performer can deliver 400% more productivity than the average performer. Despite this, when most managers look at workforce statistics, all employees tend to be lumped together into a category so broadly defined that it becomes difficult to take meaningful decisions.
If your average employee tenure is six years, is that good or bad? You could benchmark the Fortune 500 and find that indeed you would look pretty good, tied at 40th place. But if the people you are keeping are the low performers and your high performers are leaving, would that be really so great? Last summer, my colleagues and I at SAP conducted a study with Oxford Economics across 27 countries to find out what the future workforce wants. We led twin studies of executives and employees and asked the employees how they were rated on their most recent performance appraisal rating. Of the 2,872 employees, their responses were spread with about 40% being high performers, 40% average, and about 20% below average. Are Most CEOs Too Old to Innovate? The youngest executive on HBR’s list of the 100 Best-Performing CEOs is Simon Wolfson of Next, at age 46. According to research on age and innovation, even he may be beyond his creative peak. As Ezekiel Emanuel summarized in The Atlantic earlier this year: Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, a luminary among researchers on age and creativity, synthesized numerous studies to demonstrate a typical age-creativity curve: creativity rises rapidly as a career commences, peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline.
By comparison, the average CEO on our list is 58. The number of CEOs in their 40s is dwarfed by the number who qualify for Medicare. Could the best CEOs be too old to innovate? First, the research. The innovators in both groups did the bulk of their breakthrough work in their 30s and 40s. But there’s a catch. So far, none of this research has looked at CEO age directly. Maya Penn Presentation. Influential Business Books. Para Ram Charan, integrar equipes é a chave para o sucesso. The Next Big Thing You Missed: Companies That Work Better Without Bosses. Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges: C. Otto Scharmer: 9781576757635: Amazon.com: Books. Millennial Branding - Gen-Y Research & Management Consulting Firm.
Majority Of Zappos Employees Don't Have A Manager. Valve. Millennials Will Become The Majority In The Workforce In 2015. Is Your Company Ready? Unlock Employee Innovation That Fits with Your Strategy - Bill Fischer. Holacracy | Social Technology for Purposeful Organization.