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Recent Posts Tagged With 'insights'
The Second Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Focusing on What\'s Really Important
A friend from church gave me a tape several years ago by Fr. Larry Richards, a Catholic priest and evangelist, who does a broad series of talks on faith topics. In one about our "life’s purpose," he discussed the need for a spirit of sacrifice. In ...
Getting Ready for 2010: What Have You Been Saying?
A loyal reader pointed out recently that Brainzooming has become too unwieldy, making it tough to go back and find specific posts. One possibility is using the search function on each page to search for particular topics directly in Brainzooming arti...
Getting Ready for 2010: A Strategy Foundation - Guest Post by Keith Prather
Keith Prather is Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, a corporate business intelligence firm that functions as outsourced members of corporate strategy groups and consults with companies of all sizes on strategy and implementation. Arm...
You Never Know
Cleaning offices isn't a distinctive talent for me; it's a chore from beginning to end. Yet, as you learned yesterday, it's necessary right now.Among my files was a notebook from a Statistical Process Control training class my first weeks on the job....
Research Review Week - Keep Going!
Too many research reports are train wrecks of charts, arrows, and statements that simply play back the graphics, or even worse, regurgitate the detailed methodology with no forward looking implications. For senior executives, it means a confusing (an...
Research Review Week - Design Driven Deliverables
W5, a market research company based in Durham, NC is a strong proponent of “design driven deliverables,” defined as “any method of communicating research findings that goes beyond the standard research report.”In a time when it seems like att...
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...
Storytelling to Frame Research Reports - Guest Post by Sean Buvala
I'm chairing the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference October 4 - 7. It's going to be a great event, with three educational tracks all tied back to theme, "Making Business Sense of What's Next." Our main programming objective ...
Be Lazy, Sort Of
Next time you get a new assignment, project, or question to answer, ask yourself: Who knows more about this than I do? Consider all the possible answers you can think of to the question:People you know personallyPeople you know onlinePeople networked...
What Will It Take to Cover Me?
The past few weeks, I've been schlepping around fabric stores since Cyndi wants to recover several pieces of furniture. This is unfamiliar territory for me, which usually means an opportunity to hunt for different takes on Brainzooming-related ideas....
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 unpredicta...
Lessons from Kansas City Infobank - Secondary Research Techniques
Secondary research was the primary approach at Kansas City Infobank for completing projects. We informally defined secondary research as "finding what you're looking for among answers to questions that had already been asked and answered by others."S...
Lessons from Kansas City Infobank - Get on the Phone
I’ve done several posts on strategic mentors who've fundamentally shaped my thinking and approach. In an early one, I mentioned multiple posts could be filled with lessons learned from Bill McDonald when I worked for him at Kansas City Infobank. Th...
Go Ahead. Prove Me Wrong.
Don't underestimate the tremendous motivational force of challenging someone to produce facts to try and prove you wrong. Most people like to be right and will expend at least some effort to support their point.If you can get someone to do this, you'...
Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way In
Someone told me about his new company where they do entrance interviews. In contrast to an exit interview, the objective is to get a download of potentially innovative ideas when someone starts a job, before there's time to develop a point of view bi...
What Did You UNLearn at the Conference?
3 Days of UNLearning at the Business Marketing Association Conference"UNLearn" was the theme for last week's national Business Marketing Association conference (quick disclosure, I'm a board member for BMA). The theme emphasized the importance in tod...
Share Your Complete Message in a Powerpoint Headline
If you have to create a written report in PowerPoint, here's a good discipline to enforce on yourself for clarity and flow:Write the headlines on each page in such a way that if they were the only things read, your audience would get the report's mai...
Strategic Thinking Snippets - Direction and Change
Here's another installment in Strategic Thinking Snippets - ideas first shared on Twitter and now collected and arranged for Brainzooming. This Strategic Thinking Snippet installment focused on identifying strategic direction and managing through cha...
Take Help Graciously Even When You Think You Don't Need It
I was in Western Kansas last week, and my mom and I made a few trips to Walgreens. Right inside the parking lot was a huge pothole (interestingly, this may be a part of the Walgreens brand experience because there's a comparable one at the Kansas Cit...
Could You Get on the Same Page?
It's always great to solicit and consider expert opinions. It's not so great, though, when qualified experts don't agree, and you have to decide and act.Being confronted with this situation recently (4 physicians, none of whom agreed on the appropria...
Creative Consumers?
I attended a session at last year's IIR The Market Research Event that discussed “creative consumers.” They were nearly reverently described as “consumers” serving as paid ideation session participants; this, after passing personality tests (...
It's Who, Not How Many
At the Charlotte Business Marketing Association presentation several weeks ago, a question was raised about the right number of people to have in ideation sessions.That's a common question, and there are certainly optimum group sizes. What's optimum ...
A Few Life Lessons - Just because . . .
Just because you can doesn't mean you have to. Just because you don't have to doesn't mean you shouldn't. Just because someone else wouldn't doesn't it isn't worth trying. Just because it hasn't worked before doesn't mean it will or won't now. Just b...
The Comfort of Expertise
There can be great reassurance in surrounding yourself with expertise during a difficult situation.On a flight from St. Louis to Kansas City, we were experiencing “moderate turbulence.” We knew this because a Southwest Airlines pilot was sitting ...
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 LeaderLast Thursday...
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 mee...
Sports Strategy Lessons Week - Jimmy Spencer - "Mr. Strategic"
We're in an annual transitional time in sports. Football just wrapped up, baseball spring training has started, and Matt Kenseth won the rain-shortened Daytona 500 in NASCAR yesterday. There was even a big poker tournament on ESPN Sunday. While there...
The I’s Have It
Past articles have extolled the benefits of using a PMIR (Plus – Minus – Interesting – Recommendation) evaluation, a variation on the PMI technique from Edward de Bono.Here’s another variation to consider when using a PMIR – change the “I...
Brainzooming - 1 Great Way to Get Lots of Expert Help
Need a quick injection of diverse perspectives?Take advantage of the Q&A feature in LinkedIn. You can post questions under a myriad of topics for other members of LinkedIn to comment on, usually from their personal expertise.Additionally, take ad...
