Is Your Language Helping or Hurting You?
By Paul D. Roberts When I was 16, and Reagan was in the White House, I bussed tables at a restaurant in Toronto, Canada. My friend, John, was one of the most successful waiters in the place, and he shared a tip with me – If you ask your customer, “are you o.k.?” they will say, “yes” and you won’t sell another drink. If you...
The Right Effort – Positive Focus for Positive Outcomes
By Joe Giordano The final three folds on the eight-fold path deal with one’s own mental development. It is the constant practice of helping oneself have a balanced mindset, so that you can achieve a heightened awareness of what is around you. Many see the sixth fold, The Right Effort, as a precursor and necessary mastery for the other principles of the path. Without the...
Gaining Competitive Advantage through Consumer Insight. Podcast
Connie Williams, in an interview with host Jan Mazotti of Connect & Collaborate on ICOSA Radio, shares the keys to gaining competitive advantage, by creating new markets, products, and services based on deep-diving into the minds of consumers, and uncovering their unarticulated wants and needs – understanding and anticipating what their needs are before they are even consciously aware of it. Podcast Powered By Podbean Connie shares...
Four Leadership Articles Worth Reading
By Leo Boudreau We believe that organizations can only be great if they have great leaders. People who can inspire their teams, empower their effort and unleash the potential of everyone within the organization. We have identified several interesting articles in the past few weeks that give good perspectives on the topics. THE FOUR 1. First, to set the baseline, Gallup has conducted a...
InnerCity Weightlifting Featured on ESPN Video
By Joe Gammal There’s no greater reward than working with people that make a difference, and helping them in some way to create the change they want. Our Synecticsworld team had that pleasure to work with Jon Feinman and his InnerCity Weightlifting team in Spring 2012 through collaboration with the Harvard Social Innovation Club. Check out this video on ESPN to see the difference...
5 Reasons Why Everyone is Creative
By Joe Giordano Over the past few months I have read countless articles, blog posts, tweets, etc, since creating a blog is not hard now a days, so many people share their thoughts and theories this way. There they were telling me all the reasons why we make mistakes in business, why we aren’t good at being creative, and why innovations fail. Many times, authors...
Living in the Question — The First Step to Finding Answers
By Joe Gammal How can I prepare my kids to thrive in a rapidly and ever-changing world? How can I better help my clients build a sustainably innovative company? How can I make the idea of Deliberate Synergy contagious? These were some of the questions I had on my mind as I arrived at this year’s Creative Problem Solving Institute’s annual conference (CPSI) . Each...
Lessons in Team Dynamics from Despicable Me’s Minions
By Chipp Norcross A well functioning team can make work a joy. A poorly functioning team can make work feel like drudgery. The surprising thing for many teams is just how fine a line there is between the two. Why? Although there are a myriad of possible reasons for team performance, the minute interactions that bounce between people while they work together often play an...
Change begins with ideas. Are you an Idea Killer?
By Paul D. Roberts Every human change starts with an idea, ideally one that is truly new and uncertain that we have the courage to explore, and that can break our inertial-thinking. Inertial-Thinking could be stated as a version of Newton’s first law of motion. First Law of Motion: When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either is at rest or moves at...
How to Plan for Your Company’s Future
By Connie Williams One of the biggest problems facing companies and other organizations is how to plan for the future. What to invest in? Where to place your bets? We don’t have the ability to perfectly predict the future; but we do have the creative thinking skills and behaviors to build an imaginative look at the future and to help companies create powerful future scenarios and plan appropriate implications create powerful future scenarios and plan...
Discovering the Future Needs and Wants of your Marketplace
By Joe Giordano In 1998, as I was moving to Chicago for a new job, I picked up Tom Peters’ “Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for Management Revolution.” I was starting my first senior level job, taking over a senior operations role with corporate p&l responsibilities and departmental management. I was looking for some inspiration—to do things a little differently than before. At the time, this...
Creating an Innovative Mindset in I.T.
By Chipp Norcross & Joe Gammal Recently, we had the unique and special opportunity to present at the CIO Executive Summit in Seattle alongside Kirsten Simonitsch, CIO of Premera Blue Cross. In Kirsten’s presentation, “Driving Customer Engagement Through Innovation”, she detailed her experience of leading her team to find a deep and meaningful understanding of what people want from health insurance companies, and how they have...
Five Steps to Increase the COURAGE of Your Creativity
By Kyle Hermans In my years of facilitating people, teams, and organizations around the world to new breakthroughs, I have learned that creativity is often born out of fear, or fueled by something that may appear fearful, a change driver that pushes our clients out of the safety of the operational world of certainty and routine into the experimental, messy, uncertain world of innovation. One...
Deliberate Synergy
Deliberate Synergy: George’s Dream By Joe Gammal In December, 2008, George Prince, one of the founders of Synectics wrote: Dear Joe, …When I had to give up and retire I was working on a dream. How to get everyone to live the Synectics supportive way. I titled this dream Deliberate Synergy®. I did quite a bit of work on it and so you have a...
Which 1 are you of the 4 Meeting Mindsets?
By Bryan Laychak We have all been there, the off-site meeting where plates of bagels and muffins and the cups of coffee from the buffet are clinking and clattering as we settle into our seats to discuss how to build our business. But aside from the quality of the catering, the success of the meeting will have much to do with everyone’s mindsets, and the...
How Ron Johnson Could Have Avoided Catastrophe by Listening to JCPenney’s People
By Chipp Norcross The story of the rapid decline of JCPenney under Ron Johnson’s leadership is one of the most shocking business stories of recent years. Bringing in the genius behind Apple’s retail stores seemed like a no-brainer when he first arrived at JCPenney. He came in with a vision and exciting new ideas about how to turn around the struggling retailer. What I’m not...
