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Category Archives: Creativity & innovation
How much time do you spend thinking about the future of your business?
Nice article in Wired this month.
According to Rajesh Chandy of the London Business School, research shows that the amount of time a CEO gives to thinking about the future is a pretty good indicator of how innovative and successful the company as a whole will be. And yet the same research found that the CEOs actually only spend 3% of their time on it.
Two more interesting things:
CEOs whose first jobs were in marketing or R & D were more likely to give time to think about future customers, competitors and technologies relative to those of today, whereas those which backgrounds in other disciplines less so.
Overcoming social ‘overwhelm’ by setting modest goals
Do you ever have that sinking feeling when you open up Tweetdeck/Feedly/Facebook etc? I don't know about you but these are the kinds of things that frequently go through my mind:
everyone's so much more of an expert than me everyone's business is doing so much better than mine people are so much better at blogging/tweeting/interacting regularly than me I have nothing to say that anyone will want to hear aaaagghhh!
But from what people tell me, actually most of us are in the same boat: trying to understand everything, keep up with our peers, not get left behind, not be SEEN to get left behind…
Book review: The Shallows, How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. By Nicholas Carr
I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (subtitle: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember'). It's just the sort of book I enjoy – a new way of looking at things, intelligently argued, well researched, accessibly written. (Is it true, I wonder, that we most admire the books we wish we'd have written ourselves?)
Funny how one of the first subjects Carr brings up is Marshall McLuhan, out of favour for years in media studies circles. McLuhan's famous assertion that 'the medium is the message' is, for Carr, very true when it comes to the internet.
Who ‘owns’ an employee’s Twitter followers?
Some interesting debate in Marketing last week about employee Twitter accounts and who owns the relationship with followers should the employee leave the company.
On the one hand, media lawyer Mark Smith warns that companies should have a clear social media policy in which it is stated (for example) that employees "are not permitted to add business contacts… to their personal Twitter accounts, as this will allow the employee to easily retain details of business contacts in the event that they leave."
But Becky Brown, Director of Social Media for Intel, says that the company's goal is to make all employees active social media participants on behalf of the company and "ownership remains with the individual." Employees create and manage their relationships on Twitter, therefore they are theirs to take with them if they leave.
