Robyn M. Bolton shares an evergreen post on the benefits of thinking visually for business, and how to do it.  Last week, I wrote about Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a process of using art to teach visual literacy, thinking, and communication skills. Typically, used in primary school classrooms, VTS has made its way into the corporate setting, helping individuals and teams to build and strengthen their problem solving and critical thinking skills, ability to communicate and collaborate, and effectiveness in…

  Robyn Bolton explains why Visual Thinking (VTS) sessions improve creative problem solving and critical thinking skills and provide major benefits to executives. “It was quite a sight! A dozen senior executives from a big, conservative financial services firm, all sitting on the floor in front of a painting, talking about what it could mean and why they think that.” On a typical dreary November day, and Suzi and I were sitting in the café inside Boston’s Museum of Fine…

  Jared Simmons provides a concise post that identifies the three most common factors that impede progress.  Whether you are chasing profit or purpose, a team’s ability to make progress is critical to achieving its objectives. There are many obstacles that keep a team from operating at its full potential, but the three most common (and solvable) ones are ambiguity, apathy, and amateurism. The challenge is recognizing them in action.   Discover how the following three A’s impact your team:…

  Azim Nagree provides three factors that can help determine whether you need a single, mixed-function team or two separate teams when it comes to account management and customer success. ‘What’s the difference between Account Management and Customer Success? And more importantly, when do I need separate AM and CS teams?’ I’ve been asked this question multiple times in the last few months so it’s clear that many people are grappling with this problem. The short answer – it depends….

  Carlos Castelan shares how to improve the customer experience and team collaboration. In today’s world where change is one of the only constants, we often hear of companies undergoing a transformation to reinvent themselves and revitalize their customer offerings. This is a natural function of the organizational life cycle where companies grow and organize in a variety of ways along the way, including around services or products. However, in focusing on efficiency and processes to enable scale, organizations lose…

  Kaihan Krippendorff takes a left turn off a straight road to discover the benefits of not planning as a fundamental benefit to innovation.   Twenty years ago, long before we had children, my wife and I decided to spend Valentine’s Day weekend in Tuscany. We were living just a two-hour flight away in London at the time, so leaving on a Friday and returning on a Monday would still mean two days and three nights of rolling hills, wineries,…

  With New Year in the rear view mirror, are you driving forward with your resolutions?  Robyn Bolton provides five ways to improve your resolve.   According to research by Strava, the social network for athletes, most people will have given up on their New Year’s Resolutions by Sunday, January 19. While that’s probably good news for all the dedicated workout enthusiasts who will be glad to get their gyms back, given that the most common New Year’s resolution is…

Susan Drumm provides four steps to ensure you will get honest feedback from your team. Do you think you can get your team to give you honest feedback? Like no-holds-barred honest?   Many of my clients tell me they struggle to get real feedback from their direct reports and I’m not surprised. Does this story sound familiar? One of my senior clients recently received the results of his 360 report and was surprised to learn that his team felt they weren’t being…

An evergreen post from Gaelle Lamotte to kickoff 2020 and help you prepare for what lies ahead.  In a world of disruptive businesses, overwhelming information and relentless change, companies have to master the art of strategy execution to be agile enough to capitalize on growth opportunities. Excellence in execution is what makes the difference between good strategies and success in the marketplace for your customers, partners and employees, and ultimately investors and shareholders.   Points covered include: -Understanding the organization’s…

To inspire successful innovation, Kaihan Krippendorff explains why the composition of the founding team is crucial and why the first step should be to find a sherpa. He provides six questions to help you assess and secure a powerful advocate to lead the team. That historic moment when the perfect team unifies beyond an opportunity, pregnant with possibility, is the essential scene of any great innovation legend: think Jobs and Wozniak when they created Apple, Gates and Allen with Microsoft,…

Geoff Wilson explains what Andrew Luck’s recent retirement from football should teach executives about protecting top talent. If you are an organizational leader who is leaning on a few star talents surrounded by a supporting cast of also-rans to ‘gut it out’ on a daily basis, you are playing a very dangerous game. Because when your top talent has had enough–when you have extracted enough of their soul by asking them to jump on yet another grenade dropped by a poor…

Susan Drumm identifies how conflict can achieve greater results when it grows from cognitive diversity and provides a few factors that can help you build a cognitively diverse team.   When you imagine an incredibly effective, successful team meeting, what does it look like? For some people, it looks like this: One person talking while everyone nods. Someone is taking notes while muttering, ‘Yes, I think so too!’ The leader wraps the meeting by asking, ‘So we’re all in agreement?’ And everyone…