The 8 Best Innovation Ideas From Around the World

What if we took the world's best ideas for helping young companies and stitched them together to create a kind of Innovation Super-Nation? Maybe it would look like this...

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"The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation," President Obama declared in his 2011 State of the Union address. He's right. But what's the pathway to "encouraging American innovation?"

Innovation is a central element in promoting national economic performance, especially for the United States, which is at the technological frontier and can't effectively adopt technology invented elsewhere to achieve growth. As Paul Romer proposed in his New Growth Theory, investing in innovation is a crucial endogenous factor - and therefore one firmly in the grasp of policymakers - that creates economic growth. Future growth depends upon our ability to make new things. Nations with the ability to innovate are better poised to nurture entrepreneurship, attract early-stage risk capital and sustain a diversified ecosystem that bolsters long-term economic growth.

Some of the answers to our innovation challenge will come from within the U.S. We remain in many ways the most dynamic country in the world, with more top universities and multinational corporations than any other nation. But it's foolish to imagine that the best innovation ideas in the world already have a home in policies coming from Washington, D.C. Here is a world-wide tour of the best ideas that our government should import to jump-start innovation.

These policies encapsulate human capital, both indigenous and from immigration. Some are aimed at enhancing research and development (R&D), such as direct government funding of R&D, R&D tax credits and corporate tax rates. Others nurture innovative small and medium firms and improve access to risk capital. I've also considered policies encouraging technology transfer and commercialization from universities and other research centers and those relating to the overall business environment.

FROM SINGAPORE:
A BETTER WAY TO INVEST IN PEOPLE 

First, let's look to Singapore, which developed a set of indigenous human capital strategies that radically altered its economy. In 1960 Singapore had a per capita GDP of $2,300, roughly equal to Jamaica's. Singapore focused on becoming a financial services and research hub, while Jamaica concentrated on tourism. Fifty years later Singapore's per capita GDP was $43,100, while Jamaica's is slightly above $5,000.

The difference was investment in human capital. Singapore's education system is heavily subsidized by its Ministry of Education to ensure a meritocratic principle that identifies and nurtures bright young students for future leadership positions. In the '60s, Singapore attracted foreign capital by targeting labor-intensive manufacturing to create jobs. As its workforce became better educated through its investment strategies in the '70s, it began attracting higher value-added industries such as petrochemicals, electronics and data storage. Today, Singapore is a leader in a host of knowledge-based industries, including the biomedical sciences. In just the past decade, the number of scientists has leapt from 14,500 to 26,600, a gain of more than 80 percent. In the most recent Global Competitiveness Report put out by the World Economic Forum, Singapore ranked 1st in the quality of its math and science education.

FROM CANADA:
A BETTER WAY TO TREAT IMMIGRANTS

Best practices in high-skilled immigration policy can be witnessed in Canada. The government has consistently promoted Canada as a destination for immigrants and prides itself on having a fairly open and straightforward immigration process. In 2010, Canada welcomed 280,636 immigrants while the U.S. accepted 1,042,625 -- on a per capita basis less than one-half of the Canadian figure. Under the Canadian immigration system there are three categories: economic, family reunification and refugee. The economic class is based upon a detailed points system that calculates relevant skills. Canada, with a population one-tenth that of the U.S., accepted 186,913 "economic immigrants" in 2010, accounting for 66.7 percent of its total. These immigrants unquestionably contribute to economic growth, job creation and increased demand for housing. In contrast, the U.S. currently caps employment-based visas, including those with extraordinary skills, professionals holding advanced degrees, skilled workers and professionals, special immigrants (e.g. religious workers), and investors, at 140,000, or just 13.4 percent of all immigrants. Please continue via theatlantic.com

 

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8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture

Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling.

Thomson understood value. Neighbors reported seeing him leave his local grocery store with jumbo packages of tissues that were on sale. He bought off-the-rack suits and had his old shoes resoled. Yet he had no difficulty paying almost $76 million for a painting (for Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, in 2002). He sought value, whether it was in business, art, or groceries.

In 1976, Thomson inherited a $500-million business empire that was built on newspapers, publishing, travel agencies, and oil. By the time he died, in 2006, his empire had grown to $25 billion.

He left both a financial legacy and an art legacy, but his most lasting legacy might be the culture he created. Geoffrey Beattie, who worked closely with him, said that Ken wasn’t a business genius. His success came from being a principled investor and from surrounding himself with good people and staying loyal to them. In return he earned their loyalty.

For the long-term viability of any enterprise, Thomson understood that you needed a viable corporate culture. It, too, had to be long-term. So he cultivated good people and kept them. Thomson worked with honest and competent business managers and gave them his long-term commitment and support. From these modest principles, an empire grew.

Thomson created a culture that extended out from him and has lived after him. Here are eight rules for creating the right conditions for a culture that reflects your creed:

1. Hire the right people

Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. There is no shortage of impressive CVs out there, but you should try to find people who are interested in the same things you are. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward his or her own (very different) passion. Asking the right questions is key: What do you love about your chosen career? What inspires you? What courses in school did you dread? You want to get a sense of what the potential employee believes.

2. Communicate

Once you have the right people, you need to sit down regularly with them and discuss what is going well and what isn’t. It’s critical to take note of your victories, but it’s just as important to analyze your losses. A fertile culture is one that recognizes when things don’t work and adjusts to rectify the problem. As well, people need to feel safe and trusted, to understand that they can speak freely without fear of repercussion.

The art of communication tends to put the stress on talking, but listening is equally important. Great cultures grow around people who listen, not just to each other or to their clients and stakeholders. It’s also important to listen to what’s happening outside your walls. What is the market saying? What is the zeitgeist? What developments, trends, and calamities are going on?

3. Tend to the weeds

A culture of passion capital can be compromised by the wrong people. One of the most destructive corporate weeds is the whiner. Whiners aren’t necessarily public with their complaints. They don’t stand up in meetings and articulate everything they think is wrong with the company. Instead, they move through the organization, speaking privately, sowing doubt, strangling passion. Sometimes this is simply the nature of the beast: they whined at their last job and will whine at the next. Sometimes these people simply aren’t a good fit. Your passion isn’t theirs. Constructive criticism is healthy, but relentless complaining is toxic. Identify these people and replace them.

4. Work hard, play hard

To obtain passion capital requires a work ethic. It’s easy to do what you love. In the global economy we can measure who has a superior work ethic, who is leading in productivity. Not many industries these days thrive on a forty-hour work week. A culture where everyone understands that long hours are sometimes required will work if this sacrifice is recognized and rewarded.

5. Be ambitious

“Make no little plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” These words were uttered by Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect whose vision recreated the city after the great fire of 1871. The result of his ambition is an extraordinary American city that still has the magic to stir men’s blood. Ambition is sometimes seen as a negative these days, but without it we would stagnate. You need a culture that supports big steps and powerful beliefs. You can see these qualities in cities that have transformed themselves. Cities are the most visible examples of successful and failed cultures. Bilbao and Barcelona did so and became the envy of the world and prime tourist destinations. Pittsburgh reinvented itself when the steel industry withered. But Detroit wasn’t able to do the same when the auto industry took a dive.

6. Celebrate differences 

When choosing students for a program, most universities consider more than just marks. If you had a dozen straight-A students who were from the same socio-economic background and the same geographical area, you might not get much in the way of interesting debate or interaction. Great cultures are built on a diversity of background, experience, and interests. These differences generate energy, which is critical to any enterprise.

7. Create the space 

Years ago, scientists working in laboratories were often in underground bunkers and rarely saw their colleagues; secrecy was prized. Now innovation is prized. In cutting-edge research and academic buildings, architects try to promote as much interaction as possible. They design spaces where people from different disciplines will come together, whether in workspace or in common leisure space. Their reasoning is simple: it is this interaction that helps breed revolutionary ideas. Creative and engineering chat over coffee. HR and marketing bump into one another in the fitness center. Culture is made in the physical space. Look at your space and ask, “Does it promote interaction and connectivity?”

8. Take the long view 

 

If your culture is dependent on this quarter’s earnings or this month’s sales targets, then it is handicapped by short-term thinking. Passion capitalists take the long view. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.

The writer Arthur Koestler said that a writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time. Lasting influence is better than a burst of fame. Keep an eye on the long view.

Excerpted from Passion Capital: The World's Most Valuable Asset © 2012 by Paul Alofs. Published by Signal, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

[Image: Flickr user PurpleMattFish]

via fastcompany.com

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If you're not irate in the first 10 minutes of reading, if I don’t provoke you to revolutionize your management and leadership from think to execute, if you aren’t teetering on the brink of reaching for the Maalox, if you don’t innovate like a banshee, then I have failed you. 

To learn more about how uncanny abilities can increase your competitive advantage and top line growth contact us for a consultation. 

Jim Woods CEO & President, InnoThink Group

A leading strategy, innovation and hypercompetition consultancy.

www.innothinkgroup.com

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Live on Purpose

Four Tips on Winning by Yum Brands President David Novak: Chief Executive Magazine

 

Yum! Brands’ David Novak at right

Yum! Brands’ David Novak has a secret for staying on his leadership toes: the “hot-shot-replaces-me” scenario. “I think, ‘If someone replaced me tomorrow, what would he or she do?’” explains the CEO of the world’s largest restaurant company, which encompasses the KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands. “Since I like my job, why don’t I do it first?”

Results suggest his method is effective. During his tenure as CEO, the $11 billion company has flourished, reporting 13 percent-plus earnings per share growth for each of the last nine years. Novak has also spearheaded global growth; approximately 75 percent of the company’s profits now come from outside the U.S. versus 20 percent in 1997. The firm is one of a handful of U.S. companies that have taken China by storm, in its case by leveraging brand expertise—intellectual property that local competitors can’t reverse engineer as they might a physical product.

In a recent meeting with Chief Executive, Novak, who penned the recent book, Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen, offered four tips to delivering growth.

Be Humble. “Recognize that nothing big gets done by you alone,” he says. “So you need to know who’s on your team the same way a marketer knows its target audience. Know your people cold. What’s in their heads? What are they thinking? And then you’ve got to say, ‘Okay, to take them with me to achieve this strategy, what perceptions or beliefs do I have to build, change or reinforce to get them to come along?”

Grow Yourself. “Never stop learning,” urges Novak, who points to John Wooden, legendary UCLA basketball coach, as an example. “When he was winning national championships he met with and studied extra tall people and coaches of extra tall people. He was still focusing on growing himself. I think when you do that you’ll end up growing your business because you’ll be sharpening your skills and be able to apply that personal growth to growing your business.”

Wipe out “Not Invented Here” Syndrome. “Often when you have success, you get so insular that you don’t go outside and look to see what other people are doing,” he says. “I tell people one of the ways you get promoted in our company is to be a know-how builder, to get knowledge from other people and make yourself [and the company] smarter.”

Make Your Culture a Hero. “When we started our company, I had a chance to do a gigantic do-over, because we had been part of PepsiCo,” he explains. “So we looked at some of the best companies in the world at that time—Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and Southwest Airlines. Every one of them said the key to their success was their culture. You want to make it clear what you value in your company and then recognize the people role-modeling that behavior. Then make culture the hero of all the good things that happen in your company. As a CEO, you have to be the culture champion.

 

Jennifer Pellet

As editor-at-large at Chief Executive Magazine, Jennifer Pellet writes feature stories and CEO roundtable coverage and also edits various sections of the publication.

View more articles by Jennifer Pellet

via chiefexecutive.net

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You Are Beautiful Just The Way You Are

If you think this view of earth from the moon is breathtaking, just imagine how breathtaking you are to your creator from any view. Pass it on. Jim

 

Join the Courageous Living Revolution 

A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.   

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others.

Today, Jim is a management consultant and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.

The Antidote For Fear: Dr. Gordon Livingston

Hopelessness is the ultimate failure of imagination. The most prosaic form of courage is a willingness to get out of bed each morning and continue our lives. In the face of work that does not inspire us, relationships that have become stale and weighted with failed expectations, a world that little resembles the dreams of our youth, most of us choose to go on. What gives us hope that things will change for the better?

This is the essential issue in psychotherapy (definition: conversation directed at change) and is expressed in a more succinct question with which I confront patients: What’s next? We waste a lot of time thinking about the past, or that version of it that we choose to explain the present. I was at a golf driving range recently and forced to listen to two men in their sixties who had just discovered that they had grown up in the same city. They were caught up in reminiscences about acquaintances, athletic teammates, and various local luminaries whom they both knew when they were young. Woven into the conversation were accounts of their own athletic prowess in high school. The ubiquity of cellphones has made all of us routinely privy to information about the lives of strangers that we could do without, but I was especially struck by the sadness implied in these (augmented) memories of a time when everything seemed possible and football heroes would never be old men practicing a game they could never play well.

We frequently talk about the importance of hope without specifying what it is that we are hoping for. For hope to be genuine it must be realistic; otherwise it is but a dream. Visualize the long lines that form at lottery outlets when the payoff reaches hundreds of millions of dollars. My state lottery has as its motto “You’ve got to play to win.” A more realistic slogan would be “You’ve got to play to lose.” It is obviously hope that impels people to stand in those lines while discussing how they will spend the money. The problem is that this hope is undone by odds that make it unrealistic and cause many to spend money they cannot afford. The hope for miracles also provides fertile ground for those who would sell us cancer cures, effortless weight loss programs, real estate with no money down, “natural” remedies, untold wealth from Nigeria, or shortcuts to finding the perfect mate. People (other than self-help authors) don’t get rich advocating perseverance, loyalty, or years of education. Where’s the fun in that?

We are in love with new ideas, the big score, the sudden transformation. We ignore a fundamental truth: Only bad things happen quickly. Why do most kids hate school? Why is the slow acquisition of knowledge “boring?” Why do we appear to have such short historical memories? Why does the stock market, driven by fear and greed, oscillate so wildly and unpredictably, exactly like one’s bankroll in a Las Vegas casino? All these things occur because we are distracted from the real purpose of our lives by a dream of effortless success, narrowly defined in our culture as the accumulation of worldly goods. In the face of the greatest disparity between rich and middle class (not to mention poor) in our history, we now have one of our two major political parties devoted primarily to the interests of our wealthiest citizens. The core concept of capitalism, that we can all prosper together, has given way to a kind of societal selfishness that is an invitation to class conflict based on envy and a sense of unfairness. An expression of and outlet for the longing to be rich is the false idea that it could, with a little luck, happen to any of us.

What is lost in such fragile hopes is the concept of pride in our work, the satisfaction that comes with doing our jobs well in the knowledge that we can construct a comfortable, if not extravagant, life as a result of our labors. Stalked by recession, unemployment, home foreclosures, stagnating income, jobs moving overseas, and endless warfare it is easy to grow angry and cynical. When this anger is re-directed at minorities - immigrants, gay people, government workers – we are in danger of becoming fragmented along the lines of race and class, prisoners of our fear that there is not enough to go around and that we must each act in our own economic interest. This is a formula for relinquishing the central idea of the society, interdependence: that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or fail based on our ability to hear heartbeats other than our own. This idea is where our best hopes reside.

If everything that is worthwhile in this life – education, loving relationships, occupational skill, the development of civic virtue – requires sustained effort, then who will teach us to let go of the idea of instant gratification? The degree to which we covet the latest electronic gadget bodes ill for this effort. Are the thoughts being shared on a $500 iPhone any more compelling than those we used to write down and put in a mailbox? Have you read anything significant on Twitter recently? How many Facebook friends do you have? How many of them could you count on for help at 3am?

To face the future with courage we must believe that we have the power, the resolve, the tolerance to contribute to a world that we and our children will want to live in. As a nation we have things of which we can be proud and those of which we ought to be ashamed. To get where we want to go, we must have at least general agreement on where we have been. We need, in other words, to know our history. Our forbears created a system of democratic government that has been a beacon to all who would live in freedom. They also tolerated slavery. We won the wars, hot and cold, against Fascism and Communism. We also interned our fellow citizens based on their race. We think of ourselves as peace-loving while spending more on, and using, our military than all other nations combined. We elected a black president but discrimination against others for inborn circumstances like race, sexual orientation, and national origin persists. We may be “exceptional” but, like all humans, we are fallible and given to the conceit of those who have easier lives than most of mankind.

In my work I sell hope in individual doses. I listen to people’s stories, question their fundamental beliefs about themselves, and try to help them identify and change those parts of their lives that are keeping them from being happy or fulfilled. My view of how people in groups see themselves and each other is informed by my belief that much of what we think we know is untrue and most of our behavior is driven by desires and motives of which we are only dimly aware. I also believe that insight, generosity, and tolerance are not inborn traits and can be taught. We just have to identify those among us who are qualified to lead and teach us. They must be intelligent and devoted to the principles of kindness and hope. If, instead, we elevate those who are stupid or arrogant (or both) we will then get the future we deserve. via psychologytoday.com

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Join the Courageous Living Revolution

 A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.    

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others. 

Today, Jim is a management consultant and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.

 

Be Your Best Self Today - Six Strategies for Coping with the Blues: Dr. Toni Bernhard

Some mornings I wake up and there's no denying it—I've got the blues. It's as if an internal weather front has unexpectedly moved in. I may not even be by myself when the blues descend on me, but they always make me feel isolated; it's part of their "flavor." (The blues is to be distinguished from a heavy or dark mood that goes unchanged for weeks at a time. The latter could be a sign of clinical depression in which case you should seriously consider seeking the advice of a healthcare practitioner.)

Here are six suggestions for helping with those periodic blues.

1. Don't engage in "comparing mind."

Engaging in what Buddhist's call "comparing mind" can make the blues worse. It may seem as if others don't share your moods, but human beings are more alike than we realize. That neighbor who's always cheerful probably gets the blues. That friend who's in the "perfect" relationship probably gets the blues. Billionaires get the blues. In my experience, neither money nor loving relationships make people immune from the blues.

 

No matter what public face you see on other people, you don't know what their inner life is like. The odds are, it's not so different from your own. This is because we all experience what the Buddha called dukkha—usually translated into English as "suffering"—and referring to the difficulties all of us face at one time or another in our lives. For one thing, we are all subject to illness, injury, aging, and separation from those we love. Billionaires don't get a pass on these. No one does.

In addition, we're all products of our past conditioning and our life experiences. For most of us, that means we have our share of recurring painful thoughts and emotions. If a parent always told us that what we did wasn't good enough, we're likely to have internalized that conditioning and, as a result, repeatedly subject ourselves to self-criticism. No wonder we wake up with the blues on some days! Most of the time, I don't know the source of my blues; I've decided that's okay. I just know they'll intensity if I engage in comparing mind by telling myself how blues-free everyone else must be.

2. Don't try to force yourself out of the blues.

Trying to force the blues away is likely to intensify them. Part of the reason for this is that underlying that attempt to force them away is the negative judgment: "I shouldn't feel blue." Ordering yourself not to feel a certain way almost guarantees that you will! So, just be mindfully aware, without judgment, that the blues have come to visit, maybe even saying to yourself, "Ah yes, the blues again. I recognize you."

Exposing them in this friendly way to the sunlight of awareness can reduce their intensity. "Friendliness" is one of the translations for the word metta which is usually described as the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness. Sometimes though, the word "friendliness" hits the spot for me. I don't need to love those blues, but treating them with friendliness allows me to hold them more lightly until they run their course and go on their way.

3. Try Weather Practice.

I describe this practice in my book, How to Be Sick . Moods are as unpredictable and changeable as the weather. The blues settle in and then lift, just like a dense fog. Seeing the impermanent nature of the blues keeps you from identifying with them as a fixed part of who you are. This insight enables you to just see them as part of the ebb and flow of life. They arise in the mind, stay awhile, and then pass. Seeing this, you can calmly and patiently wait for those blues to lift and blow away.

 

4. If you can, go outside.

 

Changing environments can change a mood. Outside, the air has a different quality, the sights and sounds are different from those inside, and you'll feel part of the larger world around you. Take a short walk or just sit for a while.

Going outside is one of my sure-fire ways to change a blue mood. There's an espresso place a few blocks from my house. On a day when the blues has come to visit, if they haven't lifted by early afternoon, I get in my little Civic and drive to my special place, even if I only stay a half hour. Just the brief interaction with the barista helps take my mind out of that blues groove it's fallen into!

5. Reach out to someone who's having a tough time.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön said that sorrow has the same taste for all of us. I think the blues do too. Connecting with someone else who is struggling can help you realize that you're not alone. In addition, reaching out to someone takes you out of your self-focused thoughts. The simple act of helping another can stir up a wind that will blow those blues right away.

6. Treat those blues to a fun time.

Without trying to force the blues to go away, but also knowing that they're as impermanent as the weather, take them with you to an activity that's just plain fun, no matter how silly. For you, maybe it's sudoku puzzles or playing with crayons and a coloring book. I have a few movies I love to watch over and over, like a favorite piece of music. When the blues settles in, I put one of them on (Groundhog Day, Best in Show, Gosford Park). The characters in them are like old friends and, with their company, I can patiently wait out my mood. Quite often, by the time I'm finished indulging in my little pleasureful activity, those blues have lifted and blown away!

I've found that it's good to have some "blues strategies" at the ready, because the blues are never polite enough to announce ahead of time that they plan to spend the day. If you have some strategies of your own, I hope you'll share them by leaving a comment.

© 2012 Toni Bernhard  

I'm the author of the How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers , winner of the 2011 Gold Nautilus Book Award in Self-Help/Psychology. Website: www.howtobesick.com

via psychologytoday.com

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 Join the Courageous Living Revolution 

A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.  

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others. 

Today, Jim is a management consultant, coach and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.

 

How Starting Over After a Lost Helps to Find Your Safe Place

Dates are important to me. I marked my divorce by a date. My marriage to the love of my life by a date. I even dated the time I decided I would leave an abusive religion and relationship. This was a monumental decision. 

Because whatever time I have upon this earth was given to me to decide its course. So, I decided I could start over when ever I wanted to. 

Instead of waiting until January 1^st to set a floating goal I would usually reinvent each year under the whispered intent, “This time I’ll do it,” I made myself a promise to do it now. When it matters most I assure you that you will find every reason to stay wherever you are regardless of the abuse and anguish. You, like me will be more willing to live in nightmarish situation for convenience that never really exists. This is what I do. 

1. Choose the next date.
2. Be absolutely honest with myself.
3. SEE the clear picture of where I will be a month or year from now if I did not take these steps.
4. Respect my very real emotions.
5. Be loyal to myself.
6. Realize I deserve to be happy.
7. Define what happiness is. If I don’t know what happiness is then how will I know when I have achieved it?
8. I give myself time to grieve. There will be pain associated with this change.
9. Ask yourself if you give up this how will it feel to gain that?
10. Behave from a divine perspective. See yourself as deserving of God’s grace.
11. Allow yourself to be healed.
12. Write your problems, the things needing change in black on piece of plain paper. Burn it! Say good bye. Express gratitude for all you learned from the experience. 

When you give yourself the deserving freedom to be the self you deserve and crave a feeling of tearful joy will flow. A reunion. You will have touched your center. Your refuge. Your safe place for all of your energy.

When ever you feel a tendency to doubt yourself draw upon this goodness. When you do this you will then be able to embrace the real authentic you fearlessly and courageously.

Join The Courageous Living Revolution

A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.   

 

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others. 

Today, Jim is a management consultant and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.

 

Yep! This Clown Will Make You Pregnant

Tel Aviv native Nimrod Eisenberg had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a doctor. Although his childhood was spent mostly in hospitals—his mother is a midwife and his father a physician—he had career ambitions outside the medical field. So when he was just seventeen years old, he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”

Not literally, but he did spend several years performing as a clown and juggler at circuses around Israel, much to his family’s consternation. And he eventually moved to Paris to study the clowning arts at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a renown theater school. (He never wanted to be a clown in the traditional Western tradition. “In America, your clowns are either happy hobos or sad hobos.” His clowning personality, he says, is more like Charlie Chaplin.) Eisenberg soon found his way back to Israel, where he enrolled in the University of Haifa and graduated with a bachelor’s degree… in medical clowning.

“Yes, that’s a real thing,” Eisenberg laughs. “A lot of people think I’m kidding, but I’m a university accredited medical clown.”

In 2003, he joined Dream Doctors, an Israel-based organization that brings medical clowns to clinics and hospitals. It isn’t an unorthodox option that patients have to specifically request. In Israel, medical clowns are available to anybody who wants them. “We’re just another service provided by the hospital,” Eisenberg says. “We’re as integral to the medical staff as anybody.” He works alongside the doctors and nurses as a collaborative part of a patient’s treatment. “We try to be there for every procedure,” he says. “We’re there when they draw blood or change a bandage or do an x-ray.”

He has arguably the toughest job in medicine. Making somebody laugh while they’re stuck in the unhappiest place on earth is, unsurprisingly, often an uphill battle. “A hospital can be pretty grim and depressing, even for positive people,” Eisenberg says. “But if I can change their perspective, get them to reconnect with their joy, it can do wonders.” Clowns can be so effective in stress reduction that, in some minor surgeries, Eisenberg says, “a clown replaces general anesthesia.”

It’s a healing philosophy that’s also at the core of a new experimental treatment being pioneered by Eisenberg and Dream Doctors: Clown-assisted in vitro fertilization. “I only visit the patient after the in vitro procedure,” Eisenberg clarifies. The theory is, much like laughter contributes to the healing of sick people by reducing their stress, a little levity could have the same effect on fertility patients. There’s even research to back it up. In a study conducted by Dr. Shevach Friedler of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre in Israel, 219 women undergoing IVF were visited by clowns for 15 minutes after embryo implantation. 36 percent of them became pregnant.

“There’s a lot of unspoken tension and stress in a fertility ward,” Eisenberg says. “Once you start playing with that tension and acknowledging it and joking over it, it’s able to burst out and offer some relief.” One of his more successful bits with fertility patients involves a tea kettle with a red nose covering the spout. “I hold it like it’s a baby that’s crying,” he explains. “It’s my clown baby. I apologize for it, and I try rocking it to sleep and singing it songs, anything to make it stop crying.” Perhaps not a comedy routine that would amuse most audiences, but for a patient just coming out of IVF surgery, it addresses the elephant in the room. A tea kettle baby is the manifestation of all their hopes and anxieties.

“It’s a delicate balance,” he says. “You have to play on their fears without mocking them. You take those things that sit in the stomach and bring them to the surface so we can look at them and laugh about them.”

Fertility clowns have become more commonplace in Israel, but the rest of the world is still reluctant. Earlier this month, Eisenberg and fellow Dream Doctors clown Jérôme Arous toured hospitals in Canada, giving conferences and hosting workshops for fertility patients and curious doctors in Quebec City, Montreal, Chicoutimi and Halifax. They were met, Eisenberg remembers, with cautious enthusiasm. “I am not convinced,” Dr. Hananel Holzer of Montreal’s McGill Reproductive Centre told a local radio station about fertility clowns. “Not yet.”

Eisenberg is confident that the global medical community will catch on eventually. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that even his own family didn’t take him seriously. He was the black sheep who went into clowning instead of medicine. But he ended up in the family business anyway. He even spent a few years in residence at Hadassah Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his brother, an orthopedist.

“It was pretty easy to tell us apart,” Eisenberg says. “One of us dressed strange and talked funny, and the other was a medical clown.”

via businessweek.com

How to Instantly Become More Confident

Second guessing yourself is a common practice. We walk with our head. Haltingly speak in meetings only to extend more praises to others than to ourselves. We give everyone the benefit of the doubt except the one person needing it most: us. 

A few ideas on how to obtain more of the things you want. Ask yourself: 

1. How would a supremely confident person stand?
2. How would a supremely confident person walk?
3. How would a supremely confident person sit and enter a room?
4. How would a supremely confident person inflect their voice?
5. Act as if you already p[possess the habit or behavior.
6. If you were absolutely confident what type of resume’ would you submit?
7. Associate with people who are confident. Watch how they do it.
8. Smile when needed with direct eye contact. This is born more out of self respect than intimidation. 

Lastly, when daydreaming, do so in color with emotion. The brain is very active during our daydreaming. The time when we co-create who we are. jim

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

Meetings, Do You Need To Show Up?: Mrinalini Reddy

Virtual tools such as email and instant messaging and Skype can be just as effective as face-to-face meetings. It all depends on orientation and mindsets.

Partly it’s a practical question - is it worth the time and expense to travel around the world to attend a meeting? But more importantly, it raises the question of whether communication channels - the ability to see and hear others, and directly respond to them - will affect the quality of negotiations and group decision making.

That choice essentially comes down to the nature of existing (or non-existing) relationships, according to new research from INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “The success or failure of negotiations and group decision making all depends on people’s attitudes and their history,” says Roderick Swaab, principal researcher and an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD. ‘Face time’ may well be one of the best ways to improve trust in relationships and develop camaraderie between colleagues, but it’s not always required in negotiations and group decision situations — in fact, it can even be detrimental, Swaab’s research uncovered.

What’s preferred when?

When unacquainted individuals entered into a negotiation or group decision making situation, they found that the use of richer communication channels—face-to-face and video conferencing—that allowed people to see and hear each other, helped establish rapport and increased the likelihood of achieving high quality outcomes. Nonverbal cues such as tone of voice, facial expression and gestures allowed these communicators to learn more about the other side and potentially trust them enough to share and integrate information. The researchers also found that richer channels contributed to higher quality outcomes in larger groups and more complex tasks.

When team members already share healthy working relationships from prior interactions and meetings, seeing and hearing each other - whether it’s face-to-face or via video conference, or Skype - becomes less important and virtual interactions over email and instant messaging are just as likely to yield similar high-quality outcomes, explains Swaab. In negotiations, high quality outcomes are likely to occur when parties engage in making tradeoffs and reach mutually beneficial agreements, or when teams surface all the necessary information to make the best decisions. “When there is a pre-existing relationship that fosters a cooperative attitude, people think the best of their partners and communication is interpreted with the best of intentions and inherent levels of trust” he adds. As a result, face-to-face interaction becomes less important for trading off concessions and sharing information, Swaab explains.

However, when partners have experienced disagreements and conflict or seeking personal gain only, richer communication channels actually decreased the likelihood of high quality outcomes, the study showed. As communication channels do “not only transmit factual information but can also intensify feelings, the ability to see, hear, or directly respond to others’ claims has the potential to escalate already existing non-cooperative predispositions,” the researchers report. When entering tense discussions, they suggest restricting communication (face-to-face or electronically) and introducing a third party to resolve the conflict.

The genesis for Swaab’s research stems from contradictory findings in existing - and extensive - literature on the subject, where some studies found face-to-face contact to be vital for mutually satisfactory outcomes while others found no effect in being able to see and hear each other. To explore and synthesise the discrepancies, Swaab and his team developed a theoretical model and conducted two meta-analyses on every relevant study that compared the impact of communication channels on negotiation and group decision making outcomes, separately for negotiations and group decision making. “Our mission was to resolve these contradictions and put forward a model that parsimoniously explains the full range of findings,” explains Swaab.

Culture matters  

As virtual teams increasingly operate across geographies and cultures, the professors examined the impact of peoples’ cultural backgrounds. They found that when people were unacquainted the positive impact of rich communication channels was more pronounced in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures. “Communicators within an interdependent (Eastern) cultural context, approach the average conversation with a more cooperative orientation,” explains Swaab, and as a result, “may be less strongly affected by the presence or absence of rich communication channels both in negotiations and when making group decisions.” However, for independent cultures such as those in the West, where negotiators and decision makers likely have neutral orientations, communication channels were necessary to achieve high quality outcomes, he says.  

The paper was co-authored with Adam Galinksy, Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management, Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management & Organizations Victoria Medvec and IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice Daniel Diermeier, all of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The study, “The Communication Orientation Model: Explaining the Diverse Effects of Sight, Sound, and Synchronicity on Negotiation and Group Decision Making Outcomes,” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.

 

First published: September 22, 2011

Last updated: September 26, 2011

JC/MR 09/11

via knowledge.insead.edu

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

A Lesson I Learned From My Granddaughter

One Saturday evening my granddaughter long since bathed and tucked into bed, tip toed into my arms as I sat in the recliner.

 

Silently she nursed a thumb. She wiggled until she found her "just right spot."

'What are you doing said I?" My heart racing with love. 

 

"Grandpa I want to snuggle."

I reclined even further. Drawing her closer.

That's how we keep customers from going to competitiors. Isn't it?  

How To Build Loyal Customers In A Dog Eat Dog World

In this dog-eat-dog world of savvy customers and relentless competitors, managers should seek to be the hunters, not the hunted. Customer service can be the most effective weapon. 

Bear in mind, in our lean economic times Apple has continued to exceed competitors by “selling” products considered non-essential. How? They relieve an unmet desire to such a degree competitors want to become customers. 

Here are five things you should do: 

1. Stop being a victim. Assume complete responsibility for changing your situation.
2. Identify your best customers, recognize their importance to your overall profitability, and understand who your competitors’ premium customers are. 
3. Figure out what would most please your best customers and bind them tighter to your business. Also figure out what might attract your competitors’ best customers to you. Determine what approaches would create the greatest economic payoff for you.
4. Build the capability, test it, adjust it, roll it out, and further build it. Ask questions. Talk to your customers. Get their feedback. Make them part of the process. This is about their relationship with you.
5. Recognize, happy employees contribute to loyal customers.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our free innovation and competitive advantage newsletter.   Don't miss a single new business idea!

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Be a Leader of People, Not Numbers | Ram Charan

Question: How can business leaders foster a sense of trust among staff who may be in different buildings or indeed different countries?

Ram Charan: If you’re in a leadership position, remind yourself every day: you’re a leader of people first, not a leader of numbers. In a global game, you’re going to have by definition, people working with you and for you that are in different cultures, different languages as mother tongues, that do work in different government environments, and their image of social systems are different. You need to be successful to know these about your people. You need to have patience to learn about them. You need to earn their respect; you need to earn their trust.

In the virtual global game, do not confuse communications with emails. Communication is a human touch, emails is not a human touch. So you need to figure out a way to have the human touch with the people you are working with.

In a company like 3M, some 55% of their revenues come from the non-North American geography. And there are fantastic leaders there who are technology companies, CEOs locally, but they have the human touch. They have Chinese working with them, Indians working with them, the Europeans working with them, the Brazilians working with them. But the first rule is the people side.

Recorded January 4, 2011
Interviewed by Max Miller
Directed by Jonathan Fowler
Produced by Elizabeth Rodd

via bigthink.com

 

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization 

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach 

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

Are Men The New ‘Second Sex?’ - PSFK

This article titled “Lagging at school, the butt of cruel jokes: are males the new Second Sex?” was written by Elizabeth Day, for The Observer on Saturday 12th May 2012 23.05 UTC

You might not have realised it, but men are being oppressed. In many walks of life, they are routinely discriminated against in ways women are not. So unrecognised is this phenomenon that the mere mention of it will appear laughable to some.

That, at least, is the premise of a book by a South African philosophy professor which claims that sexism against men is a widespread yet unspoken malaise. In The Second Sexism, shortly to be published in the UK, David Benatar, head of the philosophy department at Cape Town University, argues that “more boys drop out of school, fewer men earn degrees, more men die younger, more are incarcerated” and that the issue is so under-researched it has become the prejudice that dare not speak its name.

“It’s a neglected form of sexism,” Benatar says in a telephone interview. “It’s true that in the developed world the majority of economic and political roles are occupied by males. But if you look at the bottom – for example, the prison population, the homeless population, or the number of people dropping out of school – that is overwhelmingly male. You tend to find more men at the very top but also at the very bottom.”

The American men’s rights author Warren Farrell calls it “the glass cellar”. There might be a glass ceiling for women, Farrell once told the Observer, but “of the 25 professions ranked lowest [in the US], 24 of them are 85-100% male. That’s things like roofer, welder, garbage collector, sewer maintenance – jobs with very little security, little pay and few people want them.”

Do Benatar and Farrell have a point? A handful of statistics seems to bear out their thesis. Not only are men more likely to be conscripted into military service, to be the victims of violence, and to lose custody of their children in the event of a divorce, but tests conducted in 2009 by the programme for international student assessment, carried out by the OECD thinktank, showed that boys lag a year behind girls at reading in every industrialised country. They work longer hours, too: in 2010 the Office for National Statistics found that men in the UK work an average of 39 hours a week, compared with 34 for women. Healthwise, men develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women, on average, and young men are three times more likely to commit suicide.

“The biggest challenge is … tackling the male tendency to suffer in silence,” says Tim Samuels, presenter of Radio 5′s Men’s Hour. “We’re getting better at admitting to our weaknesses or seeking help, but there’s still such a long way to go.”

Men are also increasingly the butt of jokes. In a recent article for Grazia magazine, one male writer took exception to comedian Jo Brand claiming that her favourite man was “a dead one” and an advertisement for oven cleaner with the tagline: “So easy, even a man can do it.” In a Guardian article on Friday, it was pointed out that the stereotyped image of a man incapable of growing up has become a staple of US film comedies – the most recent example being Jeff, Who Lives at Home, starring Jason Segel as a man still living with his long-suffering mother who lets him smoke weed in her basement.

Would the same humour be levelled at women? Benatar thinks not. “It’s very hard to quantify the level of disadvantage,” he says. “But one form of discrimination that is universal is the greater tolerance of violence against males. The victims of murder and severe assault are disproportionately male. There have been lab experiments with both men and women where it has been shown that we have fewer inhibitions inflicting violence against men than women.”

He laughs when asked how the women in his life have responded to The Second Sexism. “They seem to be positive,” he says. “Perhaps I just mix with people who are more reasonable.”

In her 2008 book The Sexual Paradox, the psychologist and journalist Susan Pinker covered some of the same territory, also highlighting the anti-male bias in education and preventative medicine. “The majority of children with developmental delays, behavioural and learning problems are male,” she says. “For the most part, our school system fails them. Many end up dropping out. Our mental health system, too, is focused on helping those who seek out assistance. That’s not the forte of most men.

“I think the five-to-six-year gap between women’s and men’s lifespans could be shortened if more work was done to address male risk-taking and stress-related disease – which kill so many more men than women in their prime. The recent spate of male suicides during the financial crisis is a good example of the way male suffering is often invisible.”

Another area of concern, according to Duncan Fisher, co-founder of the UK’s Fatherhood Institute, is the “gratuitous exclusion” of men from child-rearing: midwifery services are described as “one-to-one care” and whereas employers frequently allow women flexible working hours if they are mothers, the same option is rarely offered to men in similar situations. “It can be so alienating,” says Fisher. “Segregation, in a way, has got worse even though, under the radar, the role of fathers is actually increasing all the time. With the recession, there’s much more sharing of childcare, but there’s a growing gap between the reality and the rhetoric. A lot of early years services are still just ‘mothers’ groups’, which is worrying because it leaves vulnerable men to sort out their own narrative. They don’t believe they exist. They stay silent.”

There are those, however, who take exception to the notion that men are a downtrodden minority, unable to speak out for fear of ridicule or repression. “It’s an idea that’s made more comebacks than Madonna,” says Julie Bindel, the feminist writer and political activist. “It’s total and utter bullshit. There are areas where men are paying the price that male supremacy gives them – there’s absolutely no doubt about that.

“My dad, a working-class man from the north-east, had an absolutely horrendous job in a steel mill and he came home bad-tempered, knackered and underpaid. What he could do was come home and dominate – not in a physical way – but he could be the boss over his wife and children, he could go and sink 10 pints in the pub.

“The reality is that the public domain belongs entirely to men and the disadvantages they face are just the price they pay. It’s tough cheese. Masculinity is just learned behaviour in the same way that femininity is. Ultimately, if we dismantle the patriarchy, that would end up being better for men, too.”

“You can see the ways that patriarchy can be hard on men who don’t fit the mould,” concedes Natasha Walter, the author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and The New Feminism. “There is more debate to be had about the sacrifices that men make, but obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say that shows women hold all the cards. You have to look at the structural inequality. Sexism against men doesn’t exist in the same way because of the way the system is balanced.”

Benatar believes this is a false distinction – and that our ignorance of the “second sexism” stems from what he terms “partisan feminists”, who are interested only in the advancement of women’s rights, rather than true equality and co-operation between the sexes. “It is true that women occupy fewer of the highest and most powerful positions,” he writes, “but this also does not show that women are in general worse off. To make the claim that women are worse off, one must compare all women with all men, rather than only the most successful women with the most successful men. Otherwise, one could as easily compare the least successful men with the least successful women and one would then find that men are worse off.”

If we measured “success” differently, taking into account a sense of broader wellbeing, gained from family relationships and a flexible work-life balance, would men be losing out? Pinker believes so. “‘Global power’ as measured by bean-counting the number of male chief executive officers in industry, for example, is not the only value in a just society,” she says. “Health, happiness, the richness of one’s human relationships, job satisfaction and how long one lives are also important values. Men are lagging behind women in all those areas.”

Still, there are some men who remain relatively untroubled by this state of affairs. Tim Samuels, for one, readily concedes that we tolerate jokes about men that wouldn’t be made about women or ethnic minorities “because men haven’t faced hundreds of years of persecution”.

“We shouldn’t lose our sense of humour over this,” says Samuels. “A few gags on Loose Women aren’t going to signal the demise of mankind.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

via psfk.com

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation.