Book review

Power of the mind We have always had an interest in the power of the human mind. Which goes beyond being mindful, but also moves into the paranormal, spirituality, neuroscience, hypnosis, auras, chakras, Tao, physics., science fiction, gaming and more relevant to business, performance, decision making and strategy. Vision and decision-making Core elements in business […]

Mindfulness Mindfulness is the new black in business. It is everywhere. And not just as part of personal or self-development, but as part of the DNA of businesses. We are doing quite some work on briefing companies about happy, mindful staff with a sense of purpose. It makes perfect business sense. Happy staff is 25%

Trend watching For me, trend watching started a long time ago with Faith Popcorn and the popcorn report. Then we had “Funky business”, “Future files”, “Megachange 2050”, “The Shift” and a speeding up of more books on the future in the last year. Books such as “The second machine age”, ‘Future vision”, “Exponential organisations” and

Frightening stats and trends We were very taken by a book called “Leading from the emerging future”, which starts with some frightening statistics (with “Frugal innovation” adding a few): We leave an ecologic footprint of 1.5 planets Food prices are expected to double by 2030 In USA 1% owns more that the entire bottom 90%

Future proofing We are increasingly asked questions about “future proofing” business by our clients. We then talk about technology trends, VUCA, speed and understanding exponential change. It doesn’t always resonate. Too much science fiction. Brett King Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Brett King, the author of “Bank 3.0” and “Breaking bank”

Marketing is now reputation management Your brand is the sum of the customer experiences. Nearly 80% of all buying decisions are checked online, using an average of 10 sources. Customer feedback is the most prominent source. Most of these customer experiences are now shared online. Resulting in word of mouth on steroids. Completely transparent. With

You don’t want to stay a fish Failure is an issue. The policy report on entrepreneurship 2014 by the Irish government shows we have an issue with failure and risk. Talking to our clients in the innovation space, the same issue arises. In innovation and particularly iterative innovation, failure is a given and in theory,

Innovation Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble embarked  on a ten-year journey during which they completed research on a number of well-known and well-respected companies (e.g. Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, The New York Times, and Unilever) and interviewed dozens of senior-level executives at dozens of other companies that include Aetna, Allstate, Ben & Jerry’s, BMW, Citigroup,

Ecosystem economics will become the new black. What is your transformative purpose? We recently started to use “Exponential organisations” with our clients. One of the key points of the book is about businesses finding their “Transformative purpose”. It really resonates with our clients. When you get involved in staff engagement, it eventually always boils down