Posts in Business Problems
Can Problem-Solving really Build Teams?

It is one thing to have a problem to solve; it is another to use this as a means of improving and strengthening your business, to make it your competitive advantage. When you have a problem to solve and need to establish a project team, it's an opportunity to develop internal relationships and remove inter-departmental barriers.

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Is Your Company Creative Enough to Survive Disruption?

The issue of creativity will determine whether or not your company will survive or become a statistic. Trying to create an environment that is conducive to creativity, both for yourself and your teams will ultimately become a top priority for your company. How can your team become more creative?

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Why Can't We Find A Solution? [Problem-Solving]

Does this sound familiar?

This morning, three hours discussing the poor results from the employee survey and getting nowhere. We tried to agree some actions to improve satisfaction. But we went round and round in circles. Helen from HR wanted to find ways to get staff more involved. Mike in Manufacturing thought that was a waste of time and we should just rewrite role descriptions so everyone was clear what they should do. Sam from Sales thought getting more involvement from staff and new role descriptions were both a waste of time and that we needed to make our salaries more competitive in the marketplace. We spent 9 minutes just arguing why each of the three solutions were wrong.

No wonder many managers say their meetings don't work. So, what can you do?

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Top 5 actions for innovating in your company

Has innovation become a cliché? What does it really mean? People have many different ideas and here are just two:

  • Innovation is successfully applied ideas.
  • Disruptive innovation involves the utter disturbance of the status quo.

In a disruptive and volatile B2B world, senior decision makers need to improve results much faster than ever.  But growing revenue and profits in a sustainable way and creating more value for customers is becoming harder. So, everyone is searching for some innovation to help them overcome their increasing challenges.

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Should innovation be left to your creative teams?

Innovation is not just about ‘out of the box’, ‘blue-sky’ solutions. Sure, we need to use some right-brain thinking to free our imaginations and find creative answers. But, you need to match this with a left-brain process and hard work. Organisations can do a great job and spend lots of time solving the wrong problem. So, it’s important to take the time to understand the real problem that needs to be solved and to make sure the real problem is well defined.

How do you define your problems?

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Do your people feel responsible for innovation?

The last question Gary Hamel asked in his short 9-minute video was: Do you feel personally responsible for innovation? This raises many issues. In another post, I will discuss accountability and measures. This post discusses how to get your staff to buy in to ideas for innovation.

A simplistic way to look at people and innovation is ...

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