Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these summaries of 5 GREAT articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!
16 Ways to Jump-Start your Organization’s Creativity
Author Michael Michalko offers up more than a dozen good ideas for sparking innovation and creative improvement in a corporate setting. My favorites from his collection include: holding an idea lottery, arming employees with a “bright ideas notebook,” making a new idea the price of admission to every meeting, celebrating “stupid ideas week,” and asking employees to come up with three ways to make “impossible” tasks or assignments turn out successfully.
7 Great Leadership Development Quotes
Check out Great Leadership for a more complete list with 25 great quotes, but here are 7 of our favorite:
- "Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” -Tom Peters
- "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." -John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do." -Eleanor Roosevelt
- "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do." -Mahatma Gandhi
- “The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.” -John Maxwell
- "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved." -Helen Keller
- "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” -Gandhi
Storytelling & Creative Process Tips from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012
Mike Brown from the Kansas City-based innovation consultancy Brainzooming offers a summary of storytelling and creative process tips culled from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 list published by Fast Company. I really appreciated this post, since the FC list is so vast and deep it’s hard to get through the entire thing in a timely fashion, and Brown has given us the added bonus of serving us highlights from the best posts in the form of quotes and links.
Set Boundaries on the Sacrifices You'll Make for Work
Sacrifice on the job can take many shapes. There's intensity: long hours, pressure, being on call when you're not at work, and up-or-out evaluation systems. Business travel can be physically demanding and make it hard to have a personal life. And corporate moves can open new opportunities but pose personal challenges. Understanding what's needed in a position before you accept the role is important in any career choice.
People enter demanding fields to accomplish important things and build careers, but the associated costs can lead to unhappiness and burnout. Remaining always on and constantly working can mean less time to devote to family, friends, or yourself. Performance may suffer if continued sacrifice leads to less personal energy and creativity.
Management Tip of the Day: Get unstuck when innovating
To innovate, you need to think differently. If you find yourself struggling to get something started or you're stuck in the middle of a project, try to get into a new frame of mind:
- Get inspiration from outside.
- Learn from mistakes.
- Resist the pull of the core
