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What do Lafayette, Louisiana, the south side of Chicago, Google, Cleveland, the Texas hill country north of San Antonio, and a chunk of rural Missouri and Iowa bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island have in common?

Each leads in delivering a faster, more reliable, and more innovative internet experience. And you would know that if you had attended—and paid attention—during the first day of the Fiber To The Home Council’s conference on From Gigabit Envy to Gigabit Deployed: A Community Toolkit for Building Ultra High-Speed Networks being held this week in Kansas City.

• The parish of Lafayette built its own fiber network after fighting off the legal challenges of incumbent cable and internet providers. Now Hollywood special effects firms are opening offices and engineering firms from Boston are relocating their headquarters there.
• Gigabit Squared is soon to start construction on a new fiber network in and around the University of Chicago neighborhood and already there is more than $100 million dollars in new investment and developers are working to make their projects gig ready.
• Google is offering Kansas City residents gigabit speed internet, and 1 terabyte of cloud storage, and 100+ channels of cable television, and a DVR with 500 hour of storage (in HD), and a Nexus tablet remote control, and a fast home Wi-Fi—all for $120 a month.
• Northeast Ohio’s One Community fiber network is allowing neurosurgeons to virtually rehearse the operation before they crack open your skull.
• The foresight of the GVTC telephone cooperative ten years ago in deploying a fiber to the home network has allowed it to weather the storm of reduced landline usage and move into internet, cable, security, long-distance and advanced data.
• Grand River Mutual has used USDA grants and loans to build a fiber network that brings fast, reliable, reasonably priced telephone and internet services—and economic development opportunities.

When it comes to blazing a trail—even in something as technically involved as telecommunications—the experience of these organizations shows that vision, creativity, and perseverance can be more important than size, financial resources, or the zip code of your headquarters.  – Barrett Sydnor

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Barrett Sydnor

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Woody Bendle is back with another creative thinking exercise for keeping your best in class products and capabilities truly best in class now and in the future by thinking through how you may really be limited or competitors may be able to attack you. Here’s Woody:

“Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it. You’ve got one option now – to shoot first.”  Gary Hamel

Innovation is an interesting phenomenon.  Nearly all businesses exist because at one point or another, they identified an opportunity to create and deliver new value to the market.  Whether through a new best in class product or service, entrepreneurs often see unique ways to exploit the vulnerabilities of incumbent firms and as a result, start a new innovative business.  However, as the business grows it often puts in place highly efficient, and often inflexible, innovation-killing processes and standards in order to minimize costs and maximize profits.

I’ve always found this incredibly ironic!  The very thing that helped to create this successful business in the first place (innovation) becomes more and more difficult the larger and more successful the business gets.   And this is the point that Gary Hamel is making with his quote above; you cannot ever stop innovating.  Because once you do, someone is going to eat your lunch – that is an economic certainty!

One of the challenges for companies (in particular businesses in Western cultures) is the notion of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”   Even today with Lean and Six Sigma becoming more and more a corporate norm, Western societies and business still feel that setting out to improve something is a de facto admission that something is broken or wrong.  Get over yourselves already, would you?

In today’s markets, if you’re not improving, you’re going out of business – you just might not know it yet.

In order to be successful in today’s, and tomorrow’s market, you have to have the mindset of an innovator and you have to continuously innovate. The era of being able to rest on yesterday’s successes is long gone!

Internal improvements can be innovations!

Over the past 30 years or so, the team from Doblin Innovation Consultants has identified ten types of innovation that they classify into one of three categories:

1. Configuration
2. Offering
3. Experience

Source: Doblin Innovation Consultants

Internally oriented innovations, such as how you choose to align and deploy your resources and how you develop and implement unique processes, can regularly provide incredible value for your firm’s shareholders and customers.  These are often stealth innovations your competition can never replicate – even if they do eventually find out what it is that you are doing.  And, if you’ve adopted the mindset of continuous innovation and continuous improvement, you will have developed and implemented new best in class practices by the time your competition has replicated your old best practices.

Convinced already?  All right!  Let’s get to work!

Creative Thinking Exercise for Creating Best in Class

A valuable creative thinking exercise I’ve developed and used with repeated success over the years is one I call “Best In Class.” This exercise is useful for developing ideas for all types of innovations, but I’ve found it particularly valuable for inward facing Structure and Process innovations.

The idea behind the Best In Class creative thinking exercise is to identify and explore the things your organization is currently doing that would be considered best in class; and then develop ideas for making them even better – or even coming up with new ones.  This exercise has the following six steps:

1)     List all of the things your organization is doing that are best in class.

• These should be things where you are without peer in your category?

2)     List the all of the reasons why each is best in class

• What is truly unique about each one?
• How does it provide you a competitive advantage?
• How does it create unique value for your customers?

3)     List all of the reasons why each thing might actually be limiting for your business

• Is this preventing you from doing something else that might create more value?

4)     Come up with ways that a competitor might make each irrelevant or ineffective

• How easy would it be for someone to also do this and take your advantage away?
• Is someone already doing something to try and take this advantage away from your organization?  And if so, how?

5)     List things you would do if (for whatever reason) suddenly you were no longer allowed or able to do the thing for which you are best

6)     Considering all of the points identified in steps 2-5, how might this Best In Class item be made even better?

The idea with this exercise (as is typically the case with most creative thinking exercises) is to really push yourself and identify as many things as you can where your organization is Best In Class.  And for each thing you identify, list as many things as you can within each step.  The first things you come up with will be the easiest for you to complete.  Eventually, you will feel as if you are running out of ideas; but don’t stop here.  I have found over the years the best ideas and opportunities are amongst the last ones that you will generate.

So what do you think? Is this a creative thinking exercise you can see adding to your creativity toolbox?  Let me know!

And if you are feeling particularly ambitious, try doing this exercise as if you are that “up and coming” new disruptive competitor in your market.  I promise this will be enlightening!

Now let’s get innovating! - Woody Bendle

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Expectations are great when they help you think about what you want to accomplish. Expectations can also help you envision opportunities and problems you could face before they actually develop.

Expectations can also force you, however, to do things that aren’t good for you or even relevant to what you’re trying to make happen.

When expectations keep you clinging to the same old ideas or stuck in the same old ways, you have to do something to deal with them. We have a creative thinking exercise that can help.

A Creative Thinking Exercise to Try

Here’s a creative thinking exercise for when expectations are boxing you in and stopping you from accomplishing new successes:

1. List all the expectations you or others have about a situation that is screaming for change. You may want to note whether each expectation belongs to you or someone else.

2. Imagine throwing out each expectation one by one and asking as each is eliminated, “What would I do or not do now WITHOUT this expectation in place?”

3. When you’re all done, ask yourself, “Which of these expectations am I now willing to quit recognizing?”

Can you use this creative thinking exercise to be more effective?

No expectations on my part about you using this creative thinking exercise, but I think you’ll be more creative and happier if you do use it…frequently. – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Today’s list of strategic thinking questions is the last installment in our series based on the June 2013 Fast Company magazine and its list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013. All of the strategic thinking questions were inspired by profiles from the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business list for this year.

It’s exciting that today’s post features someone on the list I actually know: Sheryl Connelly, the Futurist at Ford Motor Company. I met Sheryl at a marcus evans conference in 2008 where we were both speaking. One year later, she was our kickoff speaker when I chaired the American Marketing Association’s national Marketing Research Conference. The strategic thinking question Sheryl Connelly inspired is the first listed under Strategy.

Across all three articles covering the strategic thinking questions the list inspired, you should definitely be able to find a few you can apply to your business or career to get you thinking of creative ideas to put you on the list in 2014!

Insights and Strategy Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

The final thirty-one strategic thinking questions address insights and strategy.

Insights Questions

If you have access to “big data,” what are you doing to improve your human ability to ask insightful questions? (1. Nate Silver - PRINCIPAL, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT; AUTHOR)

How many customers are inside your company and how easily can they supply market information? (69. Emily Sugihara - FOUNDER, BAGGU)

How would you describe the emotional transitions your data is going through? (93. Eitan Grinspun - CODIRECTOR, COMPUTER GRAPHICS GROUP, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)

Can you tell stories from your data? Can you find predictive relationships in your stories? (99-100. Hilary Mason and Leslie Bradshaw - CHIEF SCIENTIST, BITLY; COO, GUIDE)

Strategy Questions

How are you going to start regularly bringing examples into your organization of other businesses dealing with comparable issues to the ones you face? (24. Sheryl Connelly - FUTURIST, FORD MOTOR CO.)

When is it possible to test your idea on a radically small group and get enough confidence to move forward based on the feedback? (11. Carl June - PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

What new ways can you make it easier for your employees to share ideas and shape your company? (23. Art Peck - PRESIDENT OF GROWTH, INNOVATION & DIGITAL–A DIVISION OF GAP, INC.)

In what ways do you imagine young women will change your industry? (29. Reshma Saujani - FOUNDER, GIRLS WHO CODE)

How could it be better to fix a big problem you face by undoing the problem rather than putting another fix on a previous fix? (3. Diana Balmori - PRINCIPAL, BALMORI ASSOCIATES)

How could you better use your speed, expertise, and strategic thinking to disrupt a tired industry? (31 Tony Fadell and Hosain Rahman - FOUNDER, CEO, NEST LABS; FOUNDER, CEO, JAWBONE)

Looking at your internal processes, how do you break what you do into little pieces that allow you to create many more combinations than you can right now? (33. Ayah Bdeir - FOUNDER, CEO, LITTLEBITS)

How soon is the next time you’ll list everything you think is essential to your business and then cut the list by 50 percent? (36. Katie Rae - MANAGING DIRECTOR, TECHSTARS BOSTON)

How can you go “shopping” with your customers, no matter what “shopping” looks like, to gain breakthrough product ideas? (38. Evelyn Mazzocco - SVP OF CREATIVE, GLOBAL GIRLS’ AND GAMES BRANDS, MATTEL)

What more could you do to grow the rate and accuracy of insights your organization produces weekly? (39. Jill Beraud - CEO, LIVING PROOF)

How can you improve your ability to break even small problems into smaller, solvable parts? (41. Ruchi Sanghvi - HEAD OF OPERATIONS, DROPBOX)

What are new ways your organization can use yield management principles to improve productivity or grow revenue? (42. Susan Chapman - SVP OF GLOBAL REAL ESTATE AND WORKPLACE ENABLEMENT, AMERICAN EXPRESS)

Where are you looking for talent among teenagers who could contribute exciting new ideas to your business? (43. Kelvin Doe – INVENTOR)

What has your industry known about for years has great potential yet has never been delivered to customers to create new value? (44. Antonio Mata - PRESIDENT, MATA & ASSOCIATES)

How about immediately asking anyone who complains to you about a constraint, “How is that constraint really the best opportunity you’ve ever had?” 49-57. Urban Outfitters – NINE INDIVIDUALS REMAKING CITY LIVING

How is density, and its tremendous business and growth advantages, becoming a bigger part of your strategy? 49-57. Urban Outfitters – NINE INDIVIDUALS REMAKING CITY LIVING

If you’re a solopreneur, what are you doing to increase the number of people you MUST interact with daily (in the interest of stimulating conversations, exchanges, and ideas)? Where is your brand plotted on a simple vs. elegant x-y chart? (58. D.A. Wallach - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, SPOTIFY)

If you’re trying to launch a business, how could doing what you do for a worthy cause get you the attention you need? (59. Agnello Dias - COFOUNDER, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TAPROOT INDIA)

How can you give new customers a better view of the third or fourth thing you can do to serve them? (60. Peter Marino – ARCHITECT)

If your brand is trying to catch up to #1 in your industry, what can you consciously do differently instead of trying to do the same things as the leader? (61. Tom Cibrowski - SENIOR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, GOOD MORNING AMERICA)

If you start with what’s left-over, unused, forgotten, and rejected, what things can you create from them? (62. Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu - FOUNDER, CEO, SOLEREBELS)

Who are the absolute best potential partners in the absolute worst performing areas of what you do? (65. Lynn Jurich - COFOUNDER, CO–CEO, SUNRUN)

If you wrote the introductory press release for a new project or process before you even started on it, what expectations would the press release set? (72. Ian Spalter - DIRECTOR OF DESIGN AND UX, FOURSQUARE)

When your brand gains serendipitous entry into a new audience or market, what steps are you taking to build on it so it’s not a fleeting success? (86. Heidi Ueberroth - PRESIDENT, NBA INTERNATIONAL)

For the important problems you can’t solve, how can you tell stories about them to reach someone who CAN solve them? (89. Christy Turlington Burns - FOUNDER, EVERY MOTHER COUNTS)

When imagining potential business partnerships, who else is commanding the time, attention, and dollars your audience has available? (9. Tracey Bleczinski - VP OF CONSUMER PRODUCTS, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE)

How can you win over to your cause the enemy that knows your fatal flaw (and is in the best position to help you get better)? (95. John Hering - COFOUNDER, CEO, LOOKOUT MOBILE SECURITY)

Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Today, we have a second installment in our Brainzooming series on strategic thinking questions inspired by the Fast Company list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013.

Today’s strategic thinking questions focus on creativity, social media, and content marketing.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, these strategic thinking questions don’t appear in the Fast Company most creative people in business profiles. They were created by reviewing the profiles and asking ourselves what questions those profile may have asked themselves while working on their creative achievements.

The reason we’re emphatic this is because of what happened with Fast Company after publishing our post covering the 2012 list. We noticed late one morning the main Fast Company account shared our tweet about the blog post. Noting the hundreds of thousands of followers they have, I quickly inserted a Brainzooming ad in the post, and waited for the blog traffic explosion. Then, as a double check, I went to the Fast Company RT to see what it would be like to wind up at our blog from a Fast Company link.

Guess what?

Fast Company swapped out our link to Brainzooming in my original tweet, substituting one to the list on its website. If we’d ripped off their copy, I would completely understand. But our content is unique AND featured more than 100 links to the magazine’s website. That’s a social media foul, in my book, but what are you going to do?

Here are today’s UNIQUE strategic thinking questions. You can click to get to the underlying profiles, but don’t expect to find these creativity, social media, and content marketing questions there!

Creativity, Content Marketing, and Social Media Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Creativity Questions

How many scary and risky things do you say “Yes” to in the course of a year? How many do you say “No” to? What’s the impact of your answers on your creative output? (13. Connie Britton - ACTRESS, NASHVILLE)

What are new ways to expand your global influences without having to leave your office? (2. Dong-Hoon Chang - EVP, HEAD OF DESIGN STRATEGY, SAMSUNG)

What’s the longest your organization has ever brainstormed, and are you ready to brainstorm 10x longer at one stretch? (27. Maria Mujica - LATIN AMERICAN MARKETING DIRECTOR, GUMS AND CANDY, MONDELĒZ INTERNATIONAL)

How can you deliberately create more white space to experiment, try stuff, learn, change, and do it better? (32.Hosain Rahman - FOUNDER, CEO, JAWBONE)

Why would it be interesting to hear you vent about what’s gone wrong or has failed in your life? (34. Marc Maron - COMEDIAN, WTF WITH MARC MARON)

If you were required to triple the number of new creative ideas you generate on any given day, what would you do differently to boost your creative output? (37. Darrin Crescenzi - SENIOR DESIGNER, PROPHET)

What creative residue do you leave yourself at the end of the day to fuel a quick creative start tomorrow? (47. Simon Rich – WRITER)

How can you grow the number of self-described “creatives” you talk to weekly to boost your new ideas? (6. Max Levchin - CEO, AFFIRM; BOARD MEMBER, YAHOO)

How would it change your creative perspective if, as a TV show’s creator is called a “showrunner,” your title were whatever you produce + “runner”? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

If you typically have a plan in place for your creativity, how would just starting and seeing what happens feel more refreshing and creative? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

How can you bring together young, experienced people and older, inexperienced people to reverse the typical learning environment of the older teaching the young? (84. Michelle Rowley - FOUNDER, CODE SCOUTS)

What happens when you flip your typical creative process around completely? (90. Pendleton Ward – ANIMATOR)

What’s stopping you from asking for favors and help from people you have no business trying to talk to? (96. Ruzwana Bashir - COFOUNDER, CEO, PEEK)

Lots of risk can thwart addressing lots of societal need, unless someone is bold enough to do something – how bold are you? (98. Wendell Pierce - COFOUNDER, STERLING FARMS FRESH FOODS)

Content Marketing and Social Media Questions

How can you collect and share more real-life stories of people your company has helped in meaningful, personal ways? (10. Scott Harrison - FOUNDER, CHARITY: WATER)

What would happen if you tried to come up with and select a year’s worth of content marketing ideas before you published your first piece of content? (18. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele - COCREATORS AND STARS, KEY & PEELE)

If you covered only one topic, how would the narrow topic free you for incredible diversity in how you deliver content on the topic? (20. Lara Setrakian- FOUNDER, SYRIA DEEPLY)

What are all the ways you are and aren’t making it easy for your fans to create and share content about their experiences with your brand? (40. Kate Phelan and Justin Cooke - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TOPSHOP; CMO, TOPSHOP)

How are you getting ready to have your brand catch and do something with the content your audience throws back at you? (21. Jaime Robinson - VP, EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, PEREIRA & O’DELL)

If you’re giving new content away, what and when will you get paid for it? (28. Diplo - DJ, FOUNDER, MAD DECENT)

What are new ways to serve up your best content and not just your most recent content to readers? (45. Kate Lee - DIRECTOR OF CONTENT, MEDIUM)

What will it take for your brand to process external inputs and do / say something about them in real-time via social media? (7. Jill Applebaum and Megan Sheehan - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, JWT; ART DIRECTOR AND DESIGNER)

Would a prank via social media potentially help draw attention to a cause you care about deeply? (76. Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancato - FEMINIST ACTIVISTS)

When it comes to content, what more could you do with your content to create attention for your brand or another brand that needs attention? (88. Sscott Borchetta - CEO, BIG MACHINE RECORDS)

How can you create a place for smart, opinionated, and even snarky customers to hang out and share their knowledge about what they love (which might not be your brand)? (91. Mahbod Moghadam - COFOUNDER, RAP GENIUS)

What will it take to create as clear a group of dissenters for your content as you have created fans? (92. Leandra Medine - FOUNDER, MANREPELLER.COM)

If you provided 3 weeks of training to the content creators in your organization, how would you best use the time? (97. Stephanie Horbaczewski - PRESIDENT, CEO, STYLEHAUL) 

Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The June Fast Company features its list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013. Last year, we used the issue as a point of departure to share ideas, tips, and thought starters inspired by each of the creative people on the list. Last year’s series of Brainzooming posts based on the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 has received great attention all year long, and for this year, we’re taking a bit of a twist.

Given interest in the recent Brainzooming post highlighting more than 200 strategic planning questions, we used the stories from the most creative people in business list to generate strategic thinking questions inspired by the varied creative successes represented in the issue.

As with last year’s Brainzooming recap, these questions AREN’T in the Fast Company issue. Instead, we applied our technique of taking a case study and imagining the questions that would inspire someone else to get to the same place as the person or business in the case study.

So to repeat: this is ALL NEW CONTENT you’ll be reading throughout our series of posts. Later in the week, I’ll explain WHY I’m being so emphatic about this being content you won’t see in Fast Company. Stay tuned for that!

Branding and Customer Experience Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Today’s list includes twenty-five strategic thinking questions on branding and customer experience. Later in the week, we’ll feature questions on creativity, content marketing, insights, and strategy.

Branding Questions

How can you change your brand experience to cause people to want to spend more time with the brand? (12. Liz Muller - DIRECTOR OF CONCEPT DESIGN, STARBUCKS)

How would an artist create a live art event starring your brand? (16. Ai Weiwei – ARTIST)

What could you do to grow a large enough audience and facilitate a way for them to want to talk about your brand more and longer? (19. Fred Graver - HEAD OF TV TEAM, TWITTER)

If “cute” is part of your brand personality, how can you make your brand experience more childlike to enhance its “cuteness”? (22. Phill Ryu and David Lanham - FOUNDERS, IMPENDING)

What do your customers love about your brand, and how do you respect what they love when you freshen your brand experience? (25. Jason Wilson - LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER, PINTEREST)

What are the hidden aspects of your brand experience that hold new, untold, and intriguing stories? (63. Roman Mars - HOST, 99% INVISIBLE)

How can you start serving the cool part of a market that isn’t being served sufficiently? (68. Rosie O’Neill and Josh Resnick - COFOUNDERS, SUGARFINA)

Customer Experience Questions

If your product were completely interactive with a user’s touch, why would it be exciting for them to touch the product? (15. Ivan Poupyrev - SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST, DISNEY RESEARCH)

What are you doing to add more personalization (that provides value) into your customer experience? (17. Michelle Peluso - CEO, GILT GROUPE)

How would fewer choices make things easier and better for your customers? (67. Aerin Lauder - FOUNDER, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, AERIN)

How can you offer customers a smaller set of options, but give them more flexibility and higher performance as a trade-off? (30. Bob Mathews and Gary Chow - SENIOR RADIO FREQUENCY ENGINEERS, AT&T)

If you redesigned your business – even if it’s a stodgy business – around delivering “more fun for customers,” what would have to change about your customer experience? (35. Alli Webb - FOUNDER, DRYBAR)

How would your brand’s customer experience change if you designed it for the lowest common denominator technology instead of the newest technology? (4. Kirthiga Reddy - DIRECTOR OF ONLINE OPERATIONS, FACEBOOK INDIA)

What can you do to translate what you know about your customers into pleasant surprises for them? (46. Jackie Wilgar - EVP OF MARKETING, LIVE NATION)

What are new ways you can turn customer research efforts into customer design opportunities? (48. Tina Wells - FOUNDER, CEO, BUZZ MARKETING GROUP)

In what ways could you create opportunities for your customers to meet, talk, and bond? (56. Sarah Simmons – CHEF, CITY GRIT)

How can you make the online and offline experiences of your brand have the same feel? (64. Tare Lemmey - CEO, NET POWER & LIGHT)

If your customers don’t have a 100% success rate with your product or service, how can you make it more like something they can do/use with complete success? (66. Michael Buckwald and David Holz - COFOUNDERS, LEAP MOTION)

What can you do to feed information to customers about what other customers are thinking / choosing / doing right now? (70. Kevin Bruner - PRESIDENT, CTO, TELLTALE GAMES)

In what ways can you bring together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet but would find value in doing so? (71. Caroline Ghosn - FOUNDER, CEO, LEVO LEAGUE)

How could you turn a complicated process in your customer experience into a one-step process? (73. Katelyn Gleason - COFOUNDER, CEO, ELIGIBLE)

If your product requires training to use, what do you need to change about it so you can eliminate all training? (74. Aneel Bhusri - COFOUNDER, CO–CEO, WORKDAY)

What is pre-planned in your customer experience that would benefit from being spontaneous, and how can you make that happen? (75. Andy Cohen - TV HOST, EVP OF TALENT AND DEVELOPMENT, BRAVO)

How can you make it easier for potential customers to go from receiving a reminder about your brand to taking action (with telepathic communication as the end goal)? (85. Grace Woo - FOUNDER, PIXELS.IO)

If combining live events, social, and crowdsourcing is where it’s at, how do you use social to let the crowd, whether in-person or remotely, influence your event? (87. Bozoma Saint John - DIRECTOR OF CULTURAL BRANDING, MUSIC, AND ENTERTAINMENT, PEPSICO)

Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s always very rewarding when people appreciate Brainzooming blog content and find value from applying our strategy, creativity, and innovation ideas in their careers. It’s especially fun when there’s an opportunity to extend the Brainzooming message into new venues in collaboration with others.

Today, we’re highlighting two people who’ve been particularly kind in their appreciation for our content and in featuring Brainzooming content through their own social media presences.

Join Us and Let’s Talk Live on the WiseTalk Teleconference, May 30

Sue Bethanis, Founder and CEO of Mariposa Leadership, has been a recent, much appreciated retweeter of Brainzooming content. While Sue is newer to Twitter, she’s been hosting the monthly WiseTalk Leadership Forum since 2004 when she published her book, Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage: Five Keys to Becoming a More Effective Leader.

One interesting wrinkle to WiseTalk is since it’s a live teleconference (before becoming an archived recording), listeners can ask live questions via phone and email.

This opportunity to converse and shape the content to the live audience’s interests is just one reason why I’m looking forward to being a guest on the hour-long 99^th episode of WiseTalk on Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 2 pm EDT. Sue and I will be talking about the Brainzooming approach to strategic and creative thinking, plus anything else you want to talk about specifically!

Since it’s too infrequent that I get to talk live with Brainzooming readers, I’d love to take the opportunity to do so during WiseTalk. Plus if it’s a really great show with lots of call-in questions, maybe we’ll make the greatest hits 100^th episode!

Register Today for WiseTalk and Let’s Talk Live!

How do you join in to help shape our May 30^th WiseTalk conversation?

Register for the May 30 WiseTalk teleconference right away on the Mariposa Leadership website to get your dial-in information.

Check out Stephen Lahey and the Small Business Talent Podcast

Stephen Lahey, a great phone and social media friend, is the self-proclaimed #1 Brainzooming fan! Stephen is the successful leader of Lahey Consulting, a search firm and HR consultancy he founded in 2000, with a focus on marketing recruitment and retention.

Additionally, earlier this year Stephen introduced SmallBusinessTalent.com® to help business people take advantage of their “knowledge and talent to attract more ideal clients.” Among the free resources Stephen offers on Small Business Talent is a weekly half-hour podcast providing in-depth information small business people can directly benefit from in the varied roles they play.

I was honored to be the first guest on the Small Business Talent podcast when it debuted in January 2013. Stephen and I talked about how blogging, social media, and content marketing specifically apply for small businesses, including how it fits into The Brainzooming Group business strategy. You can listen to the kick-off podcast here or on SmallBusinessTalent.com®, along with all the fantastic guests Stephen has interviewed.

Stephen has made quite an impact in such a short time with the podcast. In talking with Stephen, he has some very exciting, big name authors coming up in the near future. Additionally, we’ve talked about doing another podcast soon to dive deeper into content marketing strategy for small business. To get the first word on when that’s scheduled along with updates on Stephen’s other weekly guests, sign up for Stephen’s email list today!

What’s Next?

We have several other public appearances coming up in July, including a live, in-depth webinar on strategic thinking and a  social media workshop in Boston. More on those later, but in the meantime, let’s talk May 30! – Mike Brown

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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