The Brainzooming Group

When creativity isn’t appreciated in your organization culture, what can you do if changing jobs isn’t an option?

I told the recent CreativeBloc audience that if anyone worked in a place that didn’t value creativity and innovative ideas from its own people, it was best to get out; thus, this CreativeBloc question arose.

Honestly, unless you’re an indentured servant where you work now, changing jobs and finding an organization that places a value on creativity is always an option. It just may be that changing jobs RIGHT NOW isn’t an option.

If changing jobs in pursuit of a more creativity-friendly culture seems like a far-off possibility, you need to start preparing. The first steps are to make sure you’re building a financial cushion (which may involve altering today’s lifestyle), honing your online presence to showcase your expertise and talents, and aggressively putting yourself in situations to meet and help people who can be a part of your future plan.

From the standpoint of protecting your creativity while you get ready to change jobs in the future, two streams of activity are vital:

• Developing and implementing a plan to cope with where you are (Plan A)
• Concurrently working on what’s next (Plan B)

Plan A – Your Creativity Coping Plan at Your Current Job

If creativity isn’t valued at your current job, identify what IS valued there. Ask yourself and others, “What matters in our organization?” Beyond asking the question, enhance your understanding by observing where the company’s management devotes its attention.

Once you’ve figured out what’s valued, look for ways to introduce creativity (defined as “seeing things in new and different ways”) into areas the organization values. While you may be stretched to introduce creativity in what you think are non-traditional areas, it’s vital for your creative health.

Make sure management notices your innovative contributions to company priorities. Call attention to what you’re doing. Showcase the value you’re creating for the organization. Don’t do it in a cheesy, conceited way, but confidently make sure your contributions are recognized. Management visibility is important since you’re going to need to reduce your emotional investment in your job. If the job’s not going to enrich your creativity, you can’t afford to be too wrapped up in it. That doesn’t mean you won’t perform well, but don’t over-perform since you’ll need to divert mental energy to other activities.

Personally, in my corporate life, our company began appreciating creativity even less than it had following significant management changes. What was valued? Cost cutting, stopping programs, and doing what we were doing with dramatically reduced expenditures. As a result, I tried to find creative and innovative ways to carry out those tasks. It wasn’t nearly as rewarding as investing in new marketing programs, without a doubt. But taking initiative on these priorities demonstrated my active contribution to the organization even while shifting my mental focus to my Plan B.

Plan B – Working on What’s Next

If you haven’t already, start looking at your entire life as a creative outlet. Concurrently, compartmentalize your work – viewing it as one small part of your life - not your whole life. This move is vital since you’re going to need creative energy to work on Plan B. You can’t be successful in this dual track strategy if you’re allowing your current job to drain you creatively.

Identify your distinctive talents and identify ways to incorporate them into everything you do in both your work and personal lives. Since these distinctive talents should be areas that most excite you creatively, you’ll receive you a much needed creative boost by allowing them to occupy a bigger portion of your waking hours.

Begin creating a new, expanded creative team with which to surround yourself. Take advantage of both the people you know in person and those you meet through social media to share and fortify your creativity.

As your mind starts to clear creatively, begin identifying your strategic career options. As you do this, take deliberate steps to find and/or create your second, more creative “job.” The job may be a paying one, or it could be volunteer work. It may be expressively focused on cultivating your creative pursuits. No matter what it is, your pursuit should be providing disproportionate creative fulfillment and leading you toward what your future holds – moving your creative life and career pursuits in a way that today’s plan B becomes the plan A of some point in your very near future!  – Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

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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Author John L. Allen, Jr. has been an influence on me in so many ways. Before becoming a well-known author, reporter, and sought-after expert on the Catholic Church’s inner workings and current trends impacting it during and after Pope John Paul II, John Allen and I were very close friends in high school and college. As a result, my collection of early John Allen memorabilia includes fun things such as:

• The standard opening paragraph John wrote which works for ANY book report.
• A hand-written list of his “great sayings” (The list includes a phrase which provided the punch line for the Mr. O’Neil cartoon I drew for Jan Harness’ Creative Instigation presentation).
• Many memories of hilarious stories of John’s fearless exploits in student journalism and government, rock music criticism, and the consumption of food and beverages.

It had been at least ten years since I last saw John, right before he was moving to Rome to establish a beat there reporting on the Vatican for the National Catholic Reporter. As John told me at the time, he was going to Rome, in essence, to “wait for Pope John Paul II to die.” After arriving at the Vatican however, John, not surprisingly, turned an opportunity other Rome-based reporters viewed as a laid back assignment into a platform to break stories of global impact through building relationships with important figures throughout the Catholic Church hierarchy.

In the decade since, John traveled on 50 trips with Pope John Paul II, and became the go-to Vatican analyst for CNN leading up to and after the death of Pope John Paul II. He’s also authored numerous books, including “The Future Church – How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church.”

Talking about “The Future Church” brought John  to The University of Kansas recently in advance of heading back to Rome for the beatification of Pope John Paul II this weekend.

In writing this trend-focused book, John went through an extensive process to identify and vet potential trends against specific criteria to ensure the ten trends in his book could legitimately be considered so. After his KU lecture, I asked John to talk about the research and crowdsource-based process he used to settle on the ten trends in “The Future Church,” since the strategy he employed is directly applicable to how one would approach forecasting current trends in any market or organization. – Mike Brown

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 brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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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Last week, I was back in event planning and production mode helping a client put together an internal event to launch a new initiative. This event had an interesting twist. While there were fewer than 200 attendees, the event was held inside a major indoor concert and sports venue. The dichotomy of hosting a relatively small group in a venue with thousands of seats (and the associated infrastructure to support them) reconfirmed some long-held event planning lessons and introduced some variations on other event planning practices. Doing my personal recap on the successful event, the lessons seemed worthwhile to share for those of you doing event planning or managing other creatively-oriented projects. Here are my 11 take-aways:

1. When you have a choice, pick the event venue with the greatest capabilities and expertise.

This will give you a big head start toward a successful production. Having just done an event at a venue with a permanent control room and a production team running it every day, the differences versus a hotel and hiring a production company to bring along a temporary setup were dramatic.

2. Insert emotion into the program wherever possible – ideally in every presentation.

Remember – the tougher it is to figure out how to put emotion into a presentation on a particularly dry topic, the more credit you’ll get from the audience for trying it.

3. Push your presenters to use more pictures than words.

It’s easier on both the presenter and the audience. Plus a great image can help inject needed emotion into a boring topic.

4. Make it clear to everyone when you have to move from a period of creative exploration into finalizing decisions for an event.

There may be additional opportunities to move back into creative time later. Acknowledge that shift with everyone as well. But at certain points, you simply have to decide and move on without introducing any more intriguing possibilities.

5. Work from a solid to-do list of critical items which need to be completed.

Work your list hard, but realize things may not get checked off in the order you’ve listed them or much before when you think they need to be done. Some of them may never get checked off, yet you’ll still have a tremendous event. That’s a signal to continue refining the way you determine what’s really critical.

6. Do whatever you can ahead of time.

While it’s boring to sit around and wait when you’re ahead of schedule, it’s fantastic when you’re in event planning mode. You’ll be really glad you were later when time’s running out.

7. If someone critical to the event is prone to running late, do whatever you can to remove roadblocks which will slow the person down.

That may be getting them food so they don’t have to stop for it, or securing a meeting room so they can make phone calls and keep business going while at the event. Whatever it is, remove the obstacles that could make them unavailable when you need them.

8. Don’t empower five people to direct things.

Identify a clear decision maker who will make the decisions which need to be made – in real time. Have one person (either the same or a different person) who is the sole person to communicate changes to production people. This will make for greater clarity and a better event. It also demonstrates you’re thinking about #9.

9. Be nice to the production team.

This group will make or break you, so treat the team in a way which predisposes them to want to “make” you (and the event) successful. That doesn’t mean you don’t challenge things. It does mean, though, you say “please,” “thank you,” and other words of encouragement at every opportunity.

10. Stay calm, especially during pre-production.

When you’re working with pros, pre-production and rehearsal time is the opportunity to experiment, test, and be creative. While rehearsals and walk-throughs can look and feel like disasters, the final event almost never reflects the gaffes you see the day, morning, or even the hour before the event is live.

11. Always bring some pain relief medication to the event.

Somebody will need it, trust me.  – Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

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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How portable is your personal brand to another job? This question came up talking with a blog reader after a Brainzooming training presentation. We were discussing the possibilities of moving her personal brand to a new job, having worked at a large corporation for a decade and feeling topped-out in her career path. Despite very positive sentiment from internal clients, the company had gone through senior management changes that left her without a strong senior advocate for her contributions and career.

Discussing her career options, I tried to help weigh the potential upsides and challenges of moving to another company. She had a concern about leaving and uprooting her 10-year career and the very strong relationships she’d built up over time.

I reminded her that these relationships hadn’t been handed to her; she’d cultivated productive relationships through hard work and delivering results. Her skills would serve her well no matter where she might go.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned the nearly complete turnover among her internal clients within the past 18 months.

I asked if she realized what she had just said.

If her internal clients had all turned over in the last year and a half, that meant she had developed these incredibly strong relationships with a nearly new set of people. Instead of taking years to create such favorable perceptions, she was creating strong relationships within just a few months.

When viewed from that perspective, the potential relationship-focused downsides of moving on vanish. Suddenly, her personal brand looks incredibly portable to another organization.

And you know what?

She had a goal of securing a new job within a few months, and that’s exactly what she did.

How about your personal brand and the prospects of taking it someplace else? Is your personal brand a lot more portable than YOU give it credit for being? Maybe it’s time to start exploring your options.  – Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

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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Following-up the innovation and creativity training presentations I did yesterday at CreativeBloc 2011, here are 11 Brainzooming posts on enhancing your personal innovation perspective. These can personal innovation tune-ups come in handy when you need to work on making sure you’re not putting any of the NO’s into the inNOvation challenges you may be facing:

7 Lessons to Get Ready for Change Now – Set yourself up to be your most innovative with pre-planning.

Get on a Roll, Get Results – The value of pushing beyond typical constraints to build a string of improvements.

The Strategy for Exploiting Your Mindless Job – When you have untapped mental capacity in your job, take advantage of it to innovate in new areas.

Black and White Decision Making? Today, Change to Grey (and Vice Versa) – There are benefits to consciously changing your typical decision making style, even if temporarily.

Patience – Strategic Advantage or Disadvantage? – How patience will help you (and some ways it won’t) strategically.

2 Easy Strategies for Tackling Social Media – One App at a Time – With so many new applications flying at us weekly, here’s how to stay current without taking too much time.

Trendspotters’ Fab Five – Five vital perspectives to effectively identify trends suggesting potential innovation opportunities. This is a Blogging Innovation guest post.

Forgetting as an Innovation Strategy – Why letting go of your knowledge and experience can be vital to innovation efforts.

How Does Magic Happen? – Glitz is important to creativity and innovation, but hard work and determination are equally important.

When People Don’t Understand There Are Lots of Ways to Be Right – Finding ways to deal with a negative environment that’s hostile toward innovation.

3 Ways to Generate Innovative Business Ideas When You’re Very Experienced – Three ways to counteract the limitations experienced people can place on innovation efforts.  – Mike Brown

When it comes to conferences, high impact presentations, and live event social media content, The Brainzooming Group is expert at shaping the right strategy and implementation to create unique attendee experiences before, during, and after an event. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can do the same for your event!

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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Collaborative blogging isn’t how I started out writing the Brainzooming blog. It began as a creative outlet before leaving corporate life behind. Doing it was creative, but pretty solitary. Since then, I’ve written for several multi-author blogs, which are still pretty solitary experiences too. While there are multiple authors and fewer deadlines (since you don’t have to write as frequently yourself to maintain a steady flow of content) there hasn’t been any meaningful content coordination or planned interaction among authors. Contrast these multi-author blogs with writing collaborative blogs. They take the benefits of having multiple writers and add to it with planning, strategy, and editorial calendars to actively create and manage content.

The stark differences don’t end there. The two blogging approaches differ materially in at least seven ways.

The typical multi-author blog has:

• A vague sense of who the blog’s target audience is and what’s of interest to them.
• Only rough blogging guidelines governing the authors’ efforts.
• A mix-and-match approach to writing styles among the authors actively contributing.
• No editorial plan - so subject matter coordination happens by accident, if at all.
• Challenges in coordinating content submissions for timely publishing.
• Potentially uneven editing, with it being done individually, by an ad hoc editor, or not at all.
• A blogging platform intended for individual efforts being forced to fit with a multiple contributor environment, often with publishing responsibility heaped on one person.

Contrast this with a strategic, collaborative blog which features:

• A well-developed persona (or potentially multiple ones) to guide audience-based content creation.
• A team inside the organization is trained in blogging and contributes to the collaborative blogging effort’s strategic direction.
• Individual writing styles are arranged and balanced for a better reader experience.
• Subject matter coordinated to deliver a more strategic mix of content.
• A planned calendar with posts in reserve to ensure a consistent publishing schedule.
• A designated blog admin and review process ensure the content is strong, compelling, and well-written.
• A collaborative blogging application which facilitates reminders, content management, and multiple contributors actively participating.

Rather than simply writing and publishing stories, collaborative blogging can be a powerful, cultural unifier internally, and provide a way to share compelling stories with an external audience. It can be the primary engine in telling the rest of an organization’s stories – the stories which don’t fit in a brochure or a press release.

Look for more on collaborative blogging as we continue to develop and refine them for clients and move the Brainzooming blog in that direction too. –  Mike Brown

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 brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we’ve developed integrated social media strategy for other brands and can do the same for yours.

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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I frequently invite intriguing people I meet (online or offline) to write guest blog posts for Brainzooming. The first follow-up question is usually on what to blog about for the Brainzooming community. My somewhat general answer is, “Anything you want relating to strategy, creativity, and innovation.” While this broad description works for me in writing the blog, it’s clear from the number of people who never actually write a post that more direction could help prospective guest bloggers figure out what to blog about:

What You Could Blog about for Brainzooming

Here are 15 potential topics in answer to the, “What to blog about for Brainzooming?” question:

1.    How you express creativity in your career or areas of personal interest

2.    What you do for creative inspiration

3.    Your perspective on strategic moves within an industry or team

4.    How you’re employing innovation and innovative techniques in your business

5.    An innovation or strategy lesson you’ve learned in your career

6.    Reactions to a conference or presentation on strategy, creativity, or innovation-related topics

7.    Reactions to marketing-related events or developments

8.    Creative places or creative work environments you’ve experienced

9.    Ways you keep your innovation or creative perspective sharp

10.  A strategy example or innovation lesson from daily life

11.  Your reaction to an article already appearing in the Brainzooming blog

12.  Your reaction to a relevant article appearing elsewhere

13.  Reviewing a book on strategy, creativity, or innovation (let me know on this one, I may have a standing request from someone to get their book reviewed)

14.  Guidelines for how you approach being more strategic or innovative in your career

15.  An appropriately-targeted rant (keep the language clean!)

Remember - your post doesn’t have to be written. It could also be a video!

Some More Topics You Could Blog About

These subjects are also all really relevant for Brainzooming, but for a variety of reasons, they just haven’t been covered adequately:

• Search engine optimization strategy
• Creative, visual depictions of analytical data
• How business models are having to become more innovative based on social networking
• Profiles of cool, innovative people making an impact outside the spotlight
• Remarkable displays of creative expression
• Calling BS on the hype of social media (and social media rock stars)
• What will develop to replace the important roles publishers and editors have played in making sure information is reliable
• First-hand accounts of innovation and strategy lessons learned in businesses and organizations
• Counterpoints to things I’ve written

Meet Tom – The Brainzooming Blog Persona

We’ve talked before about the importance of a persona to focus creating blog content. To help guest bloggers, here’s a brief recap of the persona I’ve been using for Brainzooming. You can always think about “Tom” and what might be of benefit to him:

• Tom is 35, married, and has two children. He has an MBA in marketing from a well-known university. From his schooling, he has built a strong network domestically, and to some extent, internationally. Currently, Tom works as a corporate brand manager, although with the downsizing that’s taken place the past few years, he has had to assume broader and non-traditional responsibilities in his corporate role.
• While Tom has traveled extensively previously, he’s more geographically stable right now as his attention turns to raising his family. Tom is an interesting mix of traditional professional objectives and eclectic personal interests, including extreme sports, alternative music, sustainability, etc.
• Tom’s become active in producing social media content through his own business-oriented blog and Twitter. Tom’s audience is growing through demonstrating his expertise online. He’s making connections he hopes will pave the way for the next phase in his career. Since he’s ahead of where his company is on social media, it’s an area where his personal experience is being called upon to help shape the company’s thinking on the topic.

Please Share Your Perspective in a Brainzooming Guest Post!

This post is way too much to tell somebody in a tweet or when talking with them at Panera. I hope it’s helpful, however, in encouraging more of you to share what you know (or what you’d like to know) about strategy, creativity, and innovation with everybody else on Brainzooming! – Mike Brown

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 brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help your organization make a successful first step into social media.

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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