Monday night, Social Media Club of Kansas City buddy Sarah Wood suggested she’d like to read a blog post about staying focused while working from home during a blizzard. Based on Sarah’s suggestion, I wrote the post and it set near-term records for the percent of Brainzooming blog visits garnered by a new post on the day it published. A variation on the topic led to Wednesday’s post, making it a two-from-one idea!
Last night, while exploring a blog topic for today (it’s been that kind of week), I tweeted Sarah for an idea. She had another great one: the Top 5 Brainzooming posts to read for new readers (or even long-term ones) of the Brainzooming blog.
With around 1,400 published posts on the Brainzooming site, Sarah’s top five post idea for new readers is fantastic to provide a quick guide to our thinking on strategy, creativity, and innovation.
It didn’t take long to generate this short list of Brainzooming posts targeted at new readers. The underlying theme for selecting each of them is to provide new readers insight into the underlying strategic thinking and perspectives running through nearly all other Brainzooming blog posts.
This post, among the blog’s longest, compiles the first five blog posts written for the initial Brainzooming site. The original working theme for the blog was “157 Ways to Be a Better Strategic Thinker.” With that theme in the background, this strategic thinking manifesto laid out the case for why everyone in an organization needs to be a strategic thinker along with ways to put this aspirational idea into action.
From a personal branding and performance standpoint, I try to take these seven principles to heart in my career. I’m hard-pressed to say how long it took to assemble the list, but they weren’t all things I knew or even believed when staring my career. While I don’t do all of them well, it’s a good representation of the scorecard by which I judge my career progress.
Some readers say I don’t put enough of myself into the Brainzooming blog. That’s definitely true visually. It’s partially true in terms of written content, too. I don’t view the Brainzooming blog as a personal journal. It’s more of a teaching resource featuring information I’ve shared with co-workers over the years who wanted to learn more and set themselves apart. This post, prompted by a question during a presentation, gives perhaps the deepest insight into who you’re dealing with if you decide to become a regular Brainzooming blog reader.
These ideas for being creative when being creative is hard represents our attitude toward creativity: with the right combination of structure, tools, and perspectives, everyone is creative. We don’t see creativity as something precious, elusive, and dependent upon mysterious inspiration. We view creative thinking skills as just that – skills everyone can and should develop for both personal and professional benefit. Bonus: At the bottom of this post, we invite you to download our eBook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to learn the perspectives that cultivate creative thinking skills and an innovative approach to your life.
People have also said it’s not completely clear from the blog exactly what The Brainzooming Group does. There are various reasons for that – some are intentional and others stem from the challenge of briefly describing what we do. Our experience suggests the easiest way for people to fully understand what we do is through seeing it in action. That’s where the excitement, speed, and solid results from compelling strategic thinking really hit home. We’ve just made an investment in an online collaborative platform which will allow us to extend the Brainzooming experience to more readers, but more on that later. This post does the best job so far, in getting what we do and the benefits we deliver down in writing.
If you decide to check out these posts, thank you for your time to peruse them. If you happen to be a longer-term Brainzooming reader, are there other Brainzooming posts you’d suggest should be on the list? - Mike Brown
Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.
