Mike Brown founded The Brainzooming Group to make innovation and strategy better, faster, easier, and shockingly pleasant for organizations. One of the ways he does that is by speaking on topics around innovation, strategy, and creativity, such as:
- Strategies for cultivating and attracting creative business leaders
- Unexpected connections and polar opposites that energize creativity
- How to upgrade your brand strategy to attract your best customers
- Fine-tuning your customer experience for massive loyalty
Packed with insights for using real-world methods to become more successful immediately, Mike’s talks always inspire feedback like So cool!, Extremely beneficial, Very motivational, Gave me a new perspective, and Generated a lot of ideas, among other expressions of enthusiasm.
Mike has spoken for organizations like Sprint, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, H&R Block, Farmers Insurance, and the US government, as well as TEDx, Big Ideas in Higher Education, and Marketing World. His talks are tailored to the audience, and can incorporate a variety of Brainzooming activities as desired.
Mike Brown's Most Popular Topics
To see descriptions of Mike's speeches in strategy, innovation, branding, and creative leadership, click on any title below for a description. Interested in having Mike speak to your group? Get in touch here.
Strategy
Being the kind of strategic thinker who also delivers results requires being able to easily address what matters in business with insight and innovation. That sounds complicated, but it’s simple. And if you do it right, it’s fun. This session highlights an approach to cultivate stronger strategic thinking skills that produce successful plans and results – in a fun, engaging way – by:
- Broadly focusing on what’s important to the brand
- Sharing simple strategic thinking tools to create many more new ideas
- Prioritizing efforts to increase success rates
Executives say they love to spend time on business strategy. But often there’s a huge disconnect between what strategy should be, and what it is. That’s when organizations end up creating financial forecasts at odds with the ideas and activities needed to bring great ideas to reality. Learn how strategy can deliver a more tangible impact within an organization to effectively influence and guide business success. Specific take-aways include:
- Determining how ready your organization is to embrace broad strategic thinking
- Using new planning approaches so more employees actively bring new ideas to strategy discussions
- Taking the first steps toward creating strategic impact
Innovation
Whenever an organization is open for business, its employees are doing their jobs and observing activities from perspectives management never sees. Their daily experiences trigger ideas for creating and improving products, fixing broken processes, and delighting customers in remarkably new ways. This session will explore common barriers preventing employees from cultivating and sharing ideas. We’ll address how organizations can foster environments where people are comfortable sharing ideas to create better processes, greater market opportunities, delighted customers, and growth. Specific topics include:
- Ideas for creating an open, inviting framework for innovation
- Approaches to invite and support employees in sharing ideas
- Ways to stimulate new thinking that creates strategic impact
It’s one thing to say your brand is going to look outside for disruptive innovation models. It’s another to do it. Customers often can’t predict future needs or purchase behaviors. And if your brand is one-upping traditional competitors, it’s vulnerable to unanticipated, disruptive players. One answer is a strategic, multi-dimensional, outside-in look for disruptive innovation ideas. This interactive workshop covers numerous strategic thinking exercises to design and implement an effective strategic innovation scan in your organization. Specific take-aways include exercises to:
- Uncover non-traditional innovation opportunities and threats with a benefits-based brand view
- Identify multiple paths to target relevant brands as innovation idea sources
- Adapt ideas from other industries and markets to address your markets’ needs
Branding
It’s easy to take the attitude that your brand is just your logo and tagline. Easy, and wrong! Tuning your brand lets you maximize your brand’s performance to shape your company’s direction, get your employees on the same page, and reach the right customers. In this keynote, you’ll gain actionable tools to tune your brand, including:
- Enhancing your brand’s big statements
- Clarify brand benefits with one question
- Finding the competitive spot no competitor can match
Sharing an organization’s stories through social media can pose a major time investment to create content and build audience interest. The biggest challenge for many organizations is starting and sustaining a social media effort with regular content that is meaningful and compelling to important audiences. The good news is that there are straightforward principles and tactics to make the effort more manageable and yet keep your audiences engaged. Key take-aways will include:
- Efficiently creating and organizing content ideas into a manageable schedule
- Empowering and preparing your audiences to participate in creating content
- Managing a regular schedule of content updates and audience interaction
Do you know leaders that are both personally creative and easily cultivate dynamic ideas in those around them? These idea magnets and their creative practices fuel leadership success, attract engaged team members, and create high-impact innovation. Attracting and cultivating vibrant creative thinking within work teams is a vital leadership skill. This presentation shares techniques to enhance personal and team creative leadership skills, no matter the industry. Specific take-aways include:
- Techniques to strengthen leadership impact with a creatively diverse team
- Methods to identify unique connections in people and ideas to maximize creative thinking
- Processes to translate creative thinking into change, progress, and results
For an established brand, it’s challenging to generate self-disruptive ideas. When a brand has invested heavily in its current business model, reworking its future in radical new ways is scary. Companies emerging with disruptive mindsets, however, approach the market without comparable hesitancies. How to do that? Identify a way to re-imagine what you do, the value you provide, and how you go to market as if you were starting from scratch, without pre-conceived notions. This talk will:
- Challenge the deceptive comfort in conventional thinking
- Survey some popular disruptive business models
- Deconstruct case studies of major disruptive brands to extract frameworks your brand can employ to imagine its own disruptive future
See Mike in action:
