We’ve been quiet for a while, and here’s why.

Thinking About Feeling I recently learned something about affect from a counselor I met at a networking event.  Just to be clear, we were using the word “affect” to describe the signs of feeling in a person’s face (or body) rather than about the feeling itself. The counselor (let’s call her Jane) told me that a human [...]

There’s a really fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Mary Hodder, someone who’s been working in ‘live search’ - what we now call the real-time web - for some time. The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great [...]

Why Should Businesses Pay Attention to Social Media? I was at a workshop today held by Women Unlimited. It was for beginners at social media, and I wanted to see what business people tend to know. Then I can know better how to help them. A seasoned marketing professional piped up that she’d never get [...]

How can you increase your business IQ by getting to the heart of daily financial matters? Emotional Reactions and Business Decisions Business etiquette does not favor evidence of feeling. It’s as though emotional reactions signify a lack of control — and therefore cloud our ability to identify, consider, or present the truth. Those who seem inflamed with [...]

Back to the “C” Word I recently interviewed Emma Gilding, an anthropologist and brand guru based in NY. Emma’s current group, Insite, at Omnicom, sees brand as more than just another sales tool. Instead, the focus is on the ways in which brand encourages citizenship. Or doesn’t. “Citizens opt into a brand’s rules and regulations because they get [...]

I’ve seen a bit of discussion about funding models recently, and have been playing around with an interesting experiment in crowdsourcing products called quirky. For creative or product-focused businesses, it seems crowdfunding is really taking off as a concept, though I’ve yet to hear much in the way of actual success stories. The idea’s fairly simple: [...]

I talked to business leaders across contexts for over three years about how they could identify a talented learner.  This sample included prominent educators, psychologists, small business owners, parents, and corporate giants.  The results I published in the last post. So if international leaders — from primary school teachers to CEOs — want to develop the [...]

…entrepreneurs find any excuse to work outdoors instead of indoors. If only a laptop existed that wasn’t entirely unusable in a bit of sun, with an infinite battery, and with the ability to pick up WiFi signals from the middle of the Meadows. Fortunately, I’ve been doing a lot of planning lately, and planning is something [...]

Every child is an artist. The Problem is how to remain an artist once (s)he grows up. –Pablo Picasso Continuing from the last few posts: What about the relationship between observation and analysis — the space between sight and insight — demands attention for successful business practice? Executives are not the only ones who are challenged [...]