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An idea is only as valuable as its ability to be actioned. So why is it that creative ideation sessions often require participants to screen and rank ideas according to their relative attractiveness without also considering their relative feasibility?

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How Valuable is Your Great Idea?

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Project advocates who informally "pre-sell" their proposals with internal stakeholders prior to formal presentations can substantially enhance their success prospects. Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...

Pre-Sell Your Ideas with "The Meeting Before the Meeting"

Program managers typically prepare for big proposal presentations by gathering and organizing their facts, figures, charts and tables into a cohesive and persuasive whole. They anticipate likely questions and prepare to either pre-empt them or devise answers for them if they arise.

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Many dramatized mysteries include a "Eureka moment" where the protagonist achieves a moment of supreme clarity that enables him/her to solve a particularly perplexing puzzle. Does this happen in real life? Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...

Waiting For Your "Eureka" Moment?

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Many of us function as consultants, either as an internal corporate resource or as an external service provider. When one speak with prospective clients about their needs, we should ask them to describe success. It may be the single best question any consultant can pose to a customer. Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...

The Single Best Question

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Have you ever been discouraged to pursue your new idea because someone dismissed it as having already been tried? How true is their statement, really? Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...

Success, Failure and Nuance

Have you ever enthusiastically shared your big idea with a co-worker only for them to curtly dismiss it with, "We've tried that already"? If this has happened to you, I hope you won't simply drop your idea without first digging into the details and judging for yourself. In new product development, nuance can sometimes make all the difference between success or failure.

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Oxford Dictionary defines "secret sauce" as a special feature or technique kept secret by an organization and regarded as being the chief factor in its success. However, if success starts to fade, it becomes time to stir the sauce.

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Time To Stir Your Secret Sauce?

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These days, many companies regularly post their various technology needs on their websites, via intermediaries and in targeted e-mails. Why should anyone respond to these?

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Creative Credit: Lorenzo Quinn

How to Get Others to Care About What You Need

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Each of us can face constraints and limitations that can cause us to accept the sub-optimal. We should challenge ourselves to aim considerably higher. Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...

Ask "What If?",

Then Seize High Ground

The following is a true story that is occurring in real time. It reveals how, by asking "what if?" and acting deliberately to eliminate limitations and obstacles, we can seize (much) higher ground.

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Every Sunday morning, some of my friends and I go running together at one of our local Metro Parks. After our work out, we retire to our neighborhood Panera to eat breakfast and discuss matters of the day. This week, not including topics unable to be mentioned in this newsletter, we discussed Uber as an example of a disruptive business model. This conversation inspired me to think about the technology intermediary business and whether it too was ripe for reinvention. I concluded that it is.

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Corporate employees don't typically get directly exposed to the economics associated with introductions, referrals and matchmaking, but for folks like me, it's an integral part of the work that I do. It's not as if there's a rule book, nor are there universal standards. Still, I think many readers might be interested in learning some of the considerations associated with professional matchmaking.

Curious to learn more? Read on, dear friends...