Blog Feed
Tracking Social Media: A Strategic View
Social media moves fast, and you are never done. This can make social media tracking, with any kind of metric dashboard or analytics tool particularly challenging. It can also put you into a reactive mode, where you spend more time tracking clicks than focusing on your overarching goals. Here are…
Read More
Productive Pinning with Pinterest®
Pinterest® is one of the newer and less well known social media “kids on the block,” but used wisely with the right audience, it can add a nice dimension to your marketing tool portfolio. The core metaphor driving Pinterest is the “bulletin board” – different users have different topic boards.…
Read More
Three Types of Leadership Creativity
There are many forms of creativity – some creative ideas are abstract ideas that come from seemingly nowhere; other creative ideas are incremental improvements or a new way to frame a problem or an existing process. Most leaders excel at one or two types of creativity – this is driven…
Read More
Choosing Creativity: A Problem-Solving Exercise
Some people are naturally creative. New ideas and innovative approaches come with ease, and they thrive on generating new possibilities or troubleshooting ideas. Of course, creative ideas are just that – ideas – and leveraging that creativity for problem-solving can be challenging. For others, creativity does not flow as easily,…
Read More
Creativity and Risk
Martin looked at his computer screen – he had been carefully drafting an email to his boss with a new idea, but was hesitant to push send. His boss, John, was known for being somewhat risk averse. New ideas were often rejected, with dismissive comments such as: We tried that…
Read More
Charting Better Time Management with a Pareto Analysis
To solve a problem, we must understand it. A lot of effective time and project management is understanding the root causes that lead to quality problems, or to increased time on a project. A Pareto Analysis is an approach for identifying, classifying and visualizing the causes driving a problem or…
Read More
Microlearning: An Overview
A brief video . . . a quick game . . . a job aid . . . Microlearning is a short lesson on one topic. Since these lessons take only 30 seconds to a few minutes each, they fit well in even the busiest staff members’ schedules. With some…
Read More
The ABC’s of an ABC Analysis
A lot of time and project management is making smart lists. Most people make “To Do” lists – long strings of activities with various levels of importance and urgency. Then, once complete, we get to check the activities off the list, often with a sense of closure and satisfaction. Organized…
Read More
The Pareto Principle: Maximizing Your Impact
Do you ever get to the end of the day, wonder where it went and struggle to name your successes or impact? Too often, the day seems to develop a momentum of its own, and by the end of 8 (or 9 or 10) hours, it’s hard to name the…
Read More
The Sounds of Safety: OSHA Headphone Use
Sound is a constant in workplace life, but noise doesn’t have to be. Given the dangers of excessive noise on worker health, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires organizations to “administer a continuing, effective hearing conservation program.” Through its rules and regulations, OSHA lays out a number of…
Read More