While being on a team of similar people is comfortable in a predictably easy-going way, without diverse skill sets, work styles and opinions, it’s impossible to execute well-balanced projects. Innovation requires a bit of conflict, a bit of back and forth. In other words: if business collaboration doesn’t make you at least slightly uncomfortable, chances are you’re missing out on its value.

It’s like Baratunde Thurston, founder of Cultivated Wit, told us early last year: “Collaboration is a different way of thinking about what you’re good at vs. what you’re not good at, and how you find those other parts to co-create the world. I mean, it’s easy to say, ‘You should collaborate!’ but it’s very hard to actually do it–to identify the talent and the resources; to create incentives for them to want to work with you; to reward everybody in a reasonably equitable way; to measure the success of the group effort, and to repeat it. All of those are hard, but that’s the process.”

Correct Collaboration

From the hard truth angle, it’s easy to understand why uptake in the workplace hasn’t always been immediate or successful. Managers of collaborative efforts are frequently faced with sorting out conflicts among colleagues while simultaneously maintaining office morale.

But “that’s O.K.” writes Sharon Nunes, vice president of Smarter Cities Strategy & Solutions at IBM. ”Sometimes the best solution to a problem emerges when opinions are challenged and colleagues need to negotiate with one another to reach consensus.”

She goes on to outline a few tips for getting the most out of your network, including:

1. Surround yourself with different people. 

Many of us are guilty of choosing to work with people who think as we do, but a homogenous clique will fail to challenge itself. And so while a culture fit is still important, Nunes says “it’s a better approach to break out of your comfort zone and embrace a cacophony of styles and opinions to achieve more innovative—and sometimes breakthrough—results.”

2. Collaborate actively.

You can’t be a part of a team if you’re just going to sit on the sidelines; you’ve got to get in and stir the pot a bit. And while it’s not really in our nature to enjoy being challenged by others, such activity often leads to the constructive dialogue needed to create lasting and meaningful results.

Nunes offers a personal example: “…when I led a new health-care business at my company, I was surrounded by a crazy quilt of opinions, genders, ages, and schools of thought. We were all polar opposites and strongly opinionated, and styles ranged from those of a ‘show me’ marketing exec to a pragmatic mathematician. It was a living lab of personality types, and I had to force myself outside the comfort zone of my logical science background to influence my team members, when to speak up or push back, and to use our time together more for working and less for sparring.”

3. Winning isn’t everything. 

Nunes acknowledges that this one might seem counterintuitive, but insists that compromise has a place in business. “You can set the expectation that a debate or disagreement will result in a common understanding, rather than creating a winner and a loser. That’s especially important in today’s global marketplace, especially with a diversity of cultures, where it is essential to understand the point of view of others.”

All New Heights

With a little bit of adjusting, collaborative efforts have the potential to kick out some really awesome things–things that couldn’t have come about without the combination of an assortment of components. Done right, collaboration enables us to go places we couldn’t go alone.

A TED blog post titled “Unlikely Collaborations: 5 Ted Talks that Reach Across Fields” recently offered some fun examples: mathematics + history, music + medicine, dance + PowerPoint, politics + paint and a favorite around these parts, agile programming + family life.

The post Business Collaboration Requires Getting UNcomfortable appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

“No matter how many shiny tools we have, we can’t get things done without other people.” So says Harbrinder Kang, Senior Director of Corporate Affairs at Cisco. It’s an excellent point; collaboration is defined by personal interaction, and despite technology’s ever-expanding advances, nothing can fully replace or perfectly replicate in-person conversations. But is face-to-face collaboration more effective? What would that mean for the remote workforce?

Human Behavior: Not Afraid of a Little Technology

In a recent study by Cisco on human behavior and effective collaboration barriers, it was proven “without question” that “collaboration is grounded in human interaction and relationships.” Not to denounce the data, but that’s not news; even the dictionary definition phrases it “the act of working with another or others.” Researchers drilled down the results and came up with what they call the four key ingredients of successful collaboration, all of which rely on human behavior:

• Build relationships and networks that lead to trust
• Turn human interactions into results
• Balance decision-making and consensus building
• Evolve the culture for productive collaboration

I’d say these are less ‘ingredients’ and more ‘objectives’, but the point is the result: innovation. And while collaborating may be slightly different when the platform is virtual — digital collaboration is subject to internet hiccups, and the ability to identify full visual or physical expressions is weakened — the fundamentals of human behavior, and the ways we connect with others, don’t evaporate. If anything, today’s in-person meetings are less productive than they’ve ever been. No one has time. Meetings kill multitasking (a controversial act in itself). They’re littered with collaboration barriers like gadgets and laptops, and even trying to fix that by restricting access to technology during the meeting makes for some very distracted attendees.

Despite the catch-22 — collaborate in-person and risk a wandering focus, or collaborate virtually and miss out on the full impact of human communication — there are some hard statistics proving that mostly-virtual employees are actually more engaged and committed than their cube-dwelling counterparts. That’s an important distinction to acknowledge for today’s remote workforce, a legion of over 3.1 million people, and one that’s reflected in the way all of us work.

It’s About Going Global

To those of us that rely heavily on technology and who consider it integral to our work, the idea that in-person collaboration is more effective, or that it leads to smarter innovation, is highly debatable. The line between the virtual and physical world is blurred. We collaborate because we’re trying to achieve something greater, something that isn’t doable by a single person or organization. We collaborate to be time and cost-effective, or to unearth fresh perspectives, more resources, and new markets. Willfully narrowing the pool of talent and access to restore intimacy seems counterproductive.

The exceptional benefits of global collaboration in business — something that wouldn’t even be possible without virtual communication — are evidence enough to show that the goal of working together should be only ever be about bringing the best ideas to market, answering customer needs, and driving innovation.

Consider examples like Ekso Bionics, a developer and manufacturer of bionic exoskeletons that allows people who’ve lost their ability to walk the chance to do so once again. Since their inception in 2005, they’ve built partnerships with universities, the Department of Defense and the Lockheed Martin Corporation, not to mention mechanical engineers and doctors. Or Water for People, a non-profit organization that seeks to improve clean water and sanitation access in developing countries, and whose mission would literally be impossible without virtual collaboration.

If innovation is suffering at the hands of modern collaboration, it’s not the tools — it’s the team. Identify goals, unite the right people, encourage unexpected interactions, and give people the tools and motivation to work effectively. Human interaction isn’t something that should be stifled by a screen.

The post Collaboration and Personal Interaction: Virtual vs. Veracity appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Welcome to Conspire’s Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.

Mindfulness and Living a Busy Life

“The to-do list is necessary part of brain hygiene,” writes Drake Baer. “And like showers and shaving, if you don’t make them part of an everyday ritual, things can get a little gnarly.”

Susan Sontag echoes these sentiments with a more serious twist:

“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make lists. The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or mypotential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.”

And the examples go on. Lists? They’re great, great, great. We know this. But what happens when they take over your life? What happens when you can’t wake up and greet the day without a few moments of non-list-y thoughts?

This article from Stephen Little explains how creating lists and maintaining a certain level of mindfulness is a winning combination, as well as what to do with all the anxiety you’ll likely encounter along the way.

“Mindfulness invites us, moment by moment, day after day, to come into a new relationship with our anxiety at its most tangible point – the body. You can’t get more real than that. If you happen to have a tendency to be very intellectual or to live in a virtual world, the anxiety held in the body is a very good place to start. In my own efforts to live wholeheartedly, “The List” and its underlying unease have become my close companions.”

Source: The school of life

The Programmable World

The Internet of Things is approaching, but most of us don’t really consider how quickly. In this article, Bill Wasik explains how for some of us, it’s already here.

“This is the language of the future: tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities. Coffeepots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material. A decade after Wi-Fi put all our computers on a wireless network—and half a decade after the smartphone revolution put a series of pocket-size devices on that network—we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before.”

Source: Wired

Writers Go Dark

If you like good TV but haven’t yet started watching Breaking Bad, I suggest you get on that train. Vince Gilligan has managed to create a show with some of the most amazing character arcs I’ve ever seen on screen, and at five seasons in I’m still very clear on what’s actually happening with the plot (take notes, LOST).

When asked why television is so much better than it’s been in the past, Gilligan talked about how much freedom writers have — storytelling can go just about anywhere now. But the consequences of that freedom could lead us right back to where we were before:

“The difference now is that writers are allowed to get away with more. We’re allowed to go darker. Thank God we don’t have what they had in the fifties, which was a sponsor reading all the scripts and saying, ‘I don’t think this character should be black.’ But we could very easily have that situation again, because TV commercials get skipped over on TiVo. Ad agencies could once again take over sponsorship of individual series, and suddenly writers will be answering to them all over again.”

Source: Vulture

The post Fun Friday Links: Mindful List Making, the Dark Side of Dark Storytelling + the Programmable World appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Ask any C-level manager what their top three business priorities are, and there’s little doubt you’ll hear something like: increasing enterprise growth, delivering results, and reducing costs. It’s that third prerogative that echoes the loudest throughout most organizations, and with an impact that spans from initiatives to output. But with most companies driving teamwork like never before, we’re uncovering brand new opportunities to stabilize finances and boost productivity. Here are 5 ways collaboration saves time and money.

1. Shared Vision, More Resources

More people involved in a project means more talent, untapped ideas, hours, and often, more budget. When a greater number of stakeholders is tasked with shaping initiatives, innovation happens. The network of available resources grows, and collaboration sprouts up naturally.

Caution: more people also means more egos, so don’t forget to clearly define individual needs and priorities.

2. (More) Mistakes to Learn From

Collaborating allows people to bring their experiences — and along with it, their failures — to the table, and gives the rest of the team a chance avoid certain blunders and bad decisions without having to be burned by them first.

Caution: failure is not something we like to be afraid of in agile business, so don’t spend so much time trying to skirt it that you forget the value of taking risks.

3. All Your Budgets Are Belong to Us

When more departments and businesses partner up and pool their finances, minimizing expenses becomes a little less difficult. Like having roommates to share the electric bill, only minus the thermostat wars.

Caution: never assume that a budget is up for grabs just because the person or team controlling it is involved in your project. That money could be promised elsewhere.

4. Welcome to My Thought Bubble

Brainstorming is an indigenous by-product of collaboration, and within the right team, can evoke new, unique ideas and drive productivity. A shared mental load can be a welcome and innovative relief for folks tasked with creative initiatives.

Caution: some people aren’t great at playing well with others, and it’s important to remember that brainstorming can be an individual activity, too. But it shouldn’t be forced — it should be inspired.

5. The Bigger Bandwidth Backup

It’s empowering and even freeing to have individual ownership on a project, but there’s a scary downside — if you have to reprioritize projects, leave the company, or are otherwise unable to keep working on something, everything comes to a screeching halt, and it doesn’t matter who or what was depending on those deliverables. Collaboration provides a safety net that allows projects and initiatives to continue moving forward even when one aspect gets put on hold.

Caution: to capitalize on this collaboration benefit, transparency and communication are key, so make sure all parties are aware of needs, changes, and roadblocks as they’re discovered.

Collaboration has a lot of relatively self-evident benefits, but sometimes it’s the way we collaborate that makes a difference. A recent survey noted that over half of the respondents credited cloud computing with reducing “the need for their IT team to maintain infrastructure, giving them more time to focus on strategy and innovation.” It also found that “88 percent of cloud users pointed to cost savings and 56 percent of respondents agreed that cloud services have helped them boost profits.”

Here at Mindjet, we believe that working together is the best way to drive innovation and growth, and we get a kick out of helping companies do it better.

Want to learn more? Try Mindjet free today.

The post 5 Ways Collaboration Saves Time and Money appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

There’s something about collaboration that makes people nervous. Sharing ideas and responsibilities opens businesses up to vulnerability and potential security issues, and the BYOD surge means the majority of partnerships are utterly dependent on mobility. But as the industry grows up and moves towards open collaboration practices, this kind of transparency is vital. Can certification provide the insurance necessary to drive mobile collaboration?

It’s Happening Anyway, This Will Just Make it Safer

First things first: what does certification mean in this case? Recently, Lifehacker reported that Good For Enterprise from Good Technologies became “the first non-BlackBerry mobile collaboration and device management software to be certified by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) for use in Australian government environments that require high levels of data security.” So basically, we’re talking about gadgets and their operating systems getting a stamp of approval from the government — or a highly trusted organization — ensuring that they’re not all that hack-able.

The thing is, not many people are willing to wait for that green light. According to a survey from earlier this year, 36% of employees who embrace using personal devices for work said they would try to skirt IT policies that forbade them from doing so, and the numbers are surely climbing. However, if device certification becomes a widespread initiative for concerned companies, employees can comfortably — rather than covertly — make the switch, advancing the mobile collaboration culture without putting company data or partnerships at risk.

Mobile Strategy Has Stepped Away from the Edge

Up until pretty recently, mobile business carried this stigma of being an afterthought. Companies knew they needed to consider it, but building it into the fundamental, core structure of marketing strategies wasn’t a priority. But according to KCPB partner Mary Meeker’s 2012 Internet Trends presentation, there are now 1.1 billion mobile 3G subscribers worldwide, representing a 37% annual growth rate. CNET’s Don Reisinger, who covered the report, noted that “mobile products now account for 10 percent of all Internet traffic,” as compared to the 1% mobile attribution of December 2009. Additionally, one of the most cited stats from Meeker’s report shows that in 2014, use of mobile devices will surpass desktop and laptop use for both personal and work-related online activities.

Of course, all of that increased use naturally leads to increased security risks. Juniper Research reported that “less than 1 in 20 smartphones and tablets have third-party security software installed.” They also estimated that by 2016, mobile users will invest a collective $3.6 billion in securing mobile gadgets, 69% of which will be made by corporations trying to protect corporate data. That makes the idea of global device certification pretty attractive, both strategically and financially.

The digital world is an impatient one. Right now, businesses are laser-focused on successfully deploying mobile strategies, and part of that is dependent on securing devices and data. Global certification policies might take time to develop and implement, but will encourage mobile collaboration by placing a premium on data insurance.

The post How Certification Will Drive Mobile Collaboration appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

After compiling decades of research, MIT Professor Tom Allen found that, despite the seemingly booming popularity of business collaboration platforms, people are not likely to collaborate very often if they are more than 50 feet apart.

Kind of a bummer, considering the number of people who work remotely these days. But Allen’s number might not matter so much in 2013, as other findings suggest we’re on the brink of huge social change (as usual). The following infographic from Clinked.com, a UK-based business collaboration startup, states that 75% of businesses say online collaboration tools will be “important” or “somewhat important” to their business this year.

Further, trends like ‘leave your staff at home day’ and the number of hours per week we spend on writing e-mails (McKinsey says 28) push the use of collaboration tools up the ladder, even in the face of decreasing proximity.

“We used to spend half our time educating clients about the benefits of social collaboration,” noted Clinked’s founder, Tayfun Bilsel. “These days, businesses are approaching us with clearly defined strategies for reducing overheads and connecting remote working teams. The market has grown up.”

We Can’t Help Ourselves

If you’re wondering what makes 2013 different, you’re certainly not alone. After all, business collaboration tools have long been touting their change agent-y potential with relatively little uptake. And the truth is that the drivers today aren’t all that different from those in the past–but now they’re coming to a head.

For starters, Facebook is still popular, but now we’re dealing with a billion+ users rather than millions. In other words, more and more people are becoming accustomed to using features that are common in enterprise tools–news feeds, activity streams, etc.  Next, the ongoing recession is still forcing businesses to do more with less. That order has been a tall and complicated one for established companies, but the onslaught of smaller players entering the ring have been built around that mentality. For them, this approach often means nixing office plans and relying completely on the cloud.

Finally, the tools themselves have simply gotten way better.In addition to simplified interfaces, many of today’s collaboration platforms play nice, integrating seamlessly into preexisting systems such as SharePoint. Popular calendars like Google and Outlook often sync, mobile versions are usually offered, and in most cases both document storage and security have received major boosts.

WE ARE WORKING FROM HOME. END OF STORY.

Let’s also not forget the WFH trend, which requires these tools. I could get on my own soapbox and stay there for days talking about this subject, but I’ve probably done that enough already. So instead: ”To be honest with you, I don’t agree with it very much,” says IBM’s Luis Suarez of Allen’s research. “I am based in the Canary Islands. My boss and my team there are all in the States, and that’s more than 50 meters apart from each other, and we do collaborate every single day.”

Suarez goes on to explain that while virtual collaboration can’t replace the invaluable benefits of face-to-face time, many people are beginning to understand its own unique power and place in the business world.

“Nowadays with the emergence of all of these social software tools like blogs, wikis, activity streams, as well with social bookmarks and tagging and podcasting. That whole range of collaboration is richer than ever, so people have got an opportunity now to decide and negotiate how they’re going to collaborate. And do it virtually.”

Lingering Challenges

Of course, nothing is without its growing pains. David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, specifically notes the struggle with team goals and innovation — sometimes, collaboration platforms don’t serve either of these endgames. But at least we’re learning that that doesn’t mean they’re any less valuable as a whole.

Like going mobile, using collaboration platforms is much more about behavior change than it is the tool. Our insatiable appetite for connection and sharing has always been a thing; we’ve always craved the ability to be heard and to be relevant. The difference today is that we’re actually capable of feeding those needs on a near constant basis. And so we will, no matter the struggle and no matter the distance between ourselves and our colleagues.

The post Business Collaboration Finally Grows Up in 2013 appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Internal business strategies, collaboration techniques, and innovative approaches typically fall under the umbrella of all-things-confidential — after all, that’s why they’re internal. But the internet has made the quick and widespread dissemination of information accessible to pretty much anyone, and since it’s not so easy to plug up digital leakage, today’s companies have to learn to take advantage of how collaboration and open innovation can help build businesses and industries.

B2B Collaboration and Multi-Channel Consumers

Business-to-business collaboration used to be a strategic choice, and one only very carefully executed by companies with several layers of backup and protection in place. That’s not the case anymore; increased operational complexity and marketplace demands are shoving organizations together out of necessity, and resistance to these types of partnerships can be costly.

According to research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, 83% of industry leaders (defined as companies with a gross margin of 27.9%) have B2B collaboration initiatives in place, over half of which have been implemented in the past two years. A big part of this migration is being caused by the rising need to respond to multi-channel customers, who demand fluidity across different customer support mediums, whether they’re online or not, 3rd party or direct. Companies have the opportunity to reduce costs and protect resources by knocking down the blockades that typically exist between them and their channel partners, manufacturers, and the like. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as identifying a liaison or trying to collapsing responsibilities — it requires streamlined communication, trust, and transparency.

Open Innovation

Unlike open source practices, which “promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge,” open innovation addresses the much larger issue of disruptive changes in the global marketplace. The approach surrounds the idea that internal research and development just doesn’t cut it anymore, and being tight-fisted with ideas is beyond difficult — it’s detrimental.

Says Andrew Gaule, an open innovation expert and director of the H-I Group, “If you sit on an idea, you’re likely to have it stolen, duplicated or rendered obsolete long before you develop the competences and capabilities needed to unlock its true value.” Because open innovation is a collaborative practice, understanding the fundamentals of high-level partnerships — things like clear communication, authenticity, asking questions, embracing failures, and focusing on outcomes — is imperative. Determining the unique value, individual investment, and financial implications of each organization’s participation is also key to successful and beneficial B2B partnerships, and should make their way into risk assessments early on.

The End Game: Better Businesses, Improved Industries

Moving from company-level team collaboration to industry-grade, business-to-business sharing can seem like a quantum leap for organizations unprepared to disclose strategic plans. But it’s important to remember that, in the larger industry ecosystem, success often relies on balance and interdependence among partners and potential partners within the larger system. Businesses that connect have access to a much wider range of resources, ideas, talent, and even budgets. Collaborative research allows internal efforts to refocus on things like product development; experimentation and A/B testing stops being so risky and expensive. Companies can practice innovation in the same way that they preach it, and organizational culture will reflect that.

Collaboration contributes to better business, and better businesses effect positive changes that will echo throughout any industry, promoting growth, customer satisfaction and retention, and smarter innovation.

In other words, there’s power and profit to be found in synergy that simply can’t be unleashed behind closed doors.

The post How Collaboration and Open Innovation Builds Businesses and Industries appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

“Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.”

I have heard this quotation attributed to Peter Drucker, a.k.a. “the father of business consulting”  (talk about a guy with some dubious children), as well as  Czech novelist Milan Kundera.

Citations for Drucker usually extend the quotation, adding, “All the rest are costs.”

Kundera. Drucker. Novelist. Consultant. Marketing. Innovation.

The Circular Interplay

There’s a wonderful, circular nature to the relationship between marketing and innovation.

First, I should say I do believe everything other than innovation and marketing in business is a cost—a necessary cost, usually. But the only thing that produces business profit is innovation and the discovery of a market need for that innovation—or, conversely, the discovery of a market need and the creation of an innovation to meet it.

Accounting, human resources, customer service, operations—all of these thing are imperative, but not the reason we are in business. We are in business to figure out how something works (innovation) and to figure out who would find it useful (marketing) and then provide it at a profit. Marketing and innovation are intricately linked in that endeavor, and the interplay between the two is like the yin and yang of the business world, the result of which is the determination of price.

One creates the other, and the more they feed off each other, the better their net contribution to the business grows and the more profitable the price, where:

Gross Revenues – Costs = Net Marketing & Innovation Contribution to Revenue

Anything that lowers costs—from cost of goods sold to financing costs to labor costs—increases net marketing & innovation contribution to the business. Anything that increases revenue—either number of units sold or price per unit or both—increases net marketing & innovation contribution, as well.

In all cases, it is the interplay between marketing and innovation—innovation and marketing—that creates a situation where customers are willing to pay above cost for a good or service.

(Of course, there are other ways to make a profit by monopoly or oligopoly, legislation, and price manipulation. These are not the kinds of business practices I’m talking about, because, however pervasive, they are outside the scope of what agile marketing and true competition are all about.)

Did Marketing Emerge From Innovation or Vice Versa?

In his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, Terrence Deacon, neuroscientist and chair of UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department, discusses in great detail the integral connection between presence and absence in our world, how each caused the other to be. He explains the interplay between materialism and consciousness, between the present and the emergent, has created all the world we see around us and within us.

However complex the book’s science and philosophy, it was Deacon’s simple description of the first organic replicators that struck me as a direct conceptual parallel to the connection between marketing and innovation—and indeed the connection between many things in life.

A Creates B Which Creates A

When Deacon discusses the misconceptions surrounding DNA and RNA replicators, he writes,

“Although it is generally believed that polynucleotide chains like DNA and RNA molecules constitute life’s replicators…they do not replicate themselves. To be more explicit: polynucleotide A cannot directly produce another exact duplicate of polynucleotide A. Instead…polynucleotide molecule A can produce a complementary polynucleotide molecule B, which in turn under the same conditions can produce polynucleotide molecule A.”

The reason this is the arrangement we see today is that, in replicators where A made itself in exact duplicate, the instability of the system doomed it to fail. That is, anytime A made a bad duplicate of A, the system would break down and not survive.

However, when A makes B which in turn makes A again, the stability of the system is exponentially more robust, because a mutation in B doesn’t necessarily doom the cycle to failure if the small change in B doesn’t destroy its original ability to make A. In fact, it makes adaptation possible.

I find this idea to be a profoundly useful for agile marketing:

Stability and adaptation come not from self-duplication, but from the interplay of complementary opposites. 

This idea is in many ways apparent and intuitive. Think: positive/negative, up/down, light/dark, form/entropy, male/female—one doesn’t exist without the other, and strength is the result of the complementary nature of the relationship, not the imposition of sameness or domination of one by the other.

Our problems in business between innovation and marketing occur when this need for opposites gets thrown out the window in favor of one steamrolling the other.

“Marketing Is Too Important to be Left to the Marketing People.”

That’s what David Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame once said. I think the humor of Packard’s statement shouldn’t be overlooked, but I find within it a glance at the innovator’s outright dismissal of marketing’s role. And I think he’s referring to traditional Mad Men-style, sell-the-sizzle advertising and marketing, a dismissal which may be deserved.

But with agile marketing—small iterations through test and measurement, responsive work in tandem with product development, trying anything once but not failing at it twice—marketing has moved more into the world of scientific approach and hypothesis testing, the world engineers and innovators know and respect.

In a complementary-opposite response, innovators must now move more toward understanding what marketing is and what the market says and does. That is, innovators have to let markets guide their innovation, rather than making something and trying to foist it upon the market. When innovators make things that markets do not want—or when they don’t listen and adapt to changing market sentiments—marketing has to get too reactionary and “sales-y” to try to sell products people don’t want.

When marketing gets too sales-y, the complementary-opposite relationship with innovation loses it’s strength and balance and falls apart.

Sales Is Not Marketing. Sales is the Cost of Bad Marketing.

To use another quotation from Drucker, “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”

I absolutely believe the more hard selling a business must do indicates how poorly it has studied the market and how poorly it has created products to match the market. Selling—like other functions of business outside marketing and innovation—is a cost, a necessary cost, perhaps, but one like all costs to be minimized.

Innovation creates agile marketing, which creates innovation, which creates agile marketing, which creates innovation, which creates agile marketing, ad infinitum.

• Doesn’t the need for too much selling indicate a breakdown in the relationship between innovation and marketing?
• Doesn’t the iterative and complementary activity between marketing and innovation require that one department not usurp the other?

I think it does.

And the profound concept of A makes B makes A bears this out in a bigger way. When marketing goes agile, its reaching out to the innovators for stability. Innovators have to reach out to marketing, as well, without turning marketing into something unstable and subservient, where A makes A.

The post Agile Marketing Series: The Complementary Opposite Nature of Marketing and Innovation appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

In today’s world of PM, it’s not just project managers who get to have all the fun. Workers of all types are  finding themselves in and out of the driver’s seat as projects shift and change, so to help them along the way, we put together a quick reference guide of some of the best secrets for managing projects, communicating effectively, and keeping teams on track.

Inside the guilde you’ll find: 

• 25 ways to keep deadlines and deliverables on track
• 25 ways to reduce internal friction and help teams work their best
• 25 ways to keep your projects on time and under budget

Check out a preview in embedded SlideShare below, and head on over here to download the complete file.

The post 25 Secrets of Successful Project Managers appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

A lot of different terms get thrown around in business. The tech world loves acronyms and lingo, and as a group we tend to use them to gauge the validity of messages in the marketplace. If the big guys are talking about project management, The Cloud, collaboration, or S-curves, you can bet that the rest of the industry will be right behind them, ready with a unique perspective, some sound advice, and maybe a snazzy infographic or two.

But what happens when all that jargon goes from catchy and catching to overdone and meaningless?

Actions Speak Louder than Buzzwords

Inundated as the internet may be with terminology, it does serve a purpose. There’s a reason SEO experts exist, and as with anything, why certain words gain popularity as they become increasingly associated with business practices, work styles, or successful organizations. It’s when companies latch on to these terms in theory — and not practice — that problems surface.

Collaboration is one of those terms that’s getting a ton of play right now, primarily because it’s rapidly becoming the model for how successful teams work. The disruptive nature of collaborating drives out-of-the-box thinking, provides a network of peer-accountability, and a framework in which testing is encouraged and failure isn’t something to be afraid of. But collaboration doesn’t work when it’s just a theory, and implementing a fully-collaborative system takes more than just throwing people together in a room with some software and a whiteboard. That’s where companies tend to falter.

“Real, genuine, messy collaboration involves reaching out to unconventional organizations that your company may never have worked with before,” say HBR bloggers Paul Ellingstad and Charmian Love. “If it feels uncomfortable, overwhelming and challenging, you’re probably on the right track.”

If your company’s idea of collaboration is simply a nebulous, undefined notion of glorified teamwork, chances are you’re doing it wrong.

Mapping the Scope: Challenges and Stakeholders

As more and more organizations turn to flattened-out team structures, collaboration becomes a more natural solution to things like assembly-line approaches to project management, or developing deliverables that involve multiple departments. Beyond assembling a team or, on a larger scale, a network of organizations, mapping the scope of your collaborative efforts can help you identify issues before they arise, gaps in the feedback loop, potential schedule obstructions, and stakeholder priority.

Consider beginning the collaboration process by mapping out the team itself. This transparent team blueprint will show how each person and their expertise contributes to the entire project, as well as how they do or don’t fit into the group’s architecture. You can then build out individual node paths for each team member to visually showcase how their work will connect with and affect the other aspects of the project. Additionally, using the same map to address and prioritize the weight of stakeholder agendas will allow you to quickly assess where action items should fall in terms of importance and responsibility.

The team at HBR makes an important observation: “Complex partnerships also require the understanding that when working at a system level, there is often no defined end point for your activities. The further you go, the more opportunities you identify. Therefore, it’s helpful to frame the scope broadly and allow for unforeseen change and modification rather than establishing a set timeline with a strict exit [or] sunset clause.”

Companies that use buzzwords without backup risk a lot more than disorganized teams and internal struggles — they risk getting caught being insincere and hypocritical. Introducing modern collaboration to your team might be more easily said than done, but you don’t want to make the costly mistake of promising results from techniques that you don’t practice.

The post Collaboration by Any Other Name: When Trends Trump Meaning appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Today’s project teams include team members from across an organization – and from outside the company as well. Often, external vendors bring along their own favorite service for uploading and sharing files with the rest of the team. Services like Box or Google Drive or Dropbox are great in helping bridge that gap between internal and external team members. But, when everyone is using a different cloud service, you spend a lot of time trying to track down the right version of the right file in the right cloud.

Mindjet now integrates with the top cloud storage services so you can centralize all of your project files into one place your entire team can access. Now, in addition to uploading files from your desktop or laptop to Mindjet’s file system, you can bring in files from the cloud tools your team uses every day.

Here’s how:

• From the Mindjet for Web interface, click on Maps, then Files and navigate to where you want to upload your files.
• Click Upload. A pop-up opens asking where the files you’d like to upload are located.
• If you’d like to upload files from your computer, click on My Computer, select the files you’d like to upload. You can also simply drag and drop the files where it says ‘Drag files here.’ To select multiple files: Windows users, click + Ctrl. Mac users, use click + Command.
• If you’d like to bring a file in from your favorite cloud storage service, select it from the list on the left.
• You’ll then be prompted to authorize Mindjet to connect to your cloud service.
• The files and folders in your cloud service are displayed. Navigate to the files you’d like to bring into Mindjet.
• Select the files and click Upload. The files you selected are now uploaded from the cloud into Mindjet.
• This integration works for Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft’s Skydrive and Google Drive. You can also link directly to a resource online with a hyperlink, connect through a WebDAV account or go super old-school with FTP.

If you’d like to remove the the link between Mindjet and your cloud service, click Upload and hover over the service you’d like to remove. You’ll see a red X button to deauthorize Mindjet from authorizing your files.

The post Mindjet for Web Now Connects to Your Favorite Cloud Storage Services appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Welcome to Conspire’s Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.

This is Your Brain on Internet

Is humanity being eroded one cute cat video at a time? That seemed to be what Paul Miller over at The Verge thought when he took his highly-publicized, year-long sabbatical from the Web, but returned last week with a somewhat surprising conclusion:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

[...]

When I return to the internet, I might not use it well. I might waste time, or get distracted, or click on all the wrong links. I won’t have as much time to read or introspect or write the great American sci-fi novel.

But at least I’ll be connected.

But wait! On the flip side, author Nicholas Carr argues that the ‘net is making us more superficial as thinkers. In this video he claims constant connectivity crowds out more contemplative calmer modes, which are what we need to retain information.  ”If that’s the way you’re using your mind, just kind of searching very quickly and finding information then forgetting it very quickly, you’re never building knowledge–you’re kind of thinking like a computer.”

14 Telling Signs You Love Your Job

Just because you have a bad day (or several) at the office doesn’t necessarily mean you hate your job. This article from Dharmesh Shaw, Founder and CTO at HubSpot, points out the behaviors of people who truly love where they work. My personal favorite:

You think, “I hope I get to…” instead of, “I hope I don’t have to…” 

When you love your job it’s like peeling an onion. There are always more layers to discover and explore.

When you hate your job it’s also like peeling an onion – but all you discover are more tears.

Source: LinkedIn

It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories

This article from Jag Bhalla on why we need stories is amazing right from the start:

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival.

Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types, plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.

Source: Scientific American

The post Fun Friday Links: This is Your Brain on Internet, Signs You *Actually* Love Your Job + It’s Our Nature to Need Stories appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

It’s collaboration month here at Conspire, so we’re bringing you lots of food-for-thought to mull over: rules for modern collaboration, ways to make the most of a collaborative environment, and how the expanding reach of project management practices ties in with synergetic companies. Keeping with this month’s focus, it’s time to talk about collaboration mistakes that are coming to light as the tech industry places higher priority on team outcomes over individual successes.

Hearing What You Want Isn’t Collaboration

Generally, we talk about collaborating in terms of making the right connections, building teams, and encouraging communication. Great places to start, but all it takes to kill cohesion is willfully ignoring ideas that don’t precisely fit stakeholder agendas. Collaboration is sort of like the physical manifestation of brainstorming; and what’s the first rule of successfully conceptualizing in a group? There are no stupid ideas. Which means the team can’t shut down or shut out suggestions that are unexpected or that might require fleshing-out — otherwise, you may as well not be working together at all.

We’re Not All on the Same (Web)Page

BYOD practices aside, not everyone uses the same tools when they work together on a project. Maybe it’s not a big deal — for example, some folks like to use unread email as a sort of checklist, but their colleagues might prefer to jot down handwritten to-do’s. That’s probably not going to change, even if they’re also using a task management system. But often, people make the cavalier assumption that everyone they’re collaborating with is already making use of the same stuff.

The immediate solution could be to lay down an edict about which devices or programs are “allowed,” and that might work for a minute. But beware — people generally work the way that they do because it’s the most effective way for them to get things done, and you could simply be asking them to disrupt their processes or duplicate them. That definitely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage the team to at least perform project-specific tasks using one method, but be prepared to train individuals, answer questions, and most importantly, demonstrate the value of the tools you’ve chosen.

We Told You to Go Away, But Not That Far

In my last post discussing rules for modern collaboration, I talked about how in general, managers and other higher-ups should keep their hands out of the pot when teams come together to collaborate. Still true, but that doesn’t mean wash your hands of the project entirely until the deadline hits. People need motivation and reassurance, and in fact, recognition for a great idea or a job well done is often cited as the #1 driver behind effective, passionate employees. According to the Harvard Business Review, employees who “receive support that helps them overcome obstacles [are the] most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak.” Peer support is important, but endorsement from stakeholders is validating and fuels ambition. Unfortunately, leaders often have quite a lot on their plates, and can forget how important checking in and acknowledging progress really is — if you’re part of the C-Suite or even a department manager, remember to let your team have its moment in the spotlight. It’s more important than you think, for morale and business return.

Don’t Be Anti-Social

According to BT Group, the main trend emerging from the state of collaboration today is the social enterprise — a world where previously just-for-fun communication platforms are either being used for business purposes, or spawning stand-alone, in-house social tools like Yammer. You’d think that the value of these would be pretty obvious; after all, finding and engaging customers or employees where they already are isn’t a new concept. But the untapped possibilities are surprising. From a 2012 McKinsey & Company report:

“The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information.”

In terms of collaboration, that means more time spent doing, and a lot less time figuring out what you should be doing.

For more on common collaboration mistakes, check out this Slideshare presentation by Chess Media Group’s Jacob Morgan.

The post You’re Doing it Wrong: Collaboration Mistakes and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Collaboration is at the core of modern business, but the way we collaborate isn’t always as cutting-edge as it could be. Since the tech world is definitely not suffering from a lack of tools — everything from streaming video to collaboration software, instant messaging, and social platforms keep us conjoined at the gadget — what gives? Actually, it might be all that versatility, all those choices, and the variety of ways we individually utilize them that’s pushing us into the collaboration bottleneck.

Bypass the gridlock by following these 3 rules for modern collaboration and keep your company from being bogged down by option overload.

Don’t Assume That Email is Enough

On average, email interruptions cost workers an hour of lost time every day. A quick scan around the Mindjet office showed that, depending on the type of email-manager someone is, and where they fall on the responsibility hierarchy, unread email counts spanned from zero to 142 (an unexpectedly low number from one of our chief officers). Varying email styles mean that, while some people treat unread messages as a to-do list, others face such an influx that they have to prioritize more strictly. And unless your email is short, marked urgent, and comes with a read receipt, you’re probably not being heard. And what good is radio silence when you’re collaborating?

If your email needs an immediate response, it’s probably a good idea to seek out the recipient using some other channel. Hit them up via chat, or social, or even the old-fashioned way: with a phone call.

Go Away, Managers

The toughest part about genuine collaboration is trying to equalize participation. Don’t get us wrong; we’ve talked before about how shooting for total contribution equilibrium doesn’t make sense, but that collaboration works because it utilizes resource aggregation and abandons traditional hierarchies. When a group tries to work together with a positional leader in the mix, it’s way too tempting to defer to their expertise, or the outcomes they value most.

You’ve heard of peer accountability — people work much better with their direct peers because they can actually relate to each other, and the obligation to complete tasks is more personally motivated. So if you’re a manager, stick to checking in every once in a while and leave your team be. They’ll let you know when they need you.

Encourage Unexpected Interactions

When two people know each other for a very long time, there often comes a point when conversation starts to revolve around remembrances or the goings-on of other people. Things get a little stale, ideas are recycled, and it takes some type of disruption to re-catalyze the relationship. The same thing can be said for teams or colleagues that work together for too long.

If you find that the marketing department is failing to come up with anything truly new or brilliant, bring in a developer, or someone from sales. Says Kellogg Professor Brian Uzzi, “Success is partially derived from relationships with other people, through whom they get access to expertise and capabilities beyond themselves.” It might be awkward at first, but new perspectives drive innovation, and this kind of atypical collaboration inspires radiant thinking, which has been scientifically linked to the natural pattern of human thought.

Lots of rules exist for modern collaboration, and it’s necessary to vet them and apply what works for your organization. Have one to share? Tell us about it in the comments.

The post Bypassing the Bottleneck: 3 Rules for Modern Collaboration appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

In the 1970s and 80s, Toyota had a deliberate strategy to sell big motorcycles in America. They looked at the market and decided there was a good opportunity for big hogs like Harleys.

However, they continually failed to break into the large road-bike segment. But that was Toyota’s big opportunity, in disguise.

Their deliberate strategy failed, but an emergent strategy changed the game entirely. Toyota wound up selling more of their smaller Super Cub motorcycle than they ever envisioned, and in the process they created a whole new market that didn’t exist: off-road motorcycles.

Innovation Emerges

Agile management practices must always allow emergent strategies to develop, because that’s where the real innovation opportunity exists, and that’s the kind of opportunity traditional hierarchies will crush.

(For an example, see my case study on Microsoft, who in the 2000s missed several opportunities, including social networking and touch-screen technology, in deliberate pursuit of more hierarchy control over MS Office and their Windows platform.)

Case Study: iLook Ultrasounds

With agile, your strategy is what you’re actually doing, not what you say you’re doing.

For example, iLook, a provider of ultrasound technology for natal clinics and hospitals, said their strategy was to sell a small, inexpensive, handheld ultrasound equipment that was simple to use.

That was the emerging opportunity.

But the company’s salesmen had external incentives to sell bigger, more expensive models of ultrasound equipment. And company engineers had internal motivations to make bigger, more powerful machines—not simple, cheap ones.

This misalignment is how companies with hierarchical management systems can flail for many years without any improvement:

• The sales team pulls toward incentives
• The engineers make what they want to make
• The marketing department tries either to convey inconvenient truths (“We have an opportunity if we sell the simple, cheaper ultrasounds, dammit!”), or it gets buried under the hierarchical weight of the sales and engineering departments.

But don’t blame the salesmen and engineers!

They often run on external incentives, and they usually come well-schooled in surviving in the hierarchical system.

Agile must play more to motivation and emergence in order to survive. Agile must say, “Hey, let’s try a few cheaper ultrasounds, and see if it works.”

Abandon All Deliberate Strategies, Early and Often

Investors don’t care about your incentives. They don’t care that you never changed your mind or flip-flopped on decisions, either. Pride and ego are the only things that care about that.

Investors have two goals:

1. Growth
2. Profitability

And neither of those two goals involves getting straight A’s on your quarterly report card. (Besides, making straight A’s is easy: you just open up the spreadsheet and type in a long line of them. Genius!)

But real growth and profitability cannot be easily forged.

Agile Failure Breeds Real Success

Professor Amar Bhide states in The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses that 93% of all companies that ultimately became successful beyond the start-up phase had to abandon their original strategy. Why? Because 93% of the time the original plan proved unviable. The real-life Mad Men don’t have a very good track record!

In the agile world, success doesn’t mean knowing exactly what to do. Instead: Success means having enough money left over to try an emergent opportunity after the deliberate strategy has failed. 

Which it will. 93% of the time.

Where old-school thinkers only go for things that have 95% confidence level, agile innovators know creativity has a much lower success rate. If only 10% of your new creative ideas succeeded, you would have the Midas touch.

Most New Ideas Don’t Succeed 

The point of agile management is to try something, see what happens, and respond quickly enough to the new information to find what will work. Or, as I’ve said before, never be afraid to fail, and never fail the same way twice.

The Theory of Good Money and Bad Money

The theory of good money and bad money, according to Clayton Christensen, says when the best strategy is not yet clear, the “good money” from investors should be patient for growth, but impatient for profit. That means, if you’re being agile, don’t blow huge piles of cash. Stay small and profitable on that scale, until the growth opportunity emerges.

And since 93% of startups have to change strategies before succeeding, growing too big, too fast, without profits is not the path of true enlightenment.

(And “too big to fail” doesn’t sound very agile, either, does it? Well, it’s not.)

Capital investments that demand growth before profits are “bad money,” but once a profitable strategy emerges, you must be agile enough to switch to a growth strategy—and also switch to being patient for profit while growth occurs.

The theory of good money and bad money says abundant capital can fuel the wrong strategy, and it can fuel it aggressively.

Investing first to grow big on an all-in, Mad-Men strategy and figure out how to make profits later is a road littered with failures.

When Honda created the small motorcycle market in America, it didn’t allocate lots of cash to one big strategy. In fact, it was the lack of huge financial investment that allowed Honda’s Super Cub business division to figure out the problem.

By the time you see the need for new business, it’s too late to begin. 

That’s like planting seeds when you need shade trees immediately.

You must invest long before you plan to see the payoffs. Put in your time before you put in all your cash. Water rows of seeds before you know exactly which trees will come in handy.

That’s the agile way.

The post Agile Marketing Series: the Emergent Strategy + Good Money vs. Bad Money appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

The start of a new financial year is underway and there’s no better time for businesses to be taking their own temperature, diagnosing any issues and treating them. It’s almost like the business equivalent of a New Year’s resolution but instead of vowing to go to the gym three times a week, you vow to grow the business by double digits or reduce staff turnover by 10 percent.

Diagnosing any Problems

So how do you get to the root of your businesses problems?

The first and most obvious step is to speak to people. If staff members aren’t confident about expressing their opinions face-to-face, then perhaps start with something as simple as a suggestion and question box. It’s an easy way to make your team feel empowered. It’s also worth considering that different departments may be suffering more than others, and from quite specific problems.

Which Part is in the Most Pain?

As part of our Change Challenge Report, which you can read more about here, we surveyed workers from a myriad industries and departments, including IT, R&D, finance, sales and marketing, advertising and communications. The results revealed some interesting sector-specific insights and issues, which might help you shed light on your own organisation.

• “Company communication isn’t clear enough” according to marketing, advertising & communications (50%), IT (25%) and sales (17%) teams. Managers in these departments are also unsure that their staff understands what their team goals are.
• “There’s a lack of senior support,” argue around a quarter of production (31%), IT (26%), marketing/advertising/comms (25%) and sales (23%) workers.
• “My hard work and contribution to the business isn’t acknowledged” by bosses, say a third of production (32%), legal (30%) and IT (29%) teams.
• “We use inefficient working practices and communication” stated production (32%) and marketing/advertising/comms teams (23%), who also cite inefficient project management as an issue.
• “I have too much work and not enough time” is a cry from all departments, although R&D teams (43%) and marketing/advertising/comms (35%) teams seem to be the most affected.

Prescribing the Right Medicine

When you’ve got a better idea of what might be ailing your teams, you can set about working with them to find a solution. Good communication is vital and without it things can fall apart very quickly. Teams should make it a priority to meet regularly and communicate feedback often. Using tools such as Mindjet can help with remote communication and facilitating an environment for feedback, which everyone can feed into regardless of time or location.

Senior support and good leadership are very important too. A good leader should motivate and coach team members, inspiring confidence in their management of the project; as is ensuring that your teams don’t feel overwhelmed. If people are struggling to get everything done, perhaps you can look to recruit interns to provide a few extra hands on deck. Even small, cost-effective, steps like this will contribute positivity to the health and well being of your business.

The post Taking the Temperature of Your Business appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Welcome to Conspire’s Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.

I’m Still Here

You’ve probably heard of Paul Miller. He’s the guy who left the internet for a whole year.

Many of us — myself included — half-expected Miller to return with some all-knowing glow; to be somehow made better because the World Wide wasn’t sucking out his soul on a daily basis (can anyone confirm that it actually does that?). But what started as a refreshing break quickly devolved into something a little less desirable. Here are a few excerpts from his return post over on The Verge.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

[...]

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

[...]

When I return to the internet, I might not use it well. I might waste time, or get distracted, or click on all the wrong links. I won’t have as much time to read or introspect or write the great American sci-fi novel. 

But at least I’ll be connected.

Source: The Verge

The Future of Information Management

Speaking of connectivity, a recent article from David Roe over at CMSWire covers the future of information management–which, according to SAP, lies in the Internet of Things. Basically? We shouldn’t give up the ‘net. And we can’t.

Source: CMSWire

Exploding Your Emotional Bandwidth

And now, for a bit on how technology is changing times of tragedy.

We are not built for this. We are not designed, at our core, to be able to absorb, at a glance and a click, a tweet and a ruthless video feed, all the ills and horrors of the world, all at once, all manner of chaos and destruction in a nonstop bloody flood over which we are powerless to influence and impotent to stop.

Source: SFGate

The post Fun Friday Links: Disconnecting from the Internet Doesn’t Solve Much appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

As the business world shifts and settles into the more mobile, collaborative structure of industries gone agile, more and more people find themselves acting as project managers — without any formal training. The internet is filled with advice from the pros; downloadable guides, crowdsourced book projects, and tip after tip. After tip. But even with all that exposure, project management still has one dirty little secret left: those deadlines you’re so worried about? They don’t really matter after all.

The Due Date Dilemma

Said one developer to the Harvard Business Review, “Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it’s done.” It’s scary to think about, and more than a little difficult to swallow that all of those hours spent meticulously tracking deadlines could have been a waste.

The reason experienced PMs don’t always sweat the schedule is because they accept the unpredictable nature of project variables. So much of being a project manager is dealing with the unknown, juggling people, resources, and tasks, that the little amount of time they have left can’t be spent agonizing over arbitrary due dates. More than that, projects that escape deadlines don’t simply vanish. They still have to be completed, and finding your team at the mercy of budgets, restricted assets, and absent or unresponsive people are typical frustrations that can leave due dates in the dust. So what if we just skipped them altogether?

While it seems completely contrary to suggest that project managers abandon their beloved calendars, think about it: when deadlines loom and the assignment’s not ready, one of two things usually happens. Either the task gets done in a stressful, hasty rush, or it’s allotted an extension — which most people will use as an excuse to put off the assignment.

Consider the idea that allowing team contributors to honestly assess their workload and priorities — and provide PMs with realistic timelines, or flow in assignments as a regular part of their activities — might actually make them more productive and efficient. Says Natasha Murashev of Reorg, “When you assign due dates for every tiny little part of the project, you are creating an awkward power dynamic between you and your team.” After all, it’s been noted that micromanagement kills engagement, and employee investment is a key component of productivity.

Implementing a Flexible Calendar: Giving it a Try

Project managers are typically great at what they do because they maintain control over minutiae, and diverting from the usual advice of carefully mapping project details won’t be easy. We’re not talking about eliminating timelines altogether — you have customers to serve, after all — but relaxing the reins will allow PMs to focus more on the quality of deliverables. Keep the following in mind to ease the transition from strict to yielding, and boost your efficiency in the process:

• Tasks rarely get done on time, anyway. If you’re already allowing extensions, you’ve already planned for this inevitability, so embrace it.
• You’re not the best estimator of someone else’s time. Their priorities are not always going to sync up with yours, so instead, allow them to determine the importance of tasks. When they’ve given you a timeline, you can either compromise with them or build it into your own schedule.
• Set personal completion estimations, and encourage your team to do the same. If you know something absolutely must be done in three weeks, plan to finish it in two, particularly if your task impacts the start of someone else’s.
• Estimate workflow based on labor-hours, not calendar days. It’s more accurate and accounts for time spent on-task, not just at work.
• Keep the lines of communication open and continuous. You might not be checking off a list, but you should always be checking in.
• Keep your customers (or stakeholders) in the loop. Updates should extend beyond team members to anyone that might be invested in, or affected by, the outcome.

Want to learn more? Download Mindjet’s free quick-ref guide, the 25 Secrets of Successful Project Managers.

The post Hint, Hint: Project Management’s Dirty Little Secret appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

Conspire focused heavily on project management in April, with posts covering everything from mistakes to avoid to the right questions to ask. Check out five of our favorites below.

1. Help! I’m an Unofficial Project Manager

Project management is something for everyone, not just those officially called Project Managers. Anyone in a management role within any organisation will have responsibility for ensuring their teams get a project done successfully. What then, do us unofficial project managers need to bear in mind, given most of us have never received formal project management training?

2. Five Ws and an H: 6 Questions All Project Managers Should Ask

You don’t get much of anywhere in business without asking questions, but strangely enough, a lot of people are pretty bad at it. Maybe they don’t ask questions at all, or they do, but only after something’s gone horribly wrong. Typically, though, the problem lies in asking the wrong questions — questions that are too broad or acute are often met with single-word answers that don’t capture useful details or address key issues.

For project managers, this can be especially detrimental and lead to hastily done work and a lot of wasted effort. My suggestion? Do like the journalists do, and check out these 6 questions all project managers should ask — every time.

 3. 6 Common Project Management Blunders

Project management is as necessary a skill for anyone in agile business as is the ability to collaborate without getting HR involved. We’re working in a world dependent on transparency, shared responsibility, and autonomy, and the truth is? We’re all project managers now.

Here are 6 common project management mistakes and how you can keep them from happening to you.

4. Behind Enemy Lines: Project Management Secrets Revealed 

Expertise-specific tasks usually get left up to the person bearing the title, right? Writers write, salespeople sell, marketers market. But as corporate hierarchies flatten out into a pancake of shared initiatives and collaboration, there’s at least one role that’s sneaking its way into everyone’s responsibilities: project management.

So, what do you do if you haven’t been formally trained? Where do you even start? Luckily for the rest of us, old-school PMs have spilled some of their best secrets for managing projects, encouraging communication, and keeping teams on track. Here are a few of our favorites.

5. Project Management Offices in 2013: 4 Best Practices from Dell, IBM + More

Instead of just certified PMs, workers of all types are suddenly finding themselves in and out of the driver’s seat as projects shift and change. And while that’s all well and good (and super exciting), it’s important to note that this adjustment doesn’t lessen the need for upper management. In fact, it hones the project management office (PMO) by filtering out smaller tasks and allowing official PMs to focus their experienced attention on the parts of the job that need it most.

In a recent study from APQC, a leader in knowledge management and bench marking, some of the biggest names in the game–Dell, IBM, and the United Illuminating Company included–revealed how their PMOs are functioning today.

Want to learn how Mindjet can help your team achieve better project management? Join us for our next webinar: Mindjet Helps Solve Project Management Challenges for Teams, taking place May 7th, at 10:00AM PDT.

The post Project Management Roll-up: Questions to Ask, Lessons to Learn and Secrets Revealed appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.

You’ve read it a million times — collaboration is king in agile business, it’s one of the best ways to be effectively creative, and bringing limited resources, people, and great ideas together is how successful organizations rise above the rest and remain ahead of the game. Well, plan to keep reading it, because it’s absolutely true. Here are 4 tips to help your team continue capitalizing on collaboration on your way to the top.

1. Every Cell Needs a Nucleus

Sometimes we get these crazy ideas about collaboration that change its effectiveness and alter its purpose. Collaboration works because it makes the most of the resources at hand by aggregating them and abandoning traditional hierarchies — but that’s not to say that form and leadership should be tossed out the window. Think of collaborative teams as cells, with all of their lovely powerhouse mitochondria and hardworking ribosomes. Every part has a function, but none of the pieces can get much done without the nucleus. Team leaders matter, even if they’re more of a mediator than a commander. Putting someone at the core of the group doesn’t diminish collaborative efforts; instead, it focuses them and provides support for the team.

2. One Bad Apple

Because collaboration is such an interdependent activity, it doesn’t take much to trip it up. That’s why we’ll reiterate the importance of flexibility and accepting failure with our dying breath(s) — that said, if a problem can be eradicated, it needs to be. Things like unnecessary paperwork, or a team member that’s not really invested in outcomes, can cause dissension and delays. Finding the weaknesses in a team or process and weeding them out as they’re discovered isn’t going to waste nearly as much time as redoing work (plus, it’s not as embarrassing as having to apologize to your stakeholders for screwing up when you could’ve prevented it).

3. Not Everyone is Created Equal

Another misconception about collaboration: everyone involved has to put forward the same time and effort, and produce a commensurate number of deliverables, as everyone else. Not so, and actually, that’s kind of impossible. Collaboration is about balance and working in concert, pairing needs and working towards a not-always-shared end-goal while accomplishing smaller milestones along the way. Do you have any idea how terrible an orchestra would sound if it included as many trombones as flutes, or multiple conductors? Don’t set unrealistic expectations or demands for the sake of forced fairness — it’s a recipe for setbacks.

4. Two Heads at First Might be Better Than Twelve at Once

We’ve written before about the differences between collaboration and teamwork: while “teamwork requires individuals to work together for a common goal harmoniously,” collaboration “bands together people with various goals, only a few of which are usually shared.” We tend to think of collaborating as a group effort, with a number of contributors coming together for a project and sharing the weight from start to finish. But sometimes collaboration is more of an evolving process that starts with one or two people, eventually swelling out to include others or, when one person’s role is complete, releasing them. And that’s totally okay — in fact, it’s smart to utilize collaboration’s pliability. Reprioritization, turnover, and disruption become much less impactful when the structure of your partnership or team isn’t entirely dependent on a fixed foundation.

May is collaboration month here at Mindjet! Read what else we have to say about it here.

The post Capitalizing on Collaboration: 4 Tips to Make the Most of It appeared first on Conspire: A @Mindjet Publication.