Shumsky Idea Box
Articles
Interesting, fun, and a little bit off the beaten path, we post articles here to inspire you and your team with new ideas. We’ll continue to search for great ideas but, in the mean time, go ahead and look around. If you have an article to add to the IdeaBox, send it to us and we’ll see if we can’t include it. Send your articles here.
7 Rules for Creative Brainstorming Sessions
1. Don’t wing it – develop a creative brief and give people time to read it, ingest it, and stew on it. Creativity in business is largely ignored. How many times do you hear people say, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body!” This is simply untrue. What is true is what Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Michael Ray has said, “People say that the only constant in the world today is change. There’s another constant in the world: your own internal creativity.
by Evan Scott - Full article...
“Buddy, can you paradigm?” The changing world of business interactions
It all used to be so simple.
You had sellers and you had buyers. The seller brought a product or service to the table. And the buyer brought money. The transaction was straightforward. The price was the price.
But now an increasing number of business dealings are as fuzzy as Donald Trump’s eyebrows. You can’t tell who’s the buyer and who’s the seller. Heck, a lot of times, each are both. And even when the roles seem clear, the form of payment is more convoluted than the plot line of a Quentin Tarantino film.
by Gordon Hochhalter - Full article...
Development and use of a tagline
When companies use taglines effectively they seem truly inspired – and it’s nearly impossible to think about these companies without remembering their taglines. Other times, taglines don’t seem to add much to your experience with the company’s products or services. What makes the difference between a good tagline and a ho-hum tagline?.
by Evan Scott - Full article...
The fact that the business world got drunk on dotcoms during the late 90s is well documented. Yet, in 2008, many companies still think of the Web as a technology issue. It is not. The Web is, and always has been, a business and marketing issue. The technology behind the Web should be considered much like the technology behind a television set – it should be understood and expected to work.
Let me take you on a quick trip through the land of fairy tales.
by Evan Scott - Full article...
Top Five Ways to Avoid Being a Fish
There’s nothing worse than going to a trade show and feeling like a fish in a fish tank, stuck in your booth, pacing the 10 foot space or sitting there trying to look engaged. On the flip side, it’s energizing to go to a trade show and see other poor souls looking like fish in their fish tanks while you and your team are having a productive and lively show – holding meetings, filling up your booth with interested prospects, and tracking down important industry intelligence to help your company succeed. Is that bad to feel good about someone else’s misfortune? Yes it is if the person is a victim. But for trade show attendees – they’re not victims; they’re just lazy or terribly uninspired.
By Evan Scott - Full article...
What We Need To Know About People
In organized fund-raising, as indeed in any form of group persuasion, a good way to begin is to learn as much as you can about people. You need to understand, for instance, that genuine leadership in any cause is rare, beyond price, and always the nucleus of significant achievement. And you ought to know, too, that whatever your goals of persuasion may be and whatever your cause, there are three different kinds of people involved.
By Harold J. "Si" Seymour"- Full article...