Now is the time for a revolution in economic thought

There was a very interesting piece by Anatole Kaletsky in the Times about how much of our current academic thinking on economics might be irrelevant and the paradigm shift that is necessary.  I think this is well worth a look.  Click here to read it. 

The ideal environment for creative thinking

There is no doubt that environment and culture can help but they are certainly not essential to being creative.  Often there is a perceived need to dress down, take people off site, use a specific creative area etc.  These things can help but are not necessary.  The risk here is that people feel they need to be away from the office and out of the normal environment to be creative. 

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NO VAT!

It’s amazing sometimes what’s out there and you just don’t know it. For example, many organisations in this climate are struggling with cash flow. Here’s a tip of which you are very possibly unaware. You can postpone paying your VAT, Personal Tax etc. We receive an excellent Newsletter from a partner of ours, Kirkpatrick and Hopes, and in it was this gem which could help many businesses with their cash flow. If you would like to know more then click here Read more

Using “Six Hats” to Prepare and Present

Using Six Thinking Hats® will ensure you have really thought through the presentation much more objectively and comprehensively. It also enables you to demonstrate this to your audience – for example if you are pitching an idea to include your own Black Hat (cautions, negatives) demonstrates:

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Updating The Six Thinking Hats®

Training has moved very much from “training by the manual” to “learning by doing”.  This is illustrated by The Innovator’s Toolkit which uses the de Bono tools to work an issue or opportunity right through from definition of the focus to getting an idea ready for implementation. 

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Critical or exploratory thinking?

Facts and information are clearly not enough to get you through life.  Critical thinking gets mentioned a lot as an alternative but this has an extremely negative, and narrow, connotation.  What is really needed is the opportunity for people, whether in work or in education, to be able to explore a subject comprehensively and think creatively around it where necessary.

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Barack Obama and You

If ever the importance of good communication skills has been demonstrated it is in Barack Obama.  People have raised major questions over his background, experience, the impact of racial discrimination etc.  However, his ability as a communicator, has transcended all of these. 

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How to implement new ideas when people are reluctant to change?

Six Thinking Hats® is tremendously powerful in addressing this issue.  The parallel thinking nature of Six Thinking Hats® controls those who would normally dominate discussions. It also encourages those who typically would not contribute to a discussion/debate.

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Diversity, stress and lipservice

 

With the current focus on diversity and inclusion, particularly in the legal sector, it made me think about past situations with stress.  We had an excellent product which accurately identified areas of stress and provided people with a personal development plan to improve their ability to cope with this. It also gave them access to a tailored set of computer based training modules.  All high quality and in our opinion cost effective and comprehensive. 

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Presentations Worse than Death – a cure?

I went to an interesting session run by the London Business Forum recently on presentation skills.  The usual statistic was produced in terms of making a public presentation being the number one fear of people – even more than dying.  42% said this was the number one fear versus only 28% for dying.

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