Running a workshop is an effective way to train a group or get them to do collaborative work.
But there’s still lots of misunderstanding around how to do this.
As part of running innovation projects at What If, we use workshops as a tool to harvest and leverage the creativity of our project teams.
Though I cannot recreate online the exciting experience of participating in one of these workshops, I wanted to share with you some of the most useful things you can implement in your workshops.
Knowing how to deliver a great speech is an essential skill for a leader.
Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Barack Obama… They are great speakers. We all remember them for how they spoke in public.
But we don’t deliver speeches to such large audiences every day. Right?
We’re more likely to talk to the team we lead, to present something to stakeholders, or to speak at an event.
So it’s good to use these public figures to inspire us. But we also need practical tools to improve how we convey a message or tell a story.
“What do our customers really want?” That’s what you want to find out.
But are you asking the right questions?
Some questions should never be asked. Never.
1. Do you think this is a good idea?
2. Would you buy this?
3. How much would you pay for this?
There are many reasons asking these three questions won’t help you.
Content marketing is the trendiest digital marketing technique.
And venture capital gives great examples of B2B content marketing. Think about the reputation that venture capitalists have built. Both investment funds (the limited partners that invest in VC funds) and startups really trust VCs.
How?
This is what you’re going to find out in today’s article.
As an entrepreneur, you’ll get new ideas for your own marketing strategy. As an investor, you’ll get a glance at what your competitors are doing.
But before sharing the analysis, I just want to tell what you content marketing really means.
For more than 9 years, I’ve been writing to educate, convince, inspire, negotiate, and sell.
Here are 16 practical things you can apply to improve your writing…
1. Know who you’re writing to.
Who is going to read? What are they interested in? Keep one reader in mind. You shouldn’t address a group but just one reader.
2. Value your readers’ time more than yours.
Each piece should be the one that your reader shouldn’t miss regarding a specific topic. If not, there’s no reason to hit “publish” or “send”.
Since 2008, an increasing number of technology ventures have been revolutionising the financial industry.
This is what I called in 2013 the “FinTech Revolution”.
In this article, I focus on the reasons for this revolution from a strategy and innovation perspective.
I also listed some of the best FinTech ideas. These are great examples of disruptive ideas that have now become significant providers of financial services.
The internet has allowed an innovative jump to occur in many industries. Customers have now an easy, very affordable access to books (e.g. Amazon), furniture (Made.com), TV (Netflix), education (Coursera.org), media (YouTube)…
As a team leader, you must agree:
Constantly making sure that your team remains engaged and motivated is a real challenge, especially since we’re all so busy.
Here’s a simple solution to know how they feel:
Organise a Team Retrospective with your team.
At the end of every week, meet with your team and ask these two questions:
One person at a time answers the first question. And when everyone is done—you included—the team starts answering the second question.
You and your team must spend a lot of money and effort trying to get the attention of your customers to tell them about your business.
You want them to pay attention to your story.
No attention = No impact
Since we live an over-communicated world, attention has become one of the most precious resources. Getting people to pay attention to what we want to say requires to be in the right place at the right time with the right story.
Everything is changing so fast. Your customers’ attention is constantly switching from one platform to another.
Creativity is key in established businesses as well as startups.
The former needs to find new areas of growth while leveraging and fighting against its structural inertia, whilst the latter must deal with initial fragility.
Problem: many idea killers prevent innovation from happening.
In many cases, brainstorming is one of these idea killers.
Let’s see why.
Creating and implementing new ideas are essential, core competencies in today’s business world. As Rita Gunther McGrath explains in her book The End of Competitive Advantage:
Social network. Marketplace. SaaS. These buzzwords are no longer synonyms of massive business opportunities.
The gold rush has already happened.
But a new business model has emerged.
Market-networks are hybrid animals: part social network, part marketplace, part SaaS. [1]