Monday, January 21, 2013

Are your business results suffering? 8 tips for Strategic Thinking

 

Everything that happens in your business happens at the hands of a human being. Do you find that people come to work every day, ready to do their best? Or do you feel that some employees could do better or more?

It is possible to have an integrated perspective about why people do what they do and to identify what is really happening. If you understand your behavior and the behavior of others whilst helping others to understand their own behavior, this may work out as a fresh perspective to solve business issues.

A relatively primitive portion of the human brain (sometimes called the "Old Brain") is a powerful center that takes charge when people are fearful or threatened, and can quickly take action without thought. It is a sort of protection scheme from all forms of threat that leads people to blame others to avoid responsibility, forming stories to explain the world in ineffective ways.

But most of what is necessary for business resides in the "New Brain" were clear and complex thinking, deep analysis, computation, language, creativity and other higher-order brain processing happens. Yet you need to learn how to use it in order to achieve a positive impact on your business performance.

The process that defines the manner in which people think about, assess, view, and create the future for themselves and others is known as Strategic Thinking, an extremely effective and valuable process that involves developing an entire set of critical skills.  What are these critical skills? Some tips:

#1: Think in a blended way, using logic and creativity to define clear and focused business vision and objectives
#2: Balance creativity with a sense of realism and honesty about what is achievable in the longer term
#3: Have an action plan to each objective broken down into tasks and each task having a list of needed resources and a specific timeline
#4: Define milestones to review progress, proactively antecipating necessary changes
#5: Be amazingly aware and perceptive, recognizing internal and external clues, listening and understanding what is said and observing all that is happening without being judgmental
#6: Be a committed lifelong learner, take positive learning from each experience in life and seek advice from others; using a coach, a mentor, a peer advisory group or some other group where you can confide in and offer up ideas for feedback
#7: Be patient; great ideas require time to develop into great successes
#8: Take time out for yourself; great insights often arise from an "offline" status
 

3 Clues to understanding your brain


A TED Talk by VS Ramachandran (click to acess bio), dated from 2007 and entitled "3 clues to understanding your brain".


 click to view

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Science learning in a fun and easy way

Check out how science can be so well communicated that is not only easy as well as fun to understand!  Many diverse subjects from creation of life on heath to human behavior and brain functioning...

Check out the You Tube channel. These are some of my favorite :

The Science of Productivity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHfjvYzr-3g

The Science of Procrastination - And How To Manage It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBwfZZvjKo

The Science of Lucid Dreaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYSX51xBkos

Your Brain on Drugs:
Marijuana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeF6rFN9org
Alcohol
http://youtu.be/vkpz7xFTWJo