Over at Small Business Labs, Steve King set out his top 10 business trends for 2011. At number 9: "Freelancers Realize They're Small Business Owners." King identifies two categories of contingent workers: those embracing freelancing and those stuck with it because of...
Branding firm BBMG has released an interesting white paper on what it terms "co-creativity." The idea is for organizations to put their stakeholders at the center of a new, more participatory brand experience. BBMG writes: For all the hype about brands inviting...
What is the future of marketing? That was the topic at a recent Thoughtlead online mini-conference. The premise: Select 60 smart people, ask them one big question, and give them each 60 seconds to make their case. The responses were sometimes predictable. More often,...
Are you celebrating failure? While business successes are great, we tend to learn far more from our failures. The stuff that goes wrong and makes for business case studies and lessons learned, and adjustments, innovation, and change. Ralph Heath's Celebrating Failure...
You couldn't have a GrowSmartBiz* conference in 2010 without talking about social media, innovation, and the role of buzz in your marketing arsenal. And the panel at last Friday's conference didn't disappoint, offering good insights and smart tips: Jason Falls...
There's a long, fascinating profile of Nike CEO Mark Parker in Fast Company. The article talks about Parker's bio, corporate culture, and where's he's taking the company and how. One line about his management style really stood out: [Bill] Bowerman's coaching...
Today I'm going to urge you to read a post about community. It's a long post, but it's an important one. The author looks at the impact of technology on copyright laws and business models, and forces us to look at the elephant in the room. Or, as he says (quoting Cory...
Why do workshifters "dare to be different"? And what implications might this have for innovation across the business landscape? For today's food for thought, read my inaugural post for Workshifting.com. And thanks to Justin Levy for inviting me to become a regulator...
During the IABC/Washington panel discussion on 2010 trends, I posed the following question: Is 2010 the year we break down silos? In retrospect, I asked the wrong question. Breaking down silos is critical, but it's not about whether we do it--it's about how. In the...
Not surprisingly for a business conference, the state of small business was the topic of much discussion at GrowSmartBiz. The anchor: the Small Business Success Index, a survey of the competitiveness of small businesses (defined as privately-owned, with 100 or fewer...