twanless

Grow A Service Business Creatively

I have just received an advance copy of Michael Michalko’s new book Cre­ative Thinker­ing and, not sur­pris­ingly, it got me thinking. Not just in a cre­ative way, but about cre­ativ­ity and its place in busi­ness generally. Now, most pro­fes­sional ser­vice providers don’t think a lot about cre­ativ­ity, unless their busi­ness demands it (in adver­tis­ing, for exam­ple). They tend to...

twanless

Confessions Of An (Reformed) Idea Slut

This is a mes­sage — and future pro­gram — for cre­atives, dream­ers, and dis­si­dents every­where.  Its  mes­sage? It’s okay to have lots — and lots — of ideas. But they need to be developed. I like to  tell every­one I meet that I’ve Never Met An Idea I Didn’t Like. It’s my mantra, my self– iden­tity, my rai­son d’etre. It’s also often been my downfall.   Yes, at...

twanless

How To Innovate Your Service Business

When you rein­vented your­self or your busi­ness, you were an inno­va­tor. You may have stopped there. So get back into it by explor­ing new ideas. Any­one who has rein­vented them­selves — or is in the process — is famil­iar with some aspects of inno­va­tion. Rein­ven­tion is a sub­set of inno­va­tion in that you look at some­thing and decide to do it in a dif­fer­ent way,...

twanless

Make It all A Moon Shot

A ver­sion of this post was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in the Finan­cial Post At a con­fer­ence in Cal­i­for­nia orga­nized by the Man­age­ment Lab, schol­ars and thinkers from all over the United States chewed over what was required of today’s managers. Over sev­eral days, the crowd put together a list of 25 “moon shots for man­age­ment” — big goals for man­agers. While...

twanless

Be The Entrepreneur You Want To Be

If you want to change your behav­ior to be a bet­ter entre­pre­neur, you’re going to have to find a    model. Then you need to employ empa­thy by mim­ic­k­ing it. For much of my adult life, I spent a lot of time in news­rooms. As a result of hang­ing out with newsies all the time, I became one of them. Yes, I was the pro­to­typ­i­cal reporter: Gruff, cyn­i­cal, sus­pi­cious and...