twanless

Love Is Blind: Is Your Business Idea Really That Good?

You’ve been slav­ing away on the work­bench at your prod­uct, your ser­vice, and your busi­ness plan. You’ve laboured late into the night, putting all your rela­tion­ships on hold, and try­ing to ignore the no-nothings who freely offer advice on how you should do it. That’s because you have a GREAT IDEA for a business. You have this fan­tas­tic, whizz-bang, prod­uct or ser­vice that’s...

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

Getting Ink: How To Publicize Your Business Today

While there’s been much noise about the demise of the press recently, the truth is that there’s more media around than  ever. The big dif­fer­ence is that the “press” has changed con­sid­er­ably over the last five years – it’s now gone elec­tronic,    has wider dis­tri­b­u­tion than ever, and includes other media out­lets like blogs, online news oper­a­tions, Face­book and  ...

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

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...