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Tag Archives: creativity

Making Your Meetings Useful

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by srgsocialmedia in Marketing

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Business, creativity, intelligence

Meeting tableFast Company magazine recently surveyed some of the world’s most-creative people for their ideas on improving the bane of most offices – the meeting.

The report noted that the average office worker spends more than 200 hours a year in meetings, and it included the established basics for a successful meeting: Be prepared, have a leader, have an agenda, set a fixed start and end time, have a conclusion and make a plan to follow up.

But the web post looked to go beyond the mundane, coming up with 10 strategies from business leaders and gurus worldwide:

  1. Pretend you’ve failed: Imagine everything that could go wrong with a new product or service, the take steps to fix problem areas.
  2. Keep it novel: Have a meeting in somewhere new, to stimulate exploratory thinking.
  3. Pause: Take at least a moment to meditate on the way to meetings, to open your mind.
  4. Don’t squander youth: Listen to younger workers.
  5. Say it in five words: Require everyone in the meeting to distill the problem to be solved in a meeting down to five words.
  6. Think like a movie director: Replace the typical agenda and decorum with movie-like passion and conflict.
  7. Get them laughing: A little humor from the leader of a meeting warms up the room and increases the leader’s stature.
  8. Bring something to the table: Require people in meetings to be prepared to contribute, and leaders should encourage it.
  9. Be like a talk show host: Leaders should realize the length of the human attention span, and plan breaks (like commercial breaks on a talk show).
  10. Use the meeting to create more meetings: Never leave a meeting without getting the names of two new people to meet.

The Fast Company post was written by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield, co-authors of The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It Well.


To learn more about Synergyst, please visit the Synergyst Research website.

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Fast Company Magazine Celebrates Creativity in Business

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by srgsocialmedia in Marketing

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Advertising, Business, creativity, Online advertising

Logo for the Fast Company 100 Most Creative listFast Company magazine has released its fifth annual list of the 100 most creative people in business, and it includes people from industries as diverse as television, automaking, retailing and social media.

Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger who has taken data analysis to a new level, was the top-ranked person on the list. His blog, FiveThirtyEight, had highly accurate predictions of last year’s elections, but he emphasized the need for creative thinking, going beyond the limitations of data, in an interview with Fast Company.

The top of the list also includes some familiar names, including actor Bryan Cranston from the acclaimed show “Breaking Bad,” and companies, including the National Football League, where Tracey Bleczinski, the vice president for consumer products, was mentioned for the rapid growth in women’s branded NFL apparel.

Fast Company has compiled multimedia presentations and lists of what it calls “precise, actionable ideas” for business.

“The list is just the beginning, too,” writes Tyler Gray. “Expect expanded stories, audio, and video on the people we’ve featured here and ongoing coverage of their creative endeavors, plus ongoing social conversations about the topics raised by our Most Creative People.”


To learn more about Synergyst, please visit the Synergyst Research website.

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