Category: Big Ideas

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Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder EngagementThe story of stakeholder engagement is a familiar one.

The term stakeholder starts as a new coinage. It becomes a word of art, understood by a select few. It then takes on a very public persona, widely used and at the heart of public discourse.

So managers seek to manage their stakeholders because it’s what they do. That’s their nature. Until we start to realise the category error that represents. And so, a gentle revolution brings us to today, and stakeholder engagement.

That’s the story we need to tell.

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Coaching in the Workplace

Coaching

CoachingIf coaching in the workplace seemed like no more than a trendy idea put about by a few business gurus and trainers in the 1990s, think again.

The upward rise of the trend has stabilised. And today, over 25 years from the publication of John Whitmore’s ‘Coaching for Performance’, the discipline is in rude health.

From my perspective, coaching is here to stay.

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TQM: Total Quality Management

TQM - Total Quality Management

TQM - Total Quality ManagementTotal Quality Management, or TQM, is more than ‘just’ a quality initiative. It is an approach to management that cuts across all aspects of an organisation. It has a deep story that stretches back to the 1920s and beyond, yet its principles are as relevant today as they have ever been.

While some of our Big Ideas came to the world of management and made themselves relevant there, Total Quality Management started in the business world. And here it remains.

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Lean Thinking… in all its forms

Lean

Lean ThinkingLean is an addictive drug.

But I’m not talking about the nasty mixture of cough syrup and soda that is hooking young Americans on codeine and promethazine.

I’m talking about the current favourite method for reducing corporate corpulence, which has been popular for nearly twenty years.

But don’t for one moment think Lean is a passing fad. Its day will come, for sure. But its pedigree is a rich one. And whatever will replace it must share many of its aspirations and principles, just as Lean shares much with TQM*, BPR* and much that has gone before.

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Networking

Networking
Networking
Networking

For some people, the idea of networking seems less appealing than dental extraction. You’re in a room full of people you don’t know, and you have to ‘make contacts’. Business networking gets a bad rap.

But let’s look at it objectively. Talking to people, making alliances, helping others, and finding people you can trust… They are hardwired into whatever it is that makes us human. We are social beings.

The ‘Social Network’ that is Facebook did not become a global colossus because it invented something new. It did so, because it gave us an easier way to do what we do naturally: connect with other people.

Strip it of its management-speak baggage, and networking is not just a big idea. It is The Big Idea that gave humans our route to world domination. It is the source of our common humanity.

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Team Building

Team Building

Team BuildingTeams are a good thing. No one doubts that. So, how can we doubt the benefit of team building?

Team building has become a multi-million Pound/Dollar/Euro… industry. Search for it online, and you’ll find dozens of service providers offering everything from cake decoration to high risk expeditions. But:

  • what is it?
  • why should you use it? and
  • what should you know about doing it well?

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Mindfulness: How to Pay Attention to What Matters

Mindfulness

MindfulnessMindfulness is your capacity to focus on what matters to you, and use your brain’s capabilities to their fullest potential.

Put like that, who wouldn’t want to enhance their mindfulness?

So, it’s little wonder that this Big Idea is constantly resurfacing through human history. The label ‘Mindfulness’ may suggest a Twenty First Century fad, but the ideas behind it and the techniques that underpin it have millennia of credibility.

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Stickiness | Why some ideas get attention and stick

Stickiness

StickinessStickiness is an idea that has, well… stuck.

We aren’t talking glue here. Instead, stickiness is a metaphor for emotions, rather like hot and cool. Ideas can be sticky, messages, can, brands and even websites can be sticky.

Stickiness is the quality of holding our attentions, and that has to be a big idea that any manager or professional needs to engage with.

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Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management

Agile Project ManagementHow do you adapt traditional project management into a rapidly changing environment? One that is characterised by shifting priorities and high uncertainty. Arguably, you don’t need to – project management has always had the tools for this. But, with the Agile Manifesto of 2001, software projects have a new paradigm. A modification of traditional approaches, called Agile Project Management.

And make no mistake… Agile has become a ‘Big Thing’. In fact, it bears some of the hallmarks of a fad, while also having a lot to offer an informed organisation with wise and pragmatic project leaders to call upon. But, as with all good ideas, it also attracts its converts and zealots.

Of course, here at Management Pocketbooks, we tend to eschew extreme and simplistic ‘right versus wrong’ arguments in management. We’re here to suck out the good stuff and brief you on what it is and how to benefit from it.

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PR – Public Relations

Public Relations - PR

Public Relations - PRHow can your organisation build the reputation it chooses? Certainly through its deeds and through paid advertising. But one way trumps all others: good PR.

PR, or Public Relations is exactly what its name suggests. It’s about building relationships with your public. And it works whether you are a business, a not-for-profit, a political or governmental body, a product or service, or a celebrity; minor or major. Good PR gets the right part of the public interested in you and pre-disposes them to think in the way you choose.

So is it manipulative? Is it just an appealing term for what we now call spin and used to call propaganda? It can be. But in this article, we are going to stick to PR done with integrity. So the answer to those questions is: ‘it depends’. And what it depends on is the integrity of how your PR is carried out. And therefore on the integrity of the people who do it for you: your PRs.

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