Cultivating Innovation
Every employee can be a powerhouse for innovation, and entrepreneurs need to create a culture to encourage it. Guidelines in doing so:

• Set aside your ego. You can’t have all the good ideas.
• Eliminate perceived penalties for “bad ideas”. Innovation requires a bit of craziness.
• Hold an open brainstorming forum to encourage ideas from everyone.
• Cultivate those people that are really good at innovation.
• Set parameters to guide employees. Don’t make it too wide open.

Source: Entrepreneur.com
Tags: innovation+collaboration

The Instant Productivity Toolkit
Matthew Cornell, a personal productivity workflow consultant reviews the book The Instant Productivity Toolkit and shares this thoughts:

• The author offers a complete vision for managing work and life.
• Create a single stack of all your active tasks, ordered by priority, with the highest ranking priority items on top.
• Have a virtual in-tray on your desk (an allocated area), and put all new papers in there, rather than scattering them everywhere.
• Lay out your desk in a way to create an atmosphere of efficiency.
• Track voice mails and calls using a separate notebook.
• … and more.

Matt’s insightful critique includes comparative notes with David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. A couple of comments on Matt’s blog raise the relevance / applicability of the author’s ideas in a highly connected world.

Source: Matt’s Idea Blog
Tags: productivity+toolkit

Marc’s Become a Dictator
My colleague Marc Orchant is writing a book about Outlook 2007, and has decided to try dictating it rather than writing it all down.

After reading recommendations from two people whose opinions I have come to trust about the brand-new version 9.0 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I decided it might very well be time to take a second look at voice dictation and command on the PC. David Pogue, writing in the New York Times, gave the new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking a rave review last week. My podcast partner, James Kendrick, has been a big fan of Dragon for a long time.

So I guess this raises the question: if Marc is dictating his book now, does this mean he’s no longer a “writer/author”? 😉

(And happy birthday for the other day too Marc!)

Source: Marc Orchant’s ZDNet Blog
Tags: dragon+naturallyspeaking, marc+orchant