President + Partner, New Kind
I came across an interesting concept recently: the Law of Two Feet. Brilliantly simple, it says any time you’re in a meeting where you’re not contributing nor adding value–you are encouraged to use your two feet and find a place where you can. In other words, if it’s not meaningful, and you’re not doing your part to make it meaningful, move on.
Continue reading “Darwin meets Dilbert: Applying the Law of Two Feet to your next meeting”
Open source communities are often compared to gift economies. You participate. You solve shared problems. Others do the same.
In many ways, you give to get.
Continue reading “Participating in a gift economy: Are you giving enough?”
The world of work has changed, but in many ways the model of motivation hasn’t. Are the traditional rewards of today’s organizations up to the challenge of motivating people to complete creative, complex tasks in creative ways? And can the open source way offer inspiration?
Daniel Pink is a bestselling author and one of the country’s top business speakers. His latest book is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. You can watch him deliver an insightful and entertaining introduction to Drive at the TED Conference.
Continue reading “Upgrading the motivational operating system: A conversation with Daniel Pink”
A tide is turning for the state of business. We have come to realize the old ways of innovating and competing are no longer moving fast enough. We’re looking for new answers, and more importantly, new ways of finding them.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending the 25th annual Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh. The forum brought together business and government leaders from across the state to discuss the challenges facing our economy as we race to compete in a changing world.
Continue reading “Meeting our business challenges with creativity”
Here’s a quick story:
A friend of mine and I had stopped at a gas station for a soda on a summer afternoon. I was probably about 10 years old. As we were drinking, I was mindlessly tearing the plastic label off my bottle and shredding it into pieces. He watched me do this for a few minutes, then said, “I hate tearing off the labels because it makes the soda taste bad.”
This was my first lesson in branding.
Few ways of communication are more universally human than storytelling. Stories give full-color context to black-and-white facts. They’re designed for sharing: Easy to tell, easy to remember. Simply start at the beginning and let the story unfold.
Continue reading “Building brand through storytelling: Seven elements great stories have in common”
Jonathan Opp 