I am going to use my twitter feed - http://twitter.com/zern - to deliver a constant stream of visual, aural, emotive, olfactory snippets of nows.

As a source of idea germs, to spark divergent thinking.

In response to my article Problem solving model: Four phases on FlyingSolo, Heather Smith from Brisbane asked for my thoughts on brainstorming alone.

One of my suggestions was: “Look for unrelated …

The difference between a truly professional outcome (one that is produced by a craftsperson) and an amateur outcome lies in the craftperson’s ability to see and work with the big picture as well as the details.

As the saying goes, God may well be in the details; but the truly sublime can only be experienced as a whole. The big picture is where all the individual pieces come …

My friend Allison O’Neill is looking for ‘The Inside Dirt on Our Bosses’ for her up and coming book.

She is collecting stories (from all over the world) of the fantastic and the terrible boss/management experiences people have had throughout their working lives. This won’t be a book of petty moans and groans, but rather a collection of real life examples we can all learn from.

Share your story on …

As I am sitting here putting the final touches on a seminar on business blogging, I caught this “magic media moment” on the news: “an unscripted and unleashed punter giving some big wig in a suit a large slice of his mind on the state of Sydney trains.”

It was a classic moment. One moment there’s the “big wig” spewing the usual PR-contrived rhetoric about …

A nice piece on design, seeing, opportunities and creative thinking: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/43

Observation: Sidewalks in Singapore appear to be built without any awareness of the buildings on either side. I am not just referring to aesthetic differences either. Walking down a street often entailed the constant stepping up, stepping down, or stepping over ledges or open gutters between sidewalks of different buildings.

Thought: This approach to urban development seem to indicate compartmentalised thinking. The designers and planners of a new …

This was painting on hoardings around a shop under renovations in Singapore. It took a second to process - the first character is “cow” in Chinese. But the sign uses the sound of that character in combination with the second word to communicate the message.

Cow in Mandarin is pronounced “neu”.

Clever huh?!

Wonder

The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other …

I will be presenting a seminar on Business Blogging at The Western Sydney Business Centre on 28 May 2008.

For further information, please contact:
Mangala Srinivasan
Western Sydney Business Centre
T: 8843 1116
E: mangala.srinivasan@business.nsw.gov.au

Very short messages - like branding taglines and even biblical proclamations - are more susceptible to a wider range of individual interpretations.

When I saw this sign outside a church in Singapore recently

my brain immediately inserted the missing line thus:

Now I am pretty sure this was not what the designers of the banner intended. Nonetheless, the bottom message is what I got …