Generation G – trendwatching.com

Another priceless offering from trendwatching.com, especially given the highly publicised times ahead, coupled with what you actually want to be doing… plenty of food for thought…

Has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity? It’s something that countless individuals have already started doing, of course: giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving. And yes, we do realize that this month’s Trend Briefing is massive, but in this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?

GENERATION G | “Captures the growing importance of ‘generosity’ as a leading societal and business mindset. As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy—and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care—the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers.

In fact, for many, sharing a passion and receiving recognition have replaced ‘taking’ as the new status symbol. Businesses should follow this societal/behavioral shift, however much of it may oppose their decades-old devotion to me, myself and I.”

If the recession is hitting you where it hurts, and your budgets are tight, GENERATION G may feel like too costly a trend to capitalize on. We beg to differ:

Not all GENERATION G projects and initiatives are costly. Often, it’s a case of mindset, of attitude, of being creative, of finding the right partners, without spending millions. In fact, many of the services and projects highlighted in this briefing didn’t cost the world.

Those projects that do involve serious money should be paid for by shifting funding from any kind of bland, non-relevant, non-interactive, and above all, non-generous ad campaign you’re planning to run this year. Hey, if others—in all the examples above—can do it, so can you.

Not infusing your company’s or brand’s mindset with a heavy dose of generosity will eventually cost you much more. Like, seeing your brand go bust. Which makes any kind of expenditure on generosity a bargain.

Joining GENERATION G as a company or a brand is not really optional, it’s a fundamental requirement if you want to stay relevant in societies that value generosity, sharing and collaboration. Joining obviously entails more than adding a social responsibility or sustainability department; it means adopting a generous mindset that permeates every interaction with your community, with your employees, with your customers, with, wait for it, your ‘stakeholders’. Nothing more or less than a holistic approach* to generosity and business.

The benefits?

It doesn’t hurt that in turbulent times like now, generosity will find an extra-appreciative audience, and certainly won’t be forgotten.

Not only will your customers be more appreciative, they’ll also return your favors by being more willing to spread the word about you. And being more willing to collaborate with you, co-creating or co-inventing or co-improving. Which would get us to CUSTOMER-MADE. See, we told you this would be an umbrella trend.

And last but not least, to manage a company with a caring, generous mindset can actually be good for your soul, too 😉

indeed! read on

Google’s view on the future of business

One of the top interview of 2008 for The McKinsey Quarterly is the following one with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. I thought it timely to revisit this… enjoy

Few would dispute that Google sits at the center of the Internet. As the leader in search, Google is now the Internet’s premier brand and the planet’s most potent free service. Managing that commanding position falls largely to seasoned technology executive Eric Schmidt, who in 2001 was tapped for the CEO post by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In his years at the company, Schmidt has delivered steady growth while expanding Google’s reach. By anticipating the ways in which people would expand their use of Internet applications, Schmidt has introduced new products from the popular Web-based e-mail service Gmail (Google Mail in Germany and the UK) to the recently unveiled G1 mobile phone. And as Google’s audience and influence have increased, so too has its appeal among advertisers worldwide… read on

Happiness at Work Index

Last week, Leon Gettler looked at the growing science of Happynomics (featured on this blog 6/6/07) which has thrown up so many studies by economists on what makes us happy.

At the time, he expressed some reservations about whether these studies actually tell us that much (but then, he has a view about economists. As the old jokes go: Question: Why did God create economists? Answer: To make weather forecasters look good.

I asked questions then about what makes you happy… have you worked that out yet?
Any closer?

Tim Ferris Interview – The 4-Hour Workweek

Delegate and automate to create the lifestyle you desire and deserve
The following is a transcript of Scott Allen’s interview with Tim Ferriss, which you can listen to while you read (or instead).

One of the things that Scott talks a lot about on About.com is how to try to find that balance as an entrepreneur, because there have been so many studies done on this that show that the typical entrepreneurs are working 70 and 80 hours a week.

The traditional take on this is something like, “Hey, that’s fine. We all know it’s a trade-off because we are investing that time, hopefully for the pay back in the future, or that it’s a trade-off for flexibility.” You may have to work 80 hours a week and work late into the night, but you get to take off in the middle of the day to do stuff with your kids.

You don’t have to answer to anybody or file for it a month in advance if you want to take vacation.

We would all love to get to the point of working a 4-hour workweek and a lot of us would like to just get to the point of working a 40-hour workweek, and making the living we’d like to make and having the rest of it available.

But Tim Ferriss has lived it, is living it and is sharing the good word in his book. In the interest of getting you closer to that 4-hour workweek, read/listen to Scott talking to Tim Ferriss.

As a result of listening to Tim Ferriss first time around, I turned off the automatic send/receive function on my Outlook program, which allows me to manage when emails come in and go out… a far more productive way of managing my time and head space. I don’t know about you but if an email comes in that requires action, it is very difficult to ignore it once its in your inbox! By switching off the function, you take back the control… excellent.

Tim shares this and many more tips… please listen as you’ll be pleasantly surprised as to how easy, and doable, most of these are.

Be sure to let me know which ones work for you.

A Big Girls Night IN…

http://www.theage.com.au/news/diet/a-girls-big-night-in/2008/04/03/1206851067850.html

by Helen Signy of TheAge

hhhmmmm…
this kind of resonated with me upon reading, so suggest you do same
if its happens to read like “oh my goodness, that’s me!”…
then maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at yourself, or not…

Among the tales of nappies and sleep deprivation, there is one topic of conversation that often crops up when new mothers get together: alcohol. There was no evidence that the women were actually drinking at high levels – just that talking about drinking was a way of helping them make what for many middle-class women is a very difficult transition into motherhood.

By talking about drinking they were able to reassure themselves and each other that they were, deep down, still the same independent women they had been [before motherhood]…

this particular bit really did make me chuckle…

“Hazardous? Swimming with sharks is hazardous. But now, apparently, splitting a bottle of wine with my husband over dinner is as potentially injurious to my health.

“And now we’re supposed to spend our evenings with a measuring jug instead of a wine glass, muttering: ‘I’ll just have a 125ml unit.’ Do I drink too much? Should I cut down? The guilt of my Sunday school years remains. When I’m dragging the crate of empties to the recycling plant, I try to still the rattling, or I trill ‘We had a party!’ to anyone nearby.

“The guilt sets in before I’ve even bought a bottle. I read up on wine with low tannins and low alcohol content, and search the shelves for those with an 11 or 12 per cent alcohol by volume, rather than just picking up the ones that taste the best – which almost always tend to be more alcoholic.

“When it comes to the actual drinking, I try to down a glass of water for each glass of wine. The result is that most of the pleasure – which is surely the point – has gone from an evening’s relaxation because I spend most of the time counting. And not just my intake – my husband’s, too. (‘Did you have another unit when I went to the loo?’)

“Now, a house without an opened bottle of wine in the evening is one I’ve yet to encounter but the vast majority of us are wise in our consumption. We know when enough is enough.

“What’s missing is not just a sense of proportion but a sense of humour. As one correspondent on the Telegraph website wrote: ‘Cut down on drink? How in the name of Satan’s pants are us ugly people going to have sex?”‘

cheers!!

Mothers of Reinvention

as featured in the “Inspired” magazine, Autumn/Winter 2008
by Fran Molloy

For former management consultant Denise Hall, the flexibility she needed as a mum has become the key to her success; her business is based on supplying talented consultants, who work as ‘free agents,’ to organisations who need their skills for a short-term project, often in project-based fields like organisational development and training.

She channelled her inner entrepreneur and with another mum as business partner, established aCE talentNET. With her extensive experience as an international management consultant, Denise could have had her pick of top executive positions; but she felt that, as a single mum, she needed a certain level of flexibility, and that is difficult within a large corporation.

Now, she works about 25 hours a week – during school hours – and is able to earn a good income, while keeping an active role in parenting her daughter.

“You don’t have to bust a boiler to make it work,” she says, adding that she sees many parents caught up in inefficient work settings that waste the time they could be spending with their children.

Efficiency and responsibility are key to making her business work – and her team is not bound by office hours. “We structure our days around what needs to be done – the work to be done is addressed rather than the hours that need to be filled.”

Technology helps to make most of Denise’s work location-independent – and she has a lot of trust and respect for her team of co-workers.

for the full article… read on

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