Sources of quality ideas and ways to manage them
Are you starved for new ideas or do you find yourself seeing so many ideas out there that sometimes you feel the information floods over you? Either way, there are idea sources and filtering techniques that can help.
Do you find yourself so time poor that you can’t spend 2 hours reading a high quality book on a new concept or global trend? In 20 minutes with the right material (there is some right here) you can get the same outcome.
Any idea or piece of information can be slotted into three clear realms or stages of knowing that a gentleman called Plato did some groundwork on without the benefit of technology to accelerate his learning:
- What you know you know
- What you know you don’t know – or know a little about but not enough to be of much use
- What you don’t know you don’t know – blind spots to which you are completely oblivious
Opportunity exists in that final point, we would like to share some quality sources with you.
Solving Blind Spots
TED – Supported by BMW. It is the university degree that doesn’t exist yet, snippets of greatness. Leaders in their field give you emotional and passionate slide show and video dumps in 20-30 minute waves. Their life is devoted to ideas and theories. Fascinating describes TED well. These people are consumed by their passion for an area of life or business. You will learn about cutting edge ideas changing our lives and the next generation’s too. For example visual technologies, organic design and other potentially profound concepts that will alter your thinking and maybe reconsider your business model and outlook on your industry or even your life.
Slideshare – You will need to do some surfing but there are some fantastic presentations in this website. One example on brand management is a ‘must read’.
Are you information efficient? Apply a ROI test to your information gathering
How many of your books, magazines, blog reads fall into this last category of filling you blind spots? This is a time saving filter we can all use to decide what we read and don’t. Reading content you know about is still important because occasionally you hit the blind spot needle in the haystack. You do pay a higher price to get it, your time.
Be critical, assess what you read regularly, assess what you attend in terms of conferences and the like. We are very quick in business to apply measurement to assess spending money on projects, advertising and marketing. This applies equally to time, valuable time spent on learning, reading and watching.
Thanks for the link to “The Brand Gap” presentation on Slideshare. That definitely filled me with ideas and was a great ROI on the time to read the 162 slides.