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Showing posts from August, 2012

Command & Control is so 20th century

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“Most American children are still socialized to obey authority. As a teacher, parent, executive, or ranking officer in the military, you are assumed to be “in charge” and to have all answers. Your job is to “command” the people under you to do what you think best, and their job is to listen and obey. Your authority comes with your position or title or rank and is generally not questioned – at least not to your face. The smooth functioning of society depends on some compliance to authority. The problem is that the highly disruptive nature of innovation creates new challenges to traditional authority, and successful leadership of an innovative enterprise requires a different kind of authority .” Tony Wagner – Creating Innovators It is so clear that the 21 st century demands and challenges require a new approach to leading, innovation as well as personal development. A top-down management style prohibits that the employees come up with new ideas. They feel th

Location is also relevant with social media

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A few weeks ago I did play golf in Germany and tasted a delicious alcohol-free beer from Erdinger. So, I decided to Google for it and check where I could buy this product in The Netherlands. I thought that this was a 5-minute job. I could not have been more wrong. I could not find any brick and mortar store, which would be selling this product. Isn’t this strange as this is the best selling alcohol-free brand in Germany? Therefor I did contact them via their website with this simple question: where can I buy this product? First they did send me to a distributor which happened to have as their only customer …… Heineken! This approach didn’t work and I did contact them again. The helpful area sales manager arranged a call with a local sales manager and he actually pointed to a store (rather close to where I live) where I could buy the product. This process did cost me quite some time, which shouldn’t be the case. So I did send the area sales manager some feed