What do women want?
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Creativity & innovation
Good question. Turns out it’s not big, burly men to help carry our parcels to the car. Best Buy was trying to increase sales to women. They hired a male consultant (go figure) who said the answer lay in hiring beefy male employees. Didn’t work (surprise surprise). What did work? Asking their female employees to […]
Tags: best buy, female consumers, learning, marketk share, peter sheahan, women consumers
Kick the rabbit in the butt & suspend disbelief – it’ll lead to breakthroughs
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Creativity & innovation
Can you walk on water? These guys can. Check out the video below to see how they do it. “You have to believe … it’s not impossible.” “We’re discovering it as we go along.” Some of it “was by mistake.” “It takes a lot of practice.” “If you fall down try again.” All words of […]
Tags: breakthrough, change management, creativity & innovation, disbelief, extreme sport, learning, liquid mountaineering, walking on water
What is creativity? Making a radio out of a phone
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Creativity & innovation
The other day my 13 year old nonchalantly took my IPhone and placed it in the radio (see above). What was he doing? Using the radio to play the music off my IPhone. Simple? For him, yes. For me, no. I had banded my thinking, which is a creativity killer. Banded thinking is placing constricting, […]
Tags: creative, creativity & innovation, embracing creativity, IPhone, langara college, learning, rediscover your creative dna, teaching
Putting fun and evaluation in the same sentence
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Human resources
Evaluation terminology is enough to make you want to hide your head in the nearest toilet. And flush. Program logic models, median, mean, outcomes, indicators, activities, outputs, baseline, denominators, dissemination, focus groups, inductive, deductive and the list goes on (and on and on). Yet, program evaluation can be incredibly valuable and necessary. I’m teaching a […]
Tags: activities, baseline, deductive, denominators, dissemination, evaluation, focus groups, indicators, inductive, learning, mean, median, outcomes, outputs, program evaluation, Program logic models, training & development, united nations
Business or pleasure? Why do we have to choose?
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Creativity & innovation, Human resources
“Business or pleasure?,” said the guy who was sitting beside me on a recent flight. “Business,” I replied. But I got to thinking. What does that say about business? That it can’t be pleasurable? That we can’t have fun or have ease when we’re working? Let’s face it, the old adage ‘put your nose to […]
Tags: business, danielle laporte, Galcos Soda Pop Stop, grindstone, John Nese, learning, white hot truth
Those who laugh last (up to 7 years longer)
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Humor & comedy
Having a happy disposition affects how long you live, up to 7 years longer than grumpy folk. Researchers at Wayne Statue University in Michigan looked at 230 pictures of major league baseball players from 1952. They categorized the pictures according to how much they were smiling and their laugh lines. They then looked at life […]
Tags: biopsychoimmunoloyg, health, humor, Humor & comedy, laugh, laughter, learning, longevity, michigan, wayne state university, Wellness
Because Laughing Matters
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Human resources, Humor & comedy
I’m teaching a workshop on Friday called ‘Because Laughing Matters‘ at the Every Woman conference in Whistler, British Columbia. This is a topic dear to my heart. And if it’s not dear to your heart it should be because: humour is strategic, it primes the brain for learning – when we’re laughing we’re using the […]
Tags: chuck hamilton, creativity & innovation, Daniel Pink, every woman, Ford, humor, Humor & comedy, IBM, laugh, laughing matters, learning, lizard brain, seth godin, whistler, Whole New Mind
Heaven doesn’t need harmonica players
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Social Responsibility
Andy Mackie, a retired horse trainer, had 9 heart surgeries. The resulting 15 prescriptions caused more problems than they were worth so he stopped taking them. That’s a lot of dough for a lot of drugs. So what did he do with the money he saved? He figured he’d live for only about a month […]
Tags: andy mackie, haiti, harmonica, inspiration, jesse joshua watson, learning, music
Viagra, sex tapes, clarithromycin – 6 reasons why spam works (unfortunately)
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Social Responsibility
“Viagra, sex tapes, lesbian dating in cleveland complaints against adult dating sites. Clarithromycin is a macrolide antibiotic. It is cast-off to regale multifarious kinds of infections.” Say what? If you blog you’ll no doubt recognize these as spam comments. Before I got a spam filter I was getting up to 80 spam comments a day […]
Tags: akismet, blog, blogging, captchas, learning, outsourcing, permission marketing, productivity, spam, spammers
Looking up and out, not just down and in
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Communication, Human resources
Ever get your head so far buried in your work that you forget to look up and out? Up for new ideas? Out for new ways to connect? Read on for a simple way of harnessing technology for good, that is to reach out and up. Having your head down, your office door shut and […]
Tags: creativity & innovation, dyana valentine, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, ichat, jodi womack, learning, no more nylons