What I’ve learned over these 26 years of business, is how you can take tools and skills, with memory and mind mapping, and bring that to executives to lighten the load that they carry on their shoulders and help them be more productive, and actually get their personal life back on track.
Sometimes when I’m talking to executives and I sit in their office and listen to some of their challenges and you see stacks of documents or approval signatures that they need to sign on to, policies that they need to review and revise, I can almost see myself sitting on the other side of the table and putting myself back into my IBM leadership position and feel that empathy for them, but more importantly, feel that I have a roadmap, or that I have a way of helping them overcome it.
I always remember meeting with a senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a major airline company, and sitting with this frustrated senior executive.
He said:
“How do I absorb all of the changes that are taking place within the airline. Industry? How do I get that out to my regional sales directors and Vice Presidents? How do I engage the frontline sales team in realizing the changes that they were going to need to make? And how do I grow the revenue in a constantly growing market that was demanding we reduce prices as opposed to the ability to increase them? How do I move people form the back of the plane to front of the plane? How do I get all of this done in an ever changing market that was constantly being competitive, and entering into price wars and competitive challenges?”
We sat down together and we designed what I would define as his very first mind map.
And that mind maps was able to take what was going on in his mind, and out it onto paper in a holistic way that enabled him to see exactly what his strategies and his business plan was, how he could communicate that to his team, and how he could then mobilize them, and inspire them, engage their creativity, inlays of developing new market channels, and more importantly, increasing the revenue.
The good news?
It took us a few years, some of the obstacles: people looking at these one page documents with icons and pictures on it, asking:
Are we in grammar school again?
Are we learning how to color and draw?
We’re used to doing 12 to 15 page powerpoint decks.
And now, all of a sudden they were looking at a one page document that basically has the business plan and the company strategy all on one page and document.
Overcoming those objections took a little of time.
It took a little bit of reeducation of people.
It took a new way of looking at holistic information, and not having to go through line by line on power point slides. The results were clearly warranted and clearly worthwhile.
$500,000,000 (half a billion) later it was clearly worthwhile.
They generated half a billion dollars of additional revenues over a three year period of time. It put this airline on a whole different growth pattern in terms of what they could do.
I also had the opportunity of working with Con Edison, a utility company in New York City (after the 9/11/2001 tragedies that we had).
They wanted to know:
How could they absorb a massive project plan?
How could they put together all the things that were necessary that they needed to get federal regulation and agencies to approve and how could they do it fast enough in a way that could get those approvals and the workers could then go back and do the work that they needed to do, to get the power lines and substations together, put all their pieces together, how could we do that?
Fortunately we had a couple of senior executives there that had been through mind mapping and we were able to sit down together and out down some of the core elements of what needed to be done on one project plans, and actions plans, that enabled them to then communicate to the regulatory organizations and get their approval on things to execute action plans that can get things to happen.
We also worked with a customer service organization that was looking at improving their customer satisfaction results. How could you get customer satisfaction results in away where customers and unhappy clients could immediately communicate with you in way that you could get the core issues of what was frustrating to them, so that the cpomapnf could learn how to better improve their service levels.
So how could you get people to talk in such an opened and candid way?
I always remember one of the senior executives said, “You know what, pre-formatting these on a mind map allowed people to talk to me in a way where I could just fill in these different branches of information, and see the whole picture. And what the customers (or the complainers) would feel its, you listened to me, you heard what I had to say.”
And so I’ve worked on this over a number of years in getting senior leaders to able to absorb more information quicker, be able to take that and distill it into bite-sized pieces, and then actually utilize in communicating to their front line staffs, to their directors, and managers - and engage people’s creative solving process in a way of how do we creatively problem solve in ways where people are engaged and wanting to share their ideas in helping the company meet its critical goals, strategies, and executing its business plans.
Its always interesting when you first sit down with an executive and you start showing him colored pencils, or maybe on a laptop you can start drawing branches that have different colors on it, and then you look for icons that you can attach to those branches - when brings me back to a simple lesson: a picture’s worth a thousand words. So if we can find what those pictures were, and we can out them on simple branches that we call, “a map of the mind,” wouldn’t that help the brain tap into its infinite creative powers and then be able to help bring solutions to the table that much quicker.
Who would argue with doing any of those things? Engaging people. Getting their creative thought processes inspired, enthused, and engaged. And then having them go out and execute plans that they actually developed. Which then created what I call buy-in and ownership, at every level of the organization, because they were part of the plan.
So I’ve utilized mind mapping, not as the end all and the be all, but as the tool to help the various thinking processes, the various problem solving processes, the creative solutions process. And that’s what we’ve been doing, and what we want to share with each and every one of you.
Because it makes a whole difference in how well you absorb information, how well you communicate that information, and how well you can utilize that information in your day to day activities.
We’ve distilled this course into five, 5 minute bite-sized pieces, so that if you can take 5 minutes, for the next 5 days, you will have one of the most powerful tools (in my years and years of experience of studying and researching human intelligence and creativity), you will have at your disposal one of the most basic and simplest tools possible that you can learn in 25 minutes.
We give you 15 minutes of practice exercises at the end of each module, so that at the end of your five sessions, you will have 25 minutes of education followed within each segment a 15 minute practice ability that now makes you much more efficient.
