Over dinner a couple months ago, one of my friends said he needed some help coming up with a name for a new website. He told me a bit about the site and asked if I could help think of something over dinner. He also asked my other friends to join in so we could get a whole bunch of ideas on the table and choose the best one.

From my experience working at an agency, as a designer, and at [my company] ooomf, coming up with ideas from a single brainstorming session like this one is usually not the most effective way. Many people I’ve come across, including the most creative ones, need individual time to let ideas marinate before the best concept reveals itself (even if it’s something that seems as simple as naming a website).

I encouraged my friend to take some time to do the same — to play with his concept a bit more before bringing it to anyone for more input. After this experience, I wondered why the group brainstorming session is often the default choice when we’re pressed to find that perfect idea.

Read the rest on lifehacker.com!

Almost everyone wants to be known as innovative, to be an innovator. Companies and individuals seek to demonstrate that they are capable of “out of the box” thinking, as the saying goes.

I have recently worked on some projects around innovation for companies like Verizon and Qualcomm and it got me to thinking – what about innovation tools to help my fellow small business owners to brainstorm, to create new products, to get rid of the innovation cramp and get the ideas flowing?

Below are 60 plus innovation tools and sites that today’s innovators should check out.

Read the rest on smallbiztrends.com!

Popular business author Dan Pink picks his 5 favorite TED Talks on how to find greater success at work.

Check it out on ted.com!

I´ve been intending to write today´s blog article for a long time. One reason being that over the years I´ve seen many candidates who have been very good in job interviews and who got the job they applied for. At the same time, I´ve also met and interviewed multiple people who did not make it, i.e. who did not get the job at the end.

A second reason is that I´ve arrived at the conclusion, that those who did not get the job might not have necessarily been less capable of fulfilling the role than the ones who got it. Often, they were just not able to communicate or to deliver what was expected from them in the crucial moments of the interviews. Why?

Below I´ve listed 11 interview principles in order to be successful at your next job interview and to get the job. Some of them you know. Some of them you might have forgotten about. And others, you might not have considered yet.

Read the rest on LinkedIn!

Check out this interesting infographic highlighting the best and worst careers! Via lifehacker.com.

You are a person that still needs a resume to get a job in today’s world of networking and making contacts. We don’t believe that you’re fresh out of university, or high school, but maybe you are looking to switch positions, from one industry to another. Anyway, a resume is essential as a presentation of your work and yourself and you need it to be well written. Some people would hire a person to do it for them and present them as they are, but only say it better. Even so, if you are writing your own resume, or you’re having it written for you- you must make sure that these words don’t appear.

Read the rest on lifehack.org!

Professional social situations can be awkward.

The rules are slightly different from standard social settings, yet business schools rarely discuss professional etiquette topics.

In her new book “The Essentials Of Business Etiquette,” Barbara Pachter writes about the specific skills professionals need to understand when presenting themselves in a business setting.

From how to introduce yourself to what to order at restaurants, these are the social rules you need to know when establishing relationships.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/227655#ixzz2brXCrkdu

You filled out the job application, updated your resume and clicked “Submit.” But as the days or weeks pass, you never receive a phone call or email from the employer. What happened?

Unbeknownst to many job seekers, a whopping 72% of resumes are never seen by human eyes. Why? Well, employers large and small now use applicant tracking software to parse the information from your resume and map it into a database called an ATS (applicant tracking system). From this information, the system will assign you a score based on how well you match the job the employer is trying to fill, and then rank and sort all candidates. Naturally, the potential employees with the highest scores move on, while others are left in the dust.

Wondering how you can optimize your resume and rank highly in the employer’s ATS? Here are several tricks to improving your resume’s score.

Read the rest on mashable.com!

Do you work with social media? Check out this Informative and fun Infographic via HootSuite!

Job seekers who have been looking for new opportunities for months, or even years, are unlikely to spend a lot of time and effort evaluating a new offer before signing on the dotted line. If you’ve been searching for for a long time, you may not have the luxury to turn down an offer. But if you can afford to pass up an opportunity to wait for something that could be better, here are seven questions you should answer before you accept a new position:

1. How healthy are the organization’s finances? Especially if you’ve been laid off recently, the last thing that you want to do is jump into a situation where another layoff could be in the near future. Make sure you research the organization and review what the press has to say before you jump to join.

2. Is the location feasible, and may it change? Can you really handle a 90-minute commute in the morning? Is there a possibility that the company may transfer you to a different location in the near future, and how would that affect your work-life balance?

Read the rest on http://jobs.aol.com!

Why is the first day on the job often the worst?

New employees tend to be greeted with stacks of benefits paperwork, technology hassles and dull presentations about company culture.

But some companies—hoping to create a first impression that really counts—are turning to orientations that seem more collegiate than corporate, complete with co-worker networking sessions, time for new employees to tout their skills and even officewide scavenger hunts.

It is the latest attempt by firms to make onboarding—the process of absorbing new hires and getting them up to speed—more effective.

A bad or underwhelming start in a new role may lead to higher rates of quitting because many workers decide whether to leave or stick with a company in the early months, studies show. The first few weeks on the job are “the first time the employee has the ability to look at a job from the inside,” says David Earle, chief executive of Staffing.org, a workforce research and advisory company.

Read the rest on http://online.wsj.com!

Are you’re constantly overlooked for a promotion that never comes? Do you grind away at the job you think you have to do instead of DOING the job you want to do? Do you think your work life will get better if your boss would just [insert any of the following]: notice, retire, relax, focus, get it together, give you some help, get fired?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, conventional wisdom says to push through and try harder, but that is probably the worst career advice you’ll ever get. When you’re in a career plateau — a place where hard work stops working – you are battling one of the most powerful forces of nature: The Plateau Effect. And you’re not alone. The Plateau Effect is woven into the fabric of the universe. It’s why we get diminishing returns for our efforts, but with some battle-tested techniques you can break free. We’ve spent the past few years mining the fields of behavioral psychology, mathematics, sports, leadership and even culinary arts to find out how some of the most successful people and companies in the world have gone from stuck to success. Call your frustration a plateau, and you are bound to come up with many more constructive solutions. Here are three:

Read the rest on http://blogs.wsj.com!

Suppose you want to design the best company on earth to work for. What would it be like? For three years we’ve been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organization. This mission arose from our research into the relationship between authenticity and effective leadership. Simply put, people will not follow a leader they feel is inauthentic. But the executives we questioned made it clear that to be authentic, they needed to work for an authentic organization.

What did they mean? Many of their answers were highly specific, of course. But underlying the differences of circumstance, industry, and individual ambition we found six common imperatives. Together they describe an organization that operates at its fullest potential by allowing people to do their best work.

We call this “the organization of your dreams.” In a nutshell, it’s a company where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are no stupid rules.

Read the rest on hbr.org!

One of the most common pieces of job-seeker advice we give on The Work Buzz blog is to personalize application materials as much as possible. This includes the addressing of your cover letter. There may be cases where it’s impossible to find a contact associated with the position, but that doesn’t mean “To whom it may concern” is the only option. With such easy access to information through social media and websites such as LinkedIn, don’t give up on cover-letter customization just because the job description doesn’t list a contact.

“You should never use [To whom it may concern] when sending a cover letter,” says Jodi R. R. Smith, president of etiquette consulting firm Mannersmith. “Instead, with a few keystrokes on your computer, you can research who the proper person for the salutation of the letter is. Having a name on the cover letter shows that you really want the job, that you took the extra time to personalize the letter and that you are able to work independently to get a job done.”

Here, experts weigh in on five alternative ways to address a cover letter:

Check out the rest on msn.careerbuilder.com!

A woman works with analytics at a PR firm. She’s up and out the door at 6am and doesn’t return home until 9pm. On weekends, you’ll find her nose stuck in her laptop doing more work.

A man holds a senior-level communications position at a Fortune 500 company. He comes in at 5am and often doesn’t leave his office until well into the evening. Every other week he’s traveling out of the country on business.

Both of these people are married with children and have brought another addition to their “home life” —workaholism.

Read the rest on recruiter.com!

“Every business should be creative”

I talk to so many people about the lack of creativity in companies in America. Part of creativity is contrarianism. Creativity battles common wisdom. Because if there’s common wisdom, there’s an opportunity. In my own experience, whatever was a good idea was a bad idea to most people.

“Companies are in the stone age organizationally”

You can tell by the offices. “I’m going to see the king!” The king is on the top floor and there are 17 people in front of the king’s office. There are layers of bureaucracy. It shouldn’t be like that.

Read the rest on fastcompany.com!

You have a nice big project you’re about to get started on. Delivery is in a few months, so you have time to plan, sketch out some initial ideas, to let it germinate in your head.

Right?

No. Start now.

Here’s the problem. For any non-trivial project, there are problems to be solved, ideas to be thought through, discoveries to be made. You want to encounter those challenges early on, so you have time to reassess, to change course. That last 20% of the project, the part that takes actually take half of the total time? You want to get to that earlier, not later.

Read the rest here!

We can’t get enough about the art of interviewing in these times. We all fret job interviews and prepare as much as possible but there is little way of predicting their outcomes. Well at least we have some cool stats in this infographic complied by our friends at Come Recommended:

• 33% of bosses know within the first 90 seconds of an interview whether they will hire someone
• Having little to no knowledge of the company is the most common mistake made during interviews (see: How To Plan Ahead for the Interview)
• 67% of bosses say that failure to make eye contact is a common nonverbal mistake
• When meeting new people, 55% of the impact comes from the way the person dresses, acts and walks through the door

Read the rest and view the infographic on http://theundercoverrecruiter.com!