Navigating the mind map

Ever had a brilliant idea but struggled to communicate it to other people? Ever wondered how to relate your thoughts to a group of people in an interactive way that triggers creativity? Tony Buzan has spent a lifetime's work dedicated to developing and refining a simple, but powerful technique to capture ideas, thoughts and inspirations - mind mapping; it is a concept that has gained millions of fans around the world.

Here Buzan, mind mapper, martial artist, rower, and founder of the World Memory Championships, explains the essentials of his concept and how it can help businesses to be better.

Could you explain what a mind map is?

A mind map is a visualisation of thought. Knowledge is not linear. All kinds of things radiate from your head when you have an idea. It is like an explosion, a supernova. It is in 360 degrees, three dimensions. That's the thought process that a mind map helps to capture.

How does one create a mind map?

The mind really works in multiple thoughts and directions at the same time - radiant thinking, thinking from an image at the centre and radiating outward.

To make a mind map, start with an image in the centre of a blank sheet of paper and draw connectors branching out over the page. Use both sides of the brain to think about your idea - the right side for images, dimensions, colour, and the left side for words, numbers, analysis and logic. Capture all those on one page in an associated way, and you have a mind map.

What's the business case for brainpower?

By encouraging radiant thinking, we can make the best use of our creative abilities in an easy, natural way; that can have great benefits for any endeavour.

Imagine a company the same as your own that opens up across the road. Each of the individuals in the new company is 10 per cent more intelligent; 10 per cent more fit; 10 per cent faster in everything they do that requires speed; 10 per cent healthier; 10 per cent less stressed; 10 per cent better at learning and thinking; 10 per cent more energetic; 10 per cent happier. How long would it take for them to dominate? What would happen to your company? It wouldn't last long, but it is quite easy to become the alternative company.

Have companies put your ideas into practice?

One of the most memorable examples was the accounts department of IBM in New York. They structured their activities through mind maps. This saved the company millions of dollars and made them money. They trained their people how to think.

One organisation I worked with is a $50 billion bank with about 1,000 people. Their training covers the mind and the body - mind mapping, innovation, creativity, knowledge management, communication skills, poetry to strengthen their metaphorical muscle, aerobic fitness, Ikedo, rowing, and mind sports like chess and Goh. This has transformed the company's culture, personal and family lives. People are healthier, and communications skills have been notably enhanced.

Tony Buzan and mind mapping
www.buzanworld.com

Get texting

Text is big. Ok it's small in actual size, but big in terms of global phenomenon. Recent data published by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) in the UK, for example, revealed that in Britain 1.2 billion text messages (yes, billion) are tapped out every week; that is a 25 per cent increase in just 12 months. In September almost five billion text messages winged their way through the ether, five times the entire 1999 total, and all from just 69 million registered handsets.

If you think that sounds like a lot of text messaging, it is small change compared to other countries. In the US according to the CTIA-The Wireless Association, 28.8 billion SMS messages are sent monthly. In China, where mobile penetration is only around 40 per cent, some 8.3 billion text messages are sent each week. That's a lot of sore thumbs.

It can be no surprise then, given the popularity and comparatively low cost of text messaging that it is becoming an increasingly useful marketing medium. A recent survey of 50 global brands commissioned by mobile messaging firm Airwide Solutions, revealed that 28 per cent of organisations have already launched SMS (short messaging services) campaigns and 18 per cent MMS (multimedia messaging services) campaigns, with the number considering implementing SMS or MMS marketing in the next 12 months doubling to 28 per cent.

For companies that take the text marketing plunge the statistics suggest response rates are higher than traditional channels. Over half of surveyed global brands that ran text campaigns said that 10 per cent or more recipients requested more information, and in financial services 73 per cent or more undertook a financial action as a result.

As well as driving sales, text messaging is a very useful way of adding value to customer service. US Airways has just introduced technology to allow on-demand flight status reporting and frequent-flyer registration via text messaging. Passengers can check whether they are going to be late or not by texting their flight number to the airline's text messaging service, and will get real-time flight information, including arrival and departure times, in return.

When devising a mobile marketing campaign companies should take heed of some recent research by UserCentric, a Chicago based usability consultancy. It looked at the errors that users of different handheld devices made when texting, and given the explosion in popularity of the iPhone offered a cautionary note for lovers of both style and texting.

The study which compared hard-key QWERTY phone owners against iPhone owners discovered that while the rate of text entry was similar; iPhone owners made more text entry errors during the texting and left more errors in the finished messages. In particular, iPhone users had problems with incorrect input of certain letters, frequently inputting the letters Q, P, J, X, Z, and W, when intending to input E, T, A, O, and I.

Not so good for companies with lots of vowels in their name, then.

Reporting the numbers

Warren Buffett is no mug. Actually he is the second or third richest man on the planet, depending on which source you read. Buffett made shareholders (he prefers the terms - co-owners and partners) in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, large sums of money by perfecting a value investment strategy. A component of that strategy involves Buffett sifting through piles of company annual reports, on a daily basis.

Given the average content of a corporate report, Buffett must have an iron will and a strong constitution. Disregard the glossy covers and full colour pictures, often running out at over 100 pages, the majority of annual reports, even the reflective and forward looking prose heavy directors' statements, read like a dictionary of financial jargon and management speak and speedily make their way to the shareholder wastepaper bin, without passing more than the merest hint of scrutiny.

Reports containing phrases like "certain adverse trends became apparent in these end-markets," and "when the Group generates surplus cash and existing investment needs are met, then the economics of share repurchases or special dividends to shareholders will be examined," are unlikely to win literary prizes. But then maybe the people these reports are intended for are less bothered by the prose, and more concerned about the numbers.

So just who is likely to be reading an annual report from a major corporation? A motley crew of stakeholders says Ken Lever, former CFO at Tomkins, the global engineering and manufacturing group, and chairman of the Financial Reporting Committee of the 100 Group of UK finance directors and CFOs.

"I would imagine certainly that our employees do; our customers from time-to-time, seeing that the company is adequately financed to service their needs; suppliers, from a credit worthiness point of view; credit rating agencies, in our case because we have publicly rated external debt; regulatory bodies will look at it, by which I mean both financial reporting regulatory bodies, such as the financial reporting review panel, or the SEC, or other regulatory bodies interested in ensuring that we comply with certain regulations." It is a long list.

It doesn't have to be dull though, and Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway is a perfect example. Buffett likes to write his own management statement cum chairman's missive, and in an entirely plain speaking, unstuffy, unconventional but highly informative and entertaining manner.

Where else after all would you find the Chairman writing the following after an unusually dismal corporate performance, "relative results are what concern us: Over time, bad relative numbers will produce unsatisfactory absolute results. Even Inspector Clouseau could find last year's guilty party: your Chairman."

Other companies too have a more free wheeling approach to corporate reporting statements, outside the mandatory financial accounting that governance and regulation insist must be present. Annual reports from Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream company, for example, made entertaining reading.

Take this excerpt from the 1994 report. "When we went looking for a new CEO, we wanted to look in places where you're supposed to look and in places where companies don't normally look for CEOs.

"So we asked all who were interested to apply by writing an essay - 100 words or less - on why they thought they were the person we needed…..The best thing that happened, though, was getting thousands of pieces of mail from people all over the country (and beyond) who wanted nothing more than to share their creative spirits with us . . . OK, maybe some wanted to wing free ice cream for life."

Warren Buffet's letters to shareholders
www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Twittering

Why email, text or phone when you can twitter? Twittering is the latest communication craze to emerge from the birthplace of most social networking and other communication technologies -California.

If it was already hard finding the time to do your work with all those emails to reply to, with the advent of Twitter it has just become even more difficult. A kind of micro-blogging, or is that nagging, activity, twitter is a service that allows people who sign up to send updates via a range of mediums - the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application - that then appear on the user's profile page and are instantly sent to those people within the users permitted circle. The messages are a maximum of 140 characters long.

The website advises that the service allows people to respond to the question "What are you doing?" with useful information, such "I'm late for my meeting". Yes, conceivably it could be useful, even a collaborative tool. Equally likely, however, is an exchange along the lines of:

A: What are you doing?
B: I'm twittering. What are you doing?
A: I'm twittering too.

And while we are twittering, we are probably not working. As with all brilliant technological innovations, twitter imitators abound, if there is not one already expect to see a squawk sometime soon. It is all part of the booming social networking phenomenon, the long-lasting business utility of which is yet unproven.

And to anyone who is interested: I'm having a cup of coffee. What are you doing?
http://twitter.com/blog/

Jibba Jabba

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky. Simon & Schuster

The preface of this book quotes Mr T of The A Team fame thus: "Don't give me none o' that jibba jabba". "Jibba Jabba" refers to the opaque, acronym-rich, business-school-speak jargon which we in business can all resort to - for a variety of reasons.

In this entertaining book, Fugere et al pepper their review with a host of business language excesses, management consultancy Accenture's annual report being an obvious (and easy) target.

The book also offers some remedy out of the morass of corporate speak and concludes with a useful jargon-buster index: action item (task); bandwidth (time); offline, as in 'let's take this conversation offline' (ie elsewhere).

Guaranteed to put a few consultancies out of business, business guru Dilbert offers a jargon buster in which you can generate your own mission statements - see here: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi