Embrace difficulties to stay mentally fit and happy!

I just came by this old article from Ian Leslie in The Economist magazine, it’s about a thought: embrace difficulties when they arise, they force us to be more creative and bring more satisfaction when we overcome them. There are two ideas intertwined here: the first one is that when things come too easy, we don’t savor them enough. Read More …

Using The Past To Discover What The Customer Will Want Next

I loved the article What’s your best innovation bet? by Melissa Schilling in this summer issue of the Harvard Business Review, as it has always been very hard to guess the future: Melissa Schilling says that “By mapping a technology’s past, you can predict what future customers will want.”  For that she explains her method: 1 Read More …

Big Data and Ethics

BIG Data and Ethics was held a few weeks ago in the new premises of the DigitYser, downtown Brussels. It was a great Meetup, with interesting speakers and an interested public 😉 It’s always a pleasure when the public can contribute and presentations raise great discussions, and it is more important here on this gathering Read More …

Kill your dragons to be creative

Walter Vandervelde did a presentation at Professional Women International on creativity this month. He taught us how to kill our internal dragons to be more creative 😉 NONO, the dragon of the criticism, prejudices and conservatism: Change your automatic reply from ‘yes but’ to a ‘yes and’. That will stop criticism and you’ll feel the Read More …

Visual tool for Systems Thinking

Thanks to @PascalMestdach for presenting the visual systems modelling method at the #LeanCampBxl Unconference. This is a very easy management technique to help visualising a complex organisation, and reflect on the dynamics at work when aiming for a particular goal.  A full model of an organisation with all the different perspectives is very hard to do, Read More …

Managing techniques to improve employee’s engagement: build a culture of trust

In a very interesting article in last Harvard Business Review “The neuroscience of trust” by Paul J. Zak. describes how trust works, and its relationship with employee engagement. Then presents eight management behaviors that create a culture of trust as the base to improve productivity through employee engagement. Gallup’s meta-analysis […] shows that high engagement—defined largely as having a Read More …

Elections warn about ethical issues in algorithms

I tweeted recently on this article about how Big Data has been used on the last American Presidential campaign. “At Cambridge,” he said, “we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The hall is captivated. According to Nix, the success of Cambridge Read More …

New year’s resolution: Apply the 8-Day Data Detox Kit

We are approaching the end of the year. For most of us this is the time to Last Year’s introspection and New Year’s big resolutions…(and if you don’t usually do it I recommend it to you: time flies (!) and taking the wheel of your life brings you a lovely sense of realisation 🙂 Have you Read More …

AI and Machine Learning in business: use it everywhere!

Last week Bev from PWI’s group in Linkedin pointed me to a great HBR article: “How One Clothing Company Blends AI and Human Expertise”, by H. James Wilson, Paul Daugherty and Prashant Shukla. It describes how the company Stitch Fix works, using machine learning insights to assist their designers, and as you will see, they Read More …

Negotiating contracts, getting the deal.

This post is about THE basic stuff in business: how to get the contract, and how to make it be a good deal. Lately, I’ve participated in 2 great talks for women entrepreneurs from PWI and PWN Munich. One was about about discussing money and remunerations and the other about sales.  The key basic principles Read More …