Category Archives: Business

Make Smart Mistakes To Achieve Impossible Goals

Originally published on Forbes 14 Oct. 2014.

Author: Kimberly Wiefling

Like most kids, I was taught to avoid mistakes. Perfection was the goal, and errors were punished—sometimes with lower grades, and occasionally with a swat on the behind. Imperfection wasn’t rewarded in adulthood either, where a narrow definition of beauty left me wishing I had a supermodel figure and a more attractive face. Then came the innovation era in the business world. Suddenly we were supposed to cast off years of perfectionism and become wildly creative.

Unfortunately, a famous NASA study showed that the typical 98% creativity scores of five-year-olds falls to a mere 2% by the time these same children become adults. Creativity is messy! The creative path is dotted with imperfection and temporary setbacks, sometimes called failure. We learn to avoid mistakes, and thus stop expressing our creativity, in order to survive in our families, at school, and at work.

Here are five ways to breathe new life into the creativity with which you were born. (For the rest of this, please see the full article on Forbes here.)

Why You Should Use Secure Email Services Instead of Popular Ones

Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly

Email – you can’t really live without it anymore since that’s how you keep in touch with people, network, and apply to jobs nowadays.

And while it is appealing to just use the most popular email service (Gmail, Yahoo!, or AOL), it’s better to switch to a safer option.

Why?

Because the popular services simply aren’t secure enough.


What Risks Do Unsecured Email Services Expose You to?

You’d think popular email services have got your back, but the reality is completely different.

Here are the kinds of privacy threats you have to deal with if you use them:

1. Advertisers Breaching Your Privacy

Here’s the harsh truth – if you use a service like AOL, Yahoo!, or Gmail, you’re pretty much giving advertisers and third party apps access to your email contents.Continue reading→

Why Team Building is Necessary for a Good Working Culture

If you care about having a great working culture, Real Simple’s Maggie Seaver shares that you need to ensure that every employee feels a sense of belonging — and one great way to do that is through team building. And with everyone from the world’s largest corporations to the smallest of startups investing in team building, is all the hype about it justified?

What is team building?

At its core, team building is any action or process that aims to turn a group of employees into a cohesive team. It helps with the employees’ transition from having an individualistic to a collaborative mindset. And this is important because when employees focus on tasks and results on an individual level only, Forbes points out that the whole organization misses out in terms of productivity and effectiveness.

Team building ranges from small activities like bowling or a game night, to big activities like a sportsfest or a three-day retreat at the beach. However, it still has a bad rap for a lot of employees, many of whom see it as some mandatory “fun” activity where they must put on a happy-go-lucky face. But if done right, it doesn’t just serve as a stress reliever for the whole team. It also brings serious benefits and advantages to the whole organizational culture of the company.Continue reading→

Purpose & Different Types of Services From an Ideal French Translation Firm

Contributed article in our business series, especially for our friends doing business with France. Enjoy! – Kimberly

Translation has emerged as a lucrative business in today’s economy.  It involves a lot of money and thus attracts unscrupulous players in its market. We ensure that our customers get the best services at affordable rates. Our company translates the documents with utmost precision in the French language so that you can understand the meaning of it.

What goes on Behind the Scenes??Continue reading→

Different Types of Stamps and Their Usage

Contributed article in our business series, especially for our Australian friends. Enjoy! – Kimberly

Technology has made maintaining paperwork much easier and faster. However, there are still things that need human interaction. Any paper designed and printed by a computer is not legitimate without an authoring mark on it. These marks can be your signature, company logo, etc. Without these marks, even the most important document is just a scarp. Stamps make the document marking easier. There are several types of stamps available in the market. From wax stamps to ink stamps in Australia at Dial A Stamp, you can choose the best one for you. You can also personalize the information imprinted on these stamps. Here we try to give you an overview of the types of stamps available in the market and their implementation.Continue reading→

Keeping Your Employees Happy: a Guide

Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly

For some companies, employee satisfaction is too far down on the priorities list. Some businesses may forfeit contented employees for a high-pressure work environment or a cheap-to-run workforce. Keeping your office happy is not just about empathy or wanting others to feel pleased about their job (although those are both important), but it stops your company losing both money and time. Constantly putting out job adverts and interviewing new candidates will inevitably cost your business money through wasted and unproductive time.Continue reading→

Mentoring 101: How to Choose the Right Protégés

Effective mentorship strategies can give enterprises a huge boost. The great minds and professionals of today were not born with greatness. They were all sculpted by their experiences, and with most success stories there is usually a fruitful mentor-protégé partnership that helped develop them and guide them to success.

Industries were built on great mentorship. Take, for instance, the iconic Oprah Winfrey who had well-renowned author Maya Angelou as her mentor. Steve Jobs mentored not just one but many of the current business moguls making an impact right now, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. Fashion visionaries like Christian Dior were under the tutelage of haute couture designer Yves St. Laurent. Sir Felix Aylmer mentored Audrey Hepburn, who in turn mentored Elizabeth Taylor. And well, the list goes on.

But how do you find good candidates to mentor? Here are a few things you need to know when choosing the right protégé:

Their talents are aligned with your strategies

The key to good mentorship strategies are planning ahead and naturally embedding mentorship in the workplace.Continue reading→

How to Encourage Visitors to Your Website

Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly

A website can be the lifeline of any business, and yours is no exception. The explosion of the use of smartphones, tablets and other digital devices means that viewers can look for what they want wherever they are, and the first place they go to is the search engines. You want your website to appear in the first couple of pages of results, but to achieve this you need to know how to encourage visitors to your website. No visitors will mean a lower place in the rankings, but there are ways to make sure you get the numbers you need viewing your site.Continue reading→