As new technologies continue to change the pace and nature of the workplace, individuals face the ever-growing challenge of remaining ahead of the curve.

Having grown up in the era of self esteem, today's young employees have been inundated with extrinsic positive affirmation their whole lives. This has often resulted in them needing constant praise and validation from employers and managers.

In this short video, Michael McQueen explores some of the challenges and implications of dealing with 'high maintenance' young people while outlining strategies for responding to them effectively.

Most organisations know that innovation is important, but many struggle to make it happen. It's a more complicated goal than, say, improving your IT. How do you increase the amount of new ideas your organisation generates, and create pathways for those ideas to be shared, grown, trialled and – when they are good – implemented?

One might be tempted to assume that anyone who works in telecommunications is a pretty good communicator because, after all, that is what you do; you help people communicate. But communication – even before Wi-Fi, twitter and smartphones- has never been simple.

In the late 16th century, a medical student in the Italian city of Pisa observed a swinging chandelier with interest. Later, after scrutinizing a collection of chandeliers of all shapes and sizes arcing from left to right the student, one Galileo Galilei, concluded that whatever their form or size, chandeliers take roughly the same time to complete one arc.

Galileo’s subsequent experiments led to theories that rocked the prevalent school of thought in Europe at the time – namely that the universe revolved around the Earth.

Pretty much all of my clients around the world are trying to change things, whether it be finding efficiencies, changing the way managers or staff work or trying to reach customers in news ways.

And pretty much all of them are finding it hard.

Someone recently told me that the company they worked for spent ‘2.8 million dollars last year on innovation.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Is it a very innovative company?’ He thought for a moment and then, slightly embarrassed, said ‘No.’

2013 will be looked back on as the year that marked the Death of the Gatekeeper. Known technically as ‘disintermediation’, recent years have seen the viability and necessity of middlemen significantly eroded – an erosion that will gather pace in the coming 12 months.

From travel agents to financial planners and stockbrokers, modern technologies and the Internet in particular have seen a profound change in the nature of distribution. The gates have been blown wide open – consumers can now connect directly with service providers and have access to ample information with which they can make intelligent buying decisions.

Using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is one of the main ways that upscale financial services companies can increase customer interaction and build loyalty.

Affluent consumers, more than anyone else, expect to interact with their financial services representatives both in-person and not via with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Providing a comprehensive and consistent mobile strategy for consumers will help to increase brand loyalty.

Michael McQueen reviews “How Cool Brands Stay Hot” on his blog:

More than ever before, the youth market is as lucrative as it is big. Considering Gen Y possess 50 cents in every dollar of discretionary spending power, companies and brands ignore this target demographic at their peril. After all, businesses whose messaging, distributions channels and products are only geared toward older generations will find themselves increasingly irrelevant in the coming years.

From the Idea Engineers Blog:

Closed loop contactless cards, such as Octopus, Oyster & Ez-Link, has been gaining mainstream scale and has penetrated by major sectors such as transport, payment, and retailing. Contactless card technology can now expand its domain of applicability by adding contactless functionality to the mobile phone. The Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile service, which leverages the current contactless infrastructures, particularly those based on industry schemes like VISA or MasterCard, has in the last year seen some major announcements and implementations. In countries like Korea and Japan, services benefiting from the convergence of contactless card technology and mobile phones have already been introduced commercially, and these converging services are ubiquitous and successful.

eriously...mobile at point of sale will change advertising as we know it

In Wikipedia, the universal arbiter of debates on definition or trivia, "Advertising" is defined as follows: a form of communication used to encourage or persuade an audience to continue or take some new action.

I had a great conversation with Ken Wallace on the weekend, who's not only a cracking screenwriter but also has the pleasure of being my brother-in-law. He has recently had his second child, and was saying how he thinks in general people consider the way that they parent, 'normal'. Everyone else does it incorrectly or abnormally.

That is, you become your own benchmark for what is 'normal'. Everything else is a bit wacky or, often, 'dysfunctional'.
There is such wisdom in this – it is not just parenting, it's everything. We become our own benchmark for what 'normal' all the time. And then we get caught up in diagnosing problems with others; we talk about how people need to change and improve and fix things.