Miscellaneous

Using Visual Language to Improve Your Verbal Communication

My favorite innovation techniques, such as brainwriting, come from some key books in my personal library: Gamestorming, Back of the Napkin, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work, creatingminds.org, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations. Common to all of these resources is the concept of “visual language” or “visualRead… Read more »

5 Non-Caffeinated Techniques to Wake You Up at Work

Maybe it’s the looming long holiday weekend, or the restless sleep I had last night, but I’m feeling so tired at work today. Whatever it is, you’ve been there. I know you know how I am feeling: unmotivated, hazy, slow, the list goes on, but my mind can’t process words that fast at the moment.Read… Read more »

If You Really Want It — Be Persistent!

Here’s a FABULOUS ARTICLE for future Govies! Reprint of an article on LinkedIn by Elizabeth A. Medina I’ve been trying to get into Civil Service ever since I left my campus work study job as a Biology and Chemistry lab assistant 14 years ago. Obviously, all that changed less than a month ago and IRead… Read more »

How Can You Make Real Change? Use the Three R’s

“Scared Straight” versus “Relate” As Human Services Administrator for the City of Santa Clarita, California, I oversee programs that help young people find jobs, resist drugs, get healthy, learn new skills, and avoid gang membership. We invite ex-gang members to speak to “high-risk” teens and we show teens in our Community Court program videos thatRead… Read more »

Talking Open Data, Big Data, and Cloud – Ajay Budhraja

There is a big push on Open Data initiatives since this enables organizations to share data with partners and also build new innovative solutions. Open data maximizes value creation built on structured and unstructured data. Open Data initiatives should be based on technologies that can collect and cleanse data in a standardized manner so thatRead… Read more »

7 Steps to Creating Your Personal Brand

I’ve been participating in a young professional women’s group. Recently we discussed and worked through Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls ^Still Don’t Get The Corner Office. Frankel’s book offers an assessment to help identify areas the reader self-identifies as performing well and areas the reader self-identifies as needing improvement. One common area improvement amongst the groupRead… Read more »

When Tummy Hurting is a Good Thing: Learning to Trust Your Gut

“Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret – and decode – what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.” –Malcolm Gladwell Your subconscious mind constantly records, connects and stores unrelatedRead… Read more »

The Wager

“Let us now speak according to our natural lights.” – Blaise Pascal’ Who doesn’t, at some point, experience doubt: doubt in ourselves, in our abilities and our choices? Doubt, like stones thrown into a pond, casts ripples in our lives with even the smallest stones of doubt having far-reaching impact. This blog post isn’t aRead… Read more »