Innovation Zen

The guys from Business Pundit compiled a list with the 10 worst job interview questions. According to them, these questions confuse, irk and offend the candidate. They are:

What interests you about our company?
Have you ever brought a lawsuit against an employer?
Why did you take the pen from me?
Can you work under pressure?
If you were a […]

I had already mentioned this speech a couple of months ago, but recently I managed to find that actual video of it. Steve Jobs delivered it in 2005 for a Stanford graduating class. It has some very insightful points, check it out.

This is the direct link to the video if somehow you can’t see it.

Information technology is changing many things, and perhaps above all of them the workplace. Consider that one can not help but wonder what IT related careers are the fastest growing ones? Recently I came across an article on ComputerMajors.com that answered exactly this question. The data was partially retrieved from research carried out by the […]

Sometime ago we have already stated that MBAs are overrated. Guess what, today it is time to criticize college education!
Recently I came across another curious article listing 15 successful entrepreneurs who didn’t need college education. You can see a description for each of these entrepreneurs on the original article, and below you will find their […]

Forbes recently published an interesting article titled “The Worst Jobs For The 21st Century.” What do you think they are? If you guessed federal agents, travel agents, journalists and radio announcers, you nailed it.
Here is a quotation from the article:
“What to avoid? The usual suspects. According to the projections by the U.S. government, manufacturing […]

If you have been reading Innovation Zen for a while you probably know that I am skeptical about the value of MBAs (for the matter of fact I am also skeptical about the whole traditional education system, but that is for another article…).
Last week I came across an interesting article titled “Proof MBAs are […]

After graduating in International Economics in 2005 I went to work for a management consulting firm. It was a high profile company, so I needed to wear a suit every day. I remember that before getting started I went out shopping and spent around $2500 buying five suits and an endless number of shirts. Different […]

Out of many social networking sites aimed at professionals, Linkedin is becoming the de facto standard. If you are not using it yet you might losing some opportunities. The Web Worker Daily, in fact, recently published an articled titled “20 Ways to Use Linkedin Productively.” The 20 points on the list are:
1. Increase freelance work
2. […]

Recently I came across a very insightful article from the MIT professor Gian-Carlo Rota. In the article he describes 10 factors that affect the education of MIT students.

There was a lot of hype around emotional intelligence a couple of years ago. Is the concept obsolete? Hardly. Recently I came across an interesting article about emotional intelligence, outlining emotional competencies like self-awareness, motivation, empathy and social skills.

“Wise” and “smart” are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that “wise” means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and “smart” means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.

Blogs are certainly redefining the online landscape. There are 55 million of them and counting, with some studies confirming that more than 100,000 blogs are created everyday! Blogs are invading corporate websites, online newspapers and content portals. Could blogs also replace resumes, though?

The NextPath blog has an interesting article titled “13 things I wish I learned in College”. While I would certainly add more competencies and attitudes to the list you will certainly find those points valid…

Most of the people agree that knowledge and information are two distinct concepts. But do they also agree upon the differences that separate the two concepts? Not really.

If you want to have success you should should try to absorb as much knowledge as possible right? Well, not quite. At least not only! I believe success, whether we talk at professional or personal level, derives from three factors: knowledge, competencies and attitudes.

Do business schools really prepare students for the challenges they will face after graduation? This is a polemic topic, and I am inclined to think that most academic institutions could do a much better job then they are currently doing.

If you ask people why do they go to the university, specially if you ask that before they go, most of them will answer with one word: knowledge. Now, I do believe that knowledge is something you will get out of university, but is not the only one nor the most important.

The third point of my speech was about learning (you can find the first two under the Career category). More specifically it was about the fact that we never stop learning.

This was the second point on the speech I gave last week, which was entitled “Kick-starting your Career”.

Today I gave a small speech to the senior years of a high school where I have studied some time ago. It was not related to innovation management, nevertheless I would like to share with you the main points of my speech, which was entitled “Kick-starting your Career”.