Shoshin: The Olympics of Business

Thursday, July 29th, 2021|

We’ve been engrossed in the Olympics this past week as we watched athletes who had put their lives on hold to continue training for an additional year, finally take center-stage in Tokyo to compete in their chosen sport.

Each athlete speaks about their perseverance, determination, and unwavering focus on becoming better and stronger in their field. Even those who are at the top of their ranking in their nation, or have won previous Olympic medals, continue with the same determination and focus to better themselves each time they enter their respective arenas. For many, it means 6+ hours of training each day—every day, even though they are already masters in their sport.

They understand that a one-second improvement can be the difference between standing on the podium, or not. These athletes have accepted the Shoshin mindset, a Zen Buddhist philosophy of a beginner’s mindset that fosters openness and acceptance for continued learning and growth.

This made us think about business and the importance of ongoing training for our teams. How often are companies and employees incorporating the Shoshin mindset?

Many firms start new hires with an intensive orientation and training, and then only provide feedback or additional training when something isn’t going right. Even worse, if the candidate hasn’t performed well by a specified timeframe, it’s assumed they are not a right fit for the role. A lack of proper training by the company is rarely taken into consideration.

What if, as hiring managers, we created a continuous training program, an investment in growth and learning to encourage all employees to adopt the Shoshin mindset in their daily routine?  And, as candidates what if we created an opportunity to go back and review the basics, shore up our foundational knowledge, add new skills and embrace new technologies?  Even if we’ve been doing our craft for years, how much more successful would we be if we improved our skills and became just a little bit better, faster, stronger?

At Artisan Creative, we’ve embraced continued learning and have implemented the following into our workflows over the years:

Training on Processes

  • Hold on-going bi-weekly one-hour trainings to continue learning together
  • Create short Loom Videos for all tasks, so new hires have a quick visual reference
  • Use Trello to house docs and references
  • Utilize Slack for quick questions if someone is stuck

Self-development

  • CliftonStrengths assessment to learn more about our peers
  • Toastmasters to become a better presenter and speaker
  • As needed Coursera or Udemy classes

In a market where it’s a challenge to find candidates, continuous investment in our teams can make the difference between success and failure.

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few~ Shunryo Suzuki, Zen master

How do you implement ongoing training and the Shoshin Mindset in your business?

We hope you’ve enjoyed our 589th a.blog.

Creating Your Personal Brand

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019|

As a creative professional, how do you open better opportunities and do more of the work you love? How do you differentiate? In the context of personal branding, this means presenting yourself in a way that sets you apart from others in your field. Your personal brand should be easy to explain in an elevator pitch, yet complex enough to generate a range of ideas and evolve over time.

You can get some unusual personal branding insights from a classic Harvard Business Review interview with Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the richest person in the fashion world, and one of the world’s leading authorities on building “star brands.”

Become a Star Brand

According to Arnault, a star brand has four key characteristics. “A star brand is timeless, modern, fast-growing, and highly profitable,” he says. “It is very hard to balance all four characteristics at once – after all, fast growth is often at odds with high profitability – but that is what makes them stars. If you have a star brand, then basically you can be sure you have mastered a paradox.”

To work toward becoming a creative rockstar, you should cultivate your own unique sensibility independent of passing trends. At the same time, you should pay attention to your media diet and attune yourself to the zeitgeist. And, you must have the courage to ask for what you’re worth. A creative staffing firm such as Artisan Creative can help you get a fair price for your work.

Be Your Own Biggest Fan

“A lot of companies talk about quality, if you want your brand to be timeless, you have to be a fanatic about it,” says Arnault. As a creative professional, this means pouring your passion into every piece of work you do. It also means presenting that work in a way that showcases your personal brand in the most flattering and exciting possible light.

Make sure you invest time and attention to detail when building your creative portfolio so it best communicates who you are and what you’re capable of. Attend networking events to build a professional support system and get comfortable with promoting yourself.

Be Bold and Take Risks

When working with the world’s most famous designers, Arnault’s biggest management priority is to give them the freedom to be themselves. “If you think and act like a typical manager around creative people – with rules, policies, data on customer preferences, and so forth – you will quickly kill their talent. Our whole business is based on giving our artists and designers complete freedom to invent without limits.”

As the manager of your own personal brand, this means giving yourself some space to pursue unusual ideas and try new things. You can orchestrate the right environment to loosen your creative muscles, or do fun and experimental work on your own time – work you really love – to freshen your perspective. Also, give yourself permission to occasionally pitch a risky idea. It may unlock some hidden potential in a project.

First, build rigorous self-discipline. Then give yourself the freedom to be yourself and shoot for greatness.

Seek Inspiration From Unlikely Sources

While he doesn’t make demands, Arnault does encourage designers to broaden their horizons. “Not long ago, I said to one of our designers, ‘Why don’t you take a trip to Japan and see what the teenage girls are wearing on the streets at night?’ These girls are very leading edge in fashion; they create trends years before they hit the mainstream, like with those very high shoes, and it makes very good sense to watch them. I did not say to the designer, ‘Go and see what kinds of shoes they are wearing and copy them,’ although I was hoping he would notice their shoes. I just suggested, ‘Go look.'”

To grow and refine your personal brand, capture ideas and inspiration from as many different places as you can. Go to museums, art galleries, symphonies, and public gardens, and take note of anything that strikes you. Explore the hidden history of your profession and how it’s done differently in other times and places. Keep an open mind, and you’ll have the flexibility to do unique, courageous work that is unmistakably yours.

At Artisan Creative, we help creative professionals get more from their lives and careers. Contact Artisan today to learn more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed issue # 546 of the a.blog.

Become Your Own Influencer

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019|

Social media influencers are changing the way we think about marketing. You don’t need fancy vacations or five-course meals to make use of the concepts behind influencer marketing. As a creative professional, the success of influencers can inspire you to build your personal brand, increase your network and reach, and find better professional opportunities.

Know Your Niche

As a creative professional, the more specifically you define yourself, the more you will stand out. This means honing a concrete elevator pitch and choosing a niche within your industry. “An easy way to select your niche is to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses,” says digital marketing consultant Shane Barker. “Choose a niche that allows you to showcase your strengths and hone your skills further. Deciding on a particular niche will help you streamline your audience and tailor your content to suit their preferences.”

Develop a Content Strategy

Once you’re clear on who you are, you can create content that reflects your skills and values and establishes your presence and authority in your industry and community. Your content strategy can encompass your design portfolio, your social media activity, blogging, video, or anything else that gets your message out and makes others aware of what you do. To become more influential, treat yourself like a small media company, and be thoughtful and deliberate about what sort of content you put out and how it aligns with your brand.

Choose Your Channels

There are many digital channels available, with more emerging all the time. Rather than trying to use them all, it’s better to choose a few you enjoy the most and are best for transmitting your work. If you’re a visual designer, you’ll want to use video or image-based channels to showcase your aesthetic sensibilities. If you’re a copywriter, you can publish articles on LinkedIn or use Twitter to test your concepts, slogans, and taglines. Newer channels can present unusual opportunities for those on the cutting edge.

Keep It Consistent

Your choice of channels is less important than your commitment to show up and stick with them. To build influence, you should be willing to put out a steady stream of content, provide value for your audience, and pursue continuous growth and improvement. With social media, being “always-on” can be a challenge; automation software can help, allowing you to create lots of posts in one sitting and parcel them out over time.

Engage and Grow

If you persist, iterate, and keep putting your best self forward, don’t be surprised to see your influence grow over time. As your work touches people’s lives and new opportunities present themselves, be sure to engage with those who support you. The ability to develop a worldwide professional network and work out your ideas with a supportive audience in real-time is perhaps the most rewarding perk of being an influencer, even if it’s just in your small corner of the world.

At Artisan Creative, we help creative professionals find new ways to enrich their portfolios, networks, and careers. Contact Artisan today to learn more.

Building Leadership Skills

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019|

Being a great leader requires more than getting a promotion. Every great leader has a unique mix of skills – wisdom, courage, humility, analysis, empathy, among others. As a manager, you can cultivate and improve yourself as a leader. No matter what field you’re in, what role you have, or what your team needs from you, some principles of exceptional leadership are consistent across time and disciplines.

In 2009, the author William Deresiewicz delivered an address to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point on the topic of leadership. Specifically, he focused on what differentiates great leaders from the rest, and how leaders can learn to buck convention and groupthink and to trust the wisdom of their minds and hearts. The speech has become a classic among those who aspire to the timeless attributes of powerful, holistic leadership.

Deresiewicz’s ideas can help you accomplish your goals, help your team surpass its own expectations, hone your perspective, and make the most of your innate leadership ability in any situation regardless of team size and structure.

Cultivate Focus

To focus means to set aside time for difficult challenges and deep work. It requires eliminating distractions, honing in on what matters, and tackling your biggest challenges head-on. It means learning to apply mindfulness not just as a practice of self-improvement, but as a way of approaching all your important tasks and responsibilities.

Deresiewicz says, “it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas… can only be found within – without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.”

Learn To Be Alone

Indeed, the central topic of Deresiewicz’s address is the importance of solitude. The only way to lead others is to get comfortable with being alone.

“I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things,” he says. “But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.”

Whether you’re an introvert, an extrovert, or something in between, it is essential that you take time alone with your thoughts and feelings to better know yourself and build trust in your own counsel. This will give you the true bedrock confidence that will let your team relax and know you know what you’re doing. Whatever responsibilities you have as a manager and a leader, perhaps the greatest is to take the time and space you need for yourself.

Build Relationships

Solitude, according to Deresiewicz, “can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counter-intuitive: friendship. Of course, friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that ‘the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.'”

As a leader, you must build a network of peers, mentors, and friends who want the best for you, who can see opportunities for you that you can’t, and who can engage with you in infinite games and deep, honest, fearless conversation. These are the relationships that most matter.

We’re All Creatives Now

Technology is changing the structures of business and society at a dizzying pace. We can no longer rely on the safety of convention. Managers and leaders must embrace the necessary skills and mindsets of creativity. We must innovate, improvise, think differently, and think positively.

The essence of creativity is courage. It’s not just for capital-C Creatives anymore. As a leader, you must be free to explore, have the intellectual honesty to critique your own ideas, and have the guts to defend them. That’s the sort of bold, compassionate leadership today’s team needs and wants.

At Artisan Creative, we have decades of experience helping leaders build winning teams and winning mindsets. Contact Artisan Creative today to start the conversation.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the 541st issue of the a.blog.

A Guide To Creating Mood Boards

Wednesday, February 20th, 2019|

For designers, digital storytellers, project managers, or anyone in the business of creating, mood boards are a useful way to brainstorm, showcase specific design concepts, or communicate the bigger ideas around a project.

Never made a mood board? Give it a go! Even if you don’t consider yourself a designer – you may find that honing your ability to organize images enhances your power as a communicator. If you’ve hit a stuck point at work, or need a jolt of aesthetic inspiration, making a mood board is an inspiring way to drill down to basics, rediscover what matters, and shake out some new ideas.

When creating a mood board, keep this advice in mind.

Think Like a Collector

Whether you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed or taking a walk in your city, take in your environment through the lens of an image curator. Smartphone cameras, bookmarking tools, and screen capturing software make it so easy to create ad hoc scrapbooks of the colors, patterns, and other sights that catch your fancy as you go about your daily travels.

Center One Big Idea

To make your mood board more cohesive, start with one large image, place it near the middle (or in some way that indicates its prominence), and arrange other images around it. Some of the best mood boards also function as visually rich mind maps.

Be Obvious

If your mood board is for your eyes only (such as a vision board to help you set personal goals), it’s not so important that it be easy for others to understand. However, if you’re sharing your mood board with colleagues, collaborators, or especially clients, be ready to answer any questions they might have before they have them. That means it’s okay to use well-known “classic” images, or even use text to drive home important ideas.

Go For Emotional Resonance

Be cognizant of color theory, Gestalt theory, and best practices around typefaces and other design decisions. Make sure your smaller choices are in service to the larger emotional sweep of your mood board. The goal is to create an emotional response to give your ideas the power of strong feelings.

Experiment With Different Sorts of Images

As long as your mood board makes sense as a whole, there’s no reason to limit yourself to photographs, illustrations, and other common images. Experiment with text, maps, diagrams to create striking visual metaphors, and anything else that may help you get your points across.

Experiment With Formats

There is power in the unexpected. Tools such as Pinterest now make it wonderfully easy for almost anyone to generate a mood board. That means that, if you want to go offline, break out your glue sticks, and do some old-fashioned collaging, you can make an even bigger splash at presentation time.

Presentation Is Everything

Whenever possible, always present your mood boards in person. This gives you the opportunity to showcase your work as you want it to be understood, to clear up any confusion, to receive feedback (an opportunity to improve and clarify your work), and to transmit the personality and flavor behind your mood board. Presentation skills are important, so whatever you do, seek as many opportunities as you can get to become a more agile and effective presenter.

For practice, try communicating your personal brand through the medium of a mood board, and then present it to a sympathetic colleague or your creative recruiter.

Mood boards are just one of our favorite techniques for honing ideas and building a brand, a company, or a creative career you will love.

Contact us today to discover many more and see what Artisan Creative’s knowledge, experience, and inspiration can do for you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our 510th a.blog.

 

Favorite Books & Shows of 2018

Wednesday, December 19th, 2018|

As the year comes to end, we wanted to recap some of the fun shows, movies and books of 2018 that our a.team has enjoyed. We are clearly an eclectic group with a wide array of tastes. Hope some of these resonate with you too! What were some of your favorites?

Favorite Books of 2018

Favorite Movies/TV Shows of 2018

We hope you’ve enjoyed our 501st a.blog.  We wish you a happy holiday season.

 

Our Top 25 Blogs

Wednesday, December 12th, 2018|

We are thrilled to publish our 500th blog today. As we approach the end of the year, we’d like to share some of our a.team’s favorite blogs.

These cover a range of topics from self-development and time-management to job search, hiring, and much more.

We hope you enjoy this top 25 greatest hits compilation.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our 500th post.  You can find plenty of other tips, inspirations, best practices, and advice on our a.blog.

We look forward to connecting.

Practicing Design Thinking

Wednesday, November 28th, 2018|

Whenever dealing with difficult challenges, applying design thinking concepts can achieve interesting results.

The ideas, strategies, and methods associated with design thinking are not exclusive to the field of design. They’re continuously being used to tackle crucial issues throughout society, from urban planning, to voter turnout, to climate change. Engineers, educators, and activists all make use of design thinking concepts and principles in their work, especially when they encounter problems for which older modes of thought have proven inadequate.

Here is a quick guide to some key concepts that foster design thinking. This should give your team what it needs to get started using design thinking to gain fresh perspectives on new or established challenges.

Observe the Core Principles

As laid out by Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Program, the driving principles are:

The Human Rule: All meaningful activity is a social activity. Always center on the humans.

The Ambiguity Rule: Test the limits of your own knowledge. Get out of your comfort zone. Dare to see things differently. Fall in love with the questions.

The Redesign Rule: There is nothing new under the sun, yet the context is ever-shifting. You’re always using existing resources to address unchanged human needs in ways that are appropriate for new technologies, capabilities, and situations.

The Tangibility Rule: To facilitate better communication, make your ideas tangible, rendered in pictures, sounds, feelings, and working prototypes.

Respect the Process

Rikke Dam and Teo Siang of the Interaction Design Foundation break down the design thinking process into five steps. The steps often repeat themselves, sometimes overlap, and do not always occur in sequence. What they do, is serve as a rough guide.

Empathize: Design thinking is human-centered thinking, and always starts with the real needs and behaviors of the user.

Define: When you’ve usefully defined and formatted your problem, you’ve gone a great distance toward solving it.

Ideate: Generate ideas through collaborative brainstorming. Adopt the attitude that, if you eliminate creative blocks and properly value ideas, you’ll never run out of them.

Prototype: Create a working model. Put your idea out in the world where users can interact with it in a tangible form.

Test: Let experts and non-experts evaluate and use your idea. Collect your results, organize them in a useful and actionable way, and use what you’ve learned to make your idea stronger.

Focus on Solutions

Design thinking frames problems as creative challenges and concerns itself with generating fresh, sometimes novel, always useful and compassionate solutions. It calls for respecting your users, collaborators, and stakeholders, and a willingness to entertain notions that may beckon you outside your comfort zone. It values criticism as long as it’s constructive and encourages positive, optimistic engagement with the world as it is, with a vision of how it can enable people to work and live more effectively together.

Whatever you’re doing, give design thinking a try, and let us know what you discover through experimenting with this new mindset.

We have decades of experience in helping people work together. Contact Artisan today to share our tools, surpass your goals, and work smarter.

 

We hope you’ve enjoyed the 498th issue of our a.blog.

 

 

Find Your Passion

Wednesday, November 7th, 2018|

#ArtisanAdvice -Find Your Passion 

Joni is a self-taught designer with a natural curiosity and gung-ho attitude toward picking up new hobbies and monetizing passions. In several years shehas launched a food blog, a granola company, became a certified holistic health coach, and launched a baked goods and flower collective. We spoke to herto find out how she went from public health and art major to successful designer without any formal design training.

Joni began playing around with the idea of a design career after graduating from Berkeley. She studied design tutorials via CDs (remember those days?) and YouTube. She loved learning and figured she had a good shot of doing design full-time. This is when Craigslist was a hotbed of job postings for kickstarting careers and Joni landed a full-time role at a design studio where she cut her teeth on the whole gamut of the design process. So what should you do if you find yourself in a similar situation? And where should you even begin?

With literally thousands of hobbies out there it can be tough to know where to even begin to find your passion. Try to be curious about everything around you and find things to do outside of work. Joni likes to be active and pack in as many activities as she can. “When you get to a certain point [in your career] there’s always a way to make it more legitimate. I tried to monetize a lot of hobbies and quickly realized some should always stay as exactly that — just hobbies.” When it comes to design, Adobe is great about providing free tutorials. And remember, you don’t have to be the best but as long as you’re scratching the itch that’s all that matters at the start.

Give Yourself a Creative Outlet

Joni worked hard at giving herself a broad skill-set, “You don’t want to be one dimensional when you work in the creative industry. It’s important to have additional places to be creative outside of your job.” In Joni’s case, she loves interacting with people and learning about new topics and industries– be it a blog or sketchbook, find a creative avenue and see where it takes you.

Nurture Relationships

So you’ve reached the point where you’ve found your passion, you’ve got the skills so now what? Work won’t find its way to you without you putting yourself out there. “I’ve always been successful with word-of-mouth business. Friends’ businesses or friends of friends are referred to me and as long as your social network knows what you do and what you’re interested in, people will come to you.” No doubt there will be times when you are pushed out of your comfort zone and here’s when you have to fake it until you make it. It’s a cliché term, but when it comes to gaining confidence it truly works. And what if you’re nervous about putting your work out there? Don’t be, Joni reassures, “The moment you get over your shyness about showing work it opens so many doors. Take your ego out of criticism and people will come to you to seek your services.”

 

We hope you’ve enjoyed the 495th issue of our a.blog.

 

7 Impactful TedTalks

Wednesday, October 10th, 2018|

TED Talks are a rich resource for ideas and inspiration. With countless hours of video and curated playlists on nearly any topic of interest, they present a nearly endless buffet for the mind and heart.

We highly recommend sampling TED Talks whenever in need of fresh perspectives. Here are a few we find particularly relevant to our goals of career advancement as it dovetails with personal, professional, and community enrichment.

Brene Brown – The Power of Vulnerability

In one of the most-watched and best-loved TED Talks of all, Brown expands on the notion of grit, one of the qualities that set Scrappers apart. She shares her research on human connection and finds that, through accepting difficulty and pain and turning them to our advantage, we can find homes in dimensions of the human experience that cannot be accessed through pure brawn alone, but through a lifelong cultivation of sensitivity and compassion.

Andy Puddicombe – All It Takes Is 10 Mindful Minutes

In an age of overstimulation, it can be easy to forget how to simply sit and do nothing, even for just ten minutes at a go. In this wise and friendly talk, Puddicombe offers a broad introduction to the core principles of mindfulness practice. He explores why it can be so difficult to do nothing, and why it’s so important. He suggests that we are what we pay attention to, and the best way to get better at using our minds is to sit back and observe them in action.

Susan Cain – The Power of Introverts

Most workplaces and most constructed environments, in general, are designed for the benefit of extroverts. In this acclaimed and influential talk, Cain shares her rocky journey to accepting her own introverted nature. She proposes that, through their powers of calm and skeptical observation, introverts have much to teach about potential new ways of doing and being. And she makes the case for building spaces and teams that can help introverts bring forth their transformative power.

Magnus Walker – Go With Your Gut Feeling

A British metalhead shares snapshots from the ping-ponging odyssey that led him to become a famous clothing entrepreneur in Los Angeles. To lead an interesting life, he suggests, we must cultivate intuition, take dangerous risks and leaps of faith, and go for what we want rather than what we think we’re supposed to want. Anyone who wants to live a bit closer to the edge can find inspiration in his exhilarating escapades and his penchant for charming and galvanizing storytelling.

Rajiv Nathan – How to Become an Expert in Vulnerability

For another expansion on Hartley’s key themes, check out career coach Rajiv Nathan’s observations on his revelatory Costa Rican vacation. He learns that entrenched knowledge can be an impediment to open-minded, open-hearted investigation, and that true strength comes from accepting how little we know about the world. Along the way, he meets a strange and surprising new friend, riffs on the foundations of Buddhism, and learns to live in a state of perpetual growth through self-critique.

Terri Trespicio – Stop Searching for Your Passion

Life doesn’t have to be a mission; it can also be an exploration. The single-minded pursuit of a dream can close doors and make your life less interesting while engaging with opportunities as they arise, and building skills by learning to “solve your favorite problems,” can help you become a person you never knew you could be. Trespicio shares her story of being fired from her “dream job,” and how she discovered that “success fuels passion more than passion fuels success.” If you’re fixated on a distant goal, or you’re nervous because you don’t have one, Trespicio’s talk is a rousing wake-up call.

Regina Hartley – Why the Best Hire May Not Have the Perfect Resume

An HR expert draws a distinction between two sorts of candidates, those who have the educational pedigrees and smooth career progressions that are generally made possible by backgrounds of privilege. And those who may hail from public schools and have uneven resumes, often because they have navigated significant hardship and uncertainty. Hartley explores the revolutionary concept of “post-traumatic growth” and makes a case for hiring for grit and humor. In a workplace that is rapidly diversifying and a society that is beginning to seriously reckon with the costs of steep inequality, her message is urgently relevant.

At Artisan Creative, we believe that the right intellectual diet is essential to success and fulfillment at life and work. Contact us today to take your team or your career to places you never knew it could go.

 

We hope you’ve enjoyed the 492nd issue of our a.blog.