The issue is that creativity and innovation must be implemented in a world where there are rules and limitations. In this BusinessWeek item, “Turning Limitations into Innovation,” Google VP Marissa Ann Mayer discusses how the tech leader balances creative constraints with “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” She also points out another key limitation for successful innovation: Setting short time limits for implementation.

Mayer explains, “Speed also lets you fail faster. Have you ever wondered how a product so lame got to market, a movie so bad actually got released, a government policy so misguided got passed? In cases like these, the people working on it have spent so much time and are so personally invested that it’s too painful to walk away.”

What’s good for a successful employer like Google is also good advice for employees. Are you thinking creatively about your career? Do you work with “a healthy disregard for the impossible”? Are you really thinking out of the box or just trying to stay in one — too invested in a job or company to walk away? Being creative in your career means taking on the big tasks while defining limits on what you will accomplish, along with establishing a timetable for success — or failure.

Here are more resources about career creativity:

• “Be More Creative“
• Bob Sutton’s blog “Work Matters“
• “Balancing Boundaries With Creativity“
• “Limit Creativity, Get Innovation“
• “Think You Manage Creativity? Here’s Why You’re Wrong“
• “Top Book Picks for Creatives“
• “Weird Rules of Creativity — Think You Manage Creativity? Here’s Why You’re Wrong“

Originally
from The Monster Blog

by Ryck

on Apr 18, 2007, 3:01AM

When it comes to your job search and ‘advertising’ campaign, which company are you most like? Do you carefully plan and perform extensive research of your potential ‘buyer’ enabling you to align your experience with their needs, or do you just go in blindly? Strategic research and revealing the needs of your potential ‘buyer’ is also crucial for a job seeker. Just like the company not paying much attention to their clients’ needs, if the company’s needs are neglected by the job seeker, they too may be setting themselves up for disappointment.

Unfortunately this is one area that job seekers often fail to do, or fail to do well. So important is this process in your job search and interview preparation that our e-book Ace that Interview! Cutting-edge interviewing techniques EXPOSED!dedicates an entire segment to this strategy.

If you are not currently performing any real research and are not convinced this process is vital to your job search and interview campaign, here are a few of the key reasons why you should.

Researching a company and job requirements will allow you to:

1. Prepare responses with relevant examples pertinent to the job’s requirements avoiding elimination as you will be positioning yourself as a serious contender for the role;
2. Demonstrate a fit with the company culture;
3. Strengthen your understanding of the company’s structure;
4. Establish whether or not you believe this position and organization is a good fit for you, to prevent a possible fallout down the track were you to accept the role only to realize that it was not as expected.

Your research should endeavour to pinpoint:

1. The company’s products and services;
2. The company’s target market;
3. The company’s competitors;
4. The interviewer and their role within the company. [If you gained this interview opportunity through one of your network contacts, you may be fortunate enough to gain inside information as to characteristics, mannerisms and communication style of the interviewer];
5. Special projects the company is working on (that perhaps you may have been involved in during previous employment);
6. Whether the organization is a large or small enterprise which can impact on salary negotiation. Large and longer established companies could have a larger revenue base and may be able to offer a larger salary base compared to a smaller/start-up organization;
7. What structure the interview will follow. Whether it will be a panel (who is sitting on the panel); a group panel, involving psychological assessments etc;
8. Allows you to develop powerful questions to ask the interviewer.

To begin your research regime you can try the following resources:

• Company website
• Advertising brochures and other promotional material
• Newspaper articles, professional journals
• Your contacts that may have dealt with, or are dealing with the company including suppliers, customers, existing/former staff
• Business Review Websites
• Company Research Websites, and the list goes on

The information you compile will assist you in preparing relevant situations from your work experience, qualified with past performance and examples. This information should be strategically aligned to the needs of the organization, thus positioning you as the best candidate for the job.

About the Author

Annemarie Cross is a triple-certified/award winning Resume Writer, Career Coach and NLP Practitioner, and founder/principal of Advanced Employment Concepts, a career consultancy offering specialised solutions for people striving for success and fulfilment in their careers while maintaining work/life balance. Annemarie can be contacted at www.annemariecross.com [All content is subject to copyright © 2005]

I’ve read many different HR magazines and one of the key complaints Human Resource Managers have is when they are interviewing applicants, but applicants really don’t know what their key skills are and what they have to offer the employer.

What happens with the employers is they think, “You’ve been with you all your life. If you don’t know your key skills and abilities, then how am I to know them and if you are not confident about your key skills and abilities, then how am I to be confident with you and therefore, hire you”

Some of the key things you need to know in product knowledge are actually right here. You need to know what your skills are:

• What are your transferable skills; skills that could be applied to any different kind of employment?
• What are your job specific skills?
• What is your education and not just your formal education, but some of the training on the job site training that you have done, training and upgrading employment courses or courses paid for by your employer.

All of these things are additional things to offer that you could offer the employer.

• What is your work experience and your qualifications?
• What are the things that you are really good at?
• What are your accomplishments, your achieve results?
• What is your reputation?
• What are you known for?
• Are you known for getting the job done on time?
• Are you known for getting the team to work together?
• What is it that you excel at?

We also want to know what your personal qualities are, your self-management skills and your ability to work with other people. No matter what employment you are going to go to, you are going to be working with other people and they need to know that you can do that. The last thing an employer wants to know is what your needs are, what your goals are and what your values are. These are very important because your goals, your values will make you fit or, in the alternative, not fit within my place of employment.

So before you start launching your job search, one of the very first things you need to do is really spend a lot of time developing product knowledge. Really knowing yourself and being able to talk confidently about yourself so that the employer can hire you. If you are confident about you, then I am confident about you and it makes it much easier for me to hire you.

You’ve been in your job for a few existence. You get a moderate wages and your payback are obliging. But you marvel if something’s gone. You try to tell manually you should be ecstatic you have such a good job, but some being you have to face how unecstatic you are at work.
To understand the next part of this article, you need to have a clear grasp of the material that has already been presented to you.
Are you settling? Are you making do in a job that very isn’t a very good fit for you?

Read this inventory of ten clues to establish how many of these statements reveal how you feel about your work.

1) You get depressed every time you think of untaken back to work after a weekend, a long weekend, or a rest.

The quicker Monday morning gets, the more a intellect of dread comes over you. You feel a pit in your stomach that you can’t flout. You desire there was something, something, you could do to sidestep untaken to work.

2) You splurge more time recovering from work than having fun.

After you cause work each day it takes you some hours to feel like manually again. You feel so drained all you can think about is sinking into your settee and zoning out in front of your television. You may have difficulty cooking a moderate meal for banquet because you are so shabby out from your tense day at work. Over time you complete you seldom have the energy to cranium out after work with links. Instead you rely on a beaker of violet, a container of ice cream, or a bowl of popcorn, and a DVD picture as your vent for fun.

3) You timepiece the watch all day long.

You look at the watch on your notebook, your sect headset, the border of your bureau. The time creeps by, gradually, so very gradually. How regularly do you restraint the time each hour? How manyly do you restraint the watch in the last two hours of your work day? When time moves so gradually it’s a good billplank you aren’t enjoying your work any more.

4) You splurge too greatly time restrainting your delicate dispatch somewhat than effective.

There are tons of behavior to entertain manually when you don’t feel like effective–restrainting your delicate dispatch, transport book post, surfing the web, scanning opportunities on your desired job plank. How greatly time do you splurge on non-work activities during a standard workday?

5) You take many mental shape being.

Some being you stir up and just know you can’t face a day at work. What do you do? Do you call in sick? plot a rest day? make a physician appointment? permit work early? Come up with something you penury to do for your children? An occasional mental shape day is a good approach to take charge of manually. If you find you are charming more and more mental shape being, you may want to take a look at why you aren’t ecstatic at work.

6) You have a rebillplankation letter drafted and waiting.

On very bad being, do you splurge time amendment your rebillplankation letter? Does it relieve some of your feelings of dread to assume how you’ll feel when you propose your letter or to picture how you’ll celebrate your new found openness? Do you have a time line for when you want to rebillplank? If you refuge’t done so already, I promote you to begin looking at your options so that you have something in the plant when you do propose your rebillplankation letter.

7) You criticize about your job to anybody who inventoryens.

Who knows you don’t like your job? A better suspect may be: Who doesn’t know? Do your nearby links know how frustrated you are at work? What about your burning family members? How about your coworkers and colleagues? Do you utter with your mustache styinventory, manicurist or chiropractor about how unecstatic you are? Are any of these people drained of trial you criticize about your work site? Do they desire you’d get on with your life already? somewhat than just uttering about what’s not effective for you, it may be time to do some delicate soul sharp to establish your next move.

8) You are bored juvenile at work.

The errands you do at work don’t engage you any more. You’ve been there, done that. You can do the work in your catnap…some being you feel like you are! While you try to get your work done, you fancy of having work that’s performing, meaningful, and engaging. You don’t know what that will be, but you faith something besides is out there that you can do.

9) You are consistently behind for work.

No subject how hard you try, you appear to show up behind for work. It’s like pulling teeth to get manually out of your house and into your car to get to work. You get distracted by the simplest errands at home, annoying to do just one more thing before you cranium into work. You may also find that you are viewing up behind for appointments, uniteings, and headset calls. Your drift to show up behind may also reveal in your failure to unite deadlines at work. though you may chalk your lethargy up to laziness or procrastination, I promote you to see it as a billplank that you don’t want to be liability what you feel you must do. Time to look at your options!

10) You faith to win the gamble to explain your life’s evils.

When all looks doubtful, it’s customary to look for a miracle to get manually out of the join you are in. For some it’s dayfancying about disarming the gamble so that they no longer penury a job to perform their pecuniary penurys. Others may fancy about what they’ll do when they recieve an inheritance, judgment a partner who is string financially, or disarming big at Vegas. what your fancy, it’s probable you are sharp for confirmation that your time in this job is imperfect.

If you cherish any of these billplanks in your own life, it’s time to make a commitment to manually to explore your work options. Don’t garbage the being of your life in a job you don’t like. Even if you can’t make a move nowadays, you can begin exploring your options nowadays. As presently as you picture what you want to do, the alleyway that will take you to your imminent work will become clearer and clearer.

song McClelland, PhD, is the cause of Your ideal Career For Dummies and the designer of the Career Clarity series, an online train that helps you find your fancy chargeer and make it frank. She?s helped thousands of people find a chargeer that?s a great fit both delicately and professionally. To accept a liberated duplicate of her ideal Career primer, outing: http://www.chargeerclaritytrain.com and demand the primer in the left navigation bar. The next time you have questions regarding this subject, you can refer back to this article as a handy guide.

Originally
from Job, work at home - YourJobZone

by Fairy_Long_Nose

on Mar 23, 2007, 12:33PM