News
See what a winning attitude can do for your business:
Book a MindStore motivational seminar at the Olympic Museum
The renowned MindStore seminars are now available in one of the most exciting and inspiring places in the world: the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. We are taking advantage of the Museum’s special exhibition “The Mind Makes a Champion” and the Olympic history to show you that in business as in sports the only limits to your success are those you set yourself.
We combine proven MindStore techniques with action from the greatest Olympians in a fun, unusual event to help you get inside their heads, learn how they did it, and transfer those skills into your job and even your private life.
Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. - Mohammed Ali
For a winning event tailored to fit your team’s needs, call Marvin Faure on +41 22 363 9286 or email us at info@mindstore.ch
The Olympic Museum
The Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland is running a special exhibition entitled “The Mind Makes a Champion”, open until 2 September 2007. Please consult the museum’s website for more information on this exhibition.
Interactive communication with large groups -- 01 Jun 2006
Practically all companies hold regular "all-hands" meetings where a large group of employees are brought together, usually to communicate corporate information such as results, strategies, directions, products, appointments or organisation changes.
Such presentations are usually made by senior managers - who are not always personally known to the participants - and often include large numbers of PowerPoint slides.
The hope is that the assembled employees will leave with not only a full understanding of whatever was communicated but will also be motivated to take appropriate action.
Unfortunately the reality is all too often rather different, due to the over-use of PowerPoint and one-way communication, and the fact that the necessarily general nature of the information presented makes it hard for the individuals in the audience to grasp its relevance to their daily work.
We have developed a very simple process that involves the audience effectively and quickly with large groups (of up to several hundred persons), without the need for specialised knowledge or large numbers of highly trained facilitators.
Marvin Faure at EURAM 2006 -- 19 May 2006
Marvin Faure recently presented his paper "Problem-Solving Was Never This Easy: Transformational Change through Appreciative Inquiry" at the European Academy of Management annual conference (EURAM 2006) in Oslo on May 19th, 2006. The paper was selected for the Positive Organisational Studies track.In the words of the organisers: 'The prime concern of [Positive Organisational Studies] is the analysis of conditions and possibilities to support organizational performance… [and] … the investigation of any kind of positive deviance in organizational settings and the consequences for its members that accordingly flourish and prosper in extraordinary ways.'
Marvin's paper describes his experiences with the use of Appreciative Inquiry or MindStore Future Perfect to create transformational change in organisations. Here is the abstract of his paper:
The use of management methods based on so-called positive approaches is growing apace in the United States and beginning to make inroads in Europe, buoyed by an ever-increasing body of research both underlining their effectiveness and providing their theoretical base. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is one of the most frequently used among these new approaches, and has often been reported as successful in generating "transformational" change: i.e. a change that leaves the organisation demonstrably different. Since the ability to effect periodic transformational change is vital to the survival of any organisation, the claims made for the greater efficacy of AI compared to traditional methods should be evaluated and the methodology understood so that it may be used to best effect. This paper has been written from a practitioner's point of view and it is intended to demonstrate what made the use of AI successful in generating transformational change in a number of cases, while providing some practical guidance that may be of use to organisations wishing to effect similar transformational changes in the future.
Keywords: Appreciative Inquiry, transformational change, innovation, motivation