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Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Content Marketing
In this course, you’ll learn how compelling blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media can reach customers and drive sales. You’ll also learn steps for creating an effective content marketing plan, and some important ways to measure its impact and success.
Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
Get started on your content marketing journey today.
Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
Social and digital media have dominated the communications industry for decades. But it's no secret that social media has the power to sway public opinion, and the way in which many companies use these platforms could be seen as manipulative.
What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
CAGE Distance Framework
Want to expand overseas? The CAGE distance framework can help ensure you're constructing a solid global strategy in four areas: cultural, administrative, economic, and geographic. Learn how to leverage useful differences between countries, identify potential obstacles, and achieve global business success.
Servant Leadership
There's more to leadership than driving a team to profit. In fact, there's a word for looking beyond self-interest to prioritize individual growth: servant leadership. Try this course for a quick breakdown of what that is, how it works, and how it can lead to organizational success.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
Using Japanese Values to Thrive in Global Business
Japanese companies have unique cultural, communication, and operational challenges. But they also have values that have led to remarkable longevity. Check out this seminar to hear how these values help earn trust from overseas head offices and develop employees.
Marketing: Reaching Your Target
Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.
Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
Want to compare your performance vs. a competitor? Or evaluate a potential vendor? Then you'll need to conduct a financial analysis. This course will teach you how to use three financial statements and evaluate financial performance in terms of profitability, efficiency, soundness, growth, and overall strength.
Career Anchors
What drives you to be good at your job?
Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.
Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
In this post-pandemic age, knowing how to navigate unprecedented rates of change and uncertainty will be key to surviving an increasingly competitive digitalized business landscape in the years to come.
Technology is advancing at such breakneck speeds that the rate of industry disruption caused by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation and Machine Learning requires human beings to think out of the box to keep up with the algorithms and bots originally programmed to “think” like us.
As the contrary result of AI’s mastery of thinking according to parameters of existing information, Innovative Thinking–the creative ability to generate new ideas, methods and solutions that break conventions and challenge the status quo–has become a pre-requisite for success in today’s unpredictable times. Unlike traditional thinking, which relies on patterns and predictable outcomes, innovative thinking involves exploring uncharted territory by reimagining common problems in unusual ways to come up with original solutions.
Innovative thinking is highly valuable as it can be a key driver of success in any business or work environment, laying the foundation for a culture that encourages employees to think creatively and mobilizes organizations to retain a competitive advantage by staying ahead of the trends. It also helps individuals develop a growth mindset that supports continuous improvement and resilience.
How to Develop and Improve Innovative Thinking Skills
According to the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report, approximately 73% of organizations surveyed prioritize creative thinking skills when hiring talent. With job loss predictions due to AI ranging anywhere from 300 million to 800 million over the next few years, the future of work remains unclear for many in industries most affected by automation–such as customer service, manufacturing, transportation and even finance and healthcare.
This shift, however, also presents opportunities for humans to capitalize on the “soft skills” that AI can’t match–such as empathy, creative problem solving, and most importantly, innovative thinking.
Contrary to popular belief, innovative thinking is not inborn and can be learned. Here are some examples of innovative thinking skills and tips on improving them.
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Why You Need Critical Thinking in a Diverse Workforce
Creativity
Usually associated with artistic talents, creativity is the ability to see the world differently. An effective way to adopt a creative mindset is through reimagining a situation from different perspectives by asking “what if?”. Doing ordinary things in unusual ways (such as taking a new route to work), connecting different ideas to form unified solutions and being curious about subjects unrelated to your field are other ways to gain fresh perspectives.
Critical Thinking
The ability to objectively evaluate data, ideas, situations and solutions with analytical meticulousness grounded in evidence and logic, also known as critical thinking, is central to innovative thinking. While creativity presents alternatives and fresh ideas, these must still be scrutinized objectively when selecting the most viable and useful options. To practice critical thinking, avoid accepting information at face value, consistently seek evidence to substantiate claims and always ask questions.
Curiosity
Innovation requires asking a lot of questions about the world–the “how’s” and “why’s”, the nuts and bolts, of what makes things tick. The curiosity to keep learning and expanding one’s knowledge inevitably leads to new information and perspectives that contribute to fresh solutions and approaches to problems.
Collaboration & Communication
Innovators recognize the value in getting others onboard to help turn an idea into a reality, seeing the potential and skills of contributors as an opportunity to fulfill a common goal. The ability to collaborate with others requires stepping out of one’s perspective to gain new insights, and this can be done through brainstorming sessions and interviews with people from diverse backgrounds, professions and industries.
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How To Leverage Innovation Tech and Transform Your Business
Applying Innovative Thinking in Work and Business
There are many ways to practice innovative thinking on a daily basis, whether at work or at home. Keeping a notebook, journal or note-taking application on your phone to jot down creative ideas and moments of inspiration is a handy way to document thought processes and potentially actionable ideas. Make it a habit to identify problem areas that can be improved or processes that can be enhanced in your daily routine.
Refresh your perspective by being open to new experiences, spending time with new people, learning new skills, acquiring new information and asking others for new ideas. It also helps to intentionally design your work environment in a way that supports creativity, fun and exploration.
Building habits that foster innovative thinking can help effectively redefine business strategies and identify strategic opportunities for innovation across key business components–from discovering or redefining new customer segments and enhancing a business’ value proposition to updating revenue streams with different pricing models and product/service offerings.
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Toyota’s Innovation in Employee Experience
Final Thoughts
According to research conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review, innovative companies are more profitable than those that are not. The key variable that determines this is a company’s rate of ideation–the more ideas, the faster a company grows. Innovative thinking drives progress and transforms industries, with the world’s biggest companies leveraging innovation to develop groundbreaking products and technologies.
From Adidas’ 3D-printed, customizable, on-demand sneakers and Coca-Cola’s Freestyle machine–which allows customers to create their own unique beverages–to Tesla’s electric vehicles and SpaceX’s reusable rockets, innovative thinking helps companies retain a unique competitive advantage in rapidly changing times. And best of all, it’s an accessible skill that anyone can learn.