Customer response has been fantastic:

“We use Mindjet almost as much as email; it helps us collaborate on everything. With Mindjet we plan and run whole projects.  We brainstorm on ideas, assign tasks, get alerts and track progress on who’s doing what, when it’s supposed to be done and how far along it is.” – Sterling G. Smith, Office Manager, Get the Point

With Mindjet Connect I get complete visibility into plans and projects. I can see it, I know it and follow it. I don’t have to ping anyone anymore. I can visually see exactly where we are in our critical path, what needs to be done first and what might what hold us up.” – Gary Hielkema, President, Sensor Link

The Mindjet portfolio includes rich (and very popular) desktop and mobile applications. Tying this all together, at the core of the portfolio, we had the appropriately named Mindjet Connect Vision and Mindjet Connect Action: two separate, cloud-based applications, which helped people bridge vision and action.

Two separate applications, no longer.

I am excited to announce that Mindjet has now completed the initial integration of our Connect Vision and Connect Action applications into one single application, now simply called Mindjet Connect. By combining Mindjet’s powerful and intuitive mapping methodology for brainstorming, information capture, and planning with Mindjet’s highly capable social task and work management technology, our customers now have access to a solution the likes of which has never existed in the market before.

With the new release of Connect – now available to both free users of Connect Basic as well as Mindjet’s Connect Business users – we have added the following capabilities:

- Integrated top level navigation between the Vision and Action elements of Connect, creating a seamless, single UI that allows individuals and teams to quickly move from the planning to execution stages of any project or set of work

- Social sign-in via Facebook and Google IDs (with more to come) enables seamless, one-click sign-in to Mindjet Connect for those who want to use their social IDs

- In-product connections to interactive videos and specific use-case “solutions” allow new users to get up to speed more quickly than ever

- Available storage has been doubled to 2GB for free Basic users and 5GB per Business member (pooled between the team members). Find out more about the differences between Connect Basic and Business here.

There are many applications out there that claim to aid in team collaboration – and putting “social” in the title of anything makes it sound sexy these days. It is true that having a virtual “water cooler” portal is useful and having a place to store and share files in the cloud is also valuable. But what organizations really need to do is to get work done more effectively and efficiently. This work – that is being done by both internal and external stakeholders – must be organized, planned, and acted upon in a complete and coordinated way. That is what that Mindjet platform is all about and that is what we have now delivered with Mindjet Connect.

Combining Connect Vision and Action is just the start. Over the next few months you will see increasingly tighter integrations of both the functionality within Connect, with the other members of the Mindjet product family, and with external services and applications.

Stay “Connected”.  You’ll be amazed at what true collaboration can do for your business.

Chances are you’re already sick of hearing about it so I’ll make this quick. For the socially-enabled businesses, this move means business (a.k.a. it just. got. serious.).

Social Business

A number of experts have been saying this for some time now, but the unprecedented brouhaha around Lord Zuck’s initial public offering more broadly supports the notion that the gap between business and social business is quickly closing.

Still doubtful? Create a list of the things you and your friends use Facebook for, the things your children use Facebook for, and the things your parents use Facebook for. I assure you, so long as you’re being completely honest, that list is going to be pret-ty long. In Steven Johnson’s words: “Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination.”

Despite its rocky start, this trend continues to translate over to the world of business with increasing zeal. Today more and more organizations are either using or at least considering networking-based solutions in order to improve internal communications and engage with customers. And while there’s never been any indication that Facebook intends to branch off of the consumer path with enterprise solutions, this morning’s events will certainly serve to increase that awareness and interest in the institution of connection.

Already onboard? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below. Tell me what is and isn’t working for you in socially-enabled business land. We’re still just at the beginning stages of this movement and the better we understand it now, the better the solutions will be down the road.

One such process-science relationship is apparent when it comes to data and how we receive it, process it and act on it. We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve received too many e-mails, to the point that we’ve struggled to open and respond adequately to each one and it’s a familiar sight seeing colleagues trying to juggle a dozen different jobs at once, not actually delivering to the highest quality on any of them.

There are plenty of resources available for individuals and teams to use to get their data and information processing in order, but the problem that’s very often found is they simply put everything in one folder or e-mail for you to look at, not effectively helping you deal with the problem of an information overload.

We’ve been talking about how the human brain doesn’t work like a filing system and isn’t good at multi-tasking for some time now, and how we should be looking for a better way of working that suits the way the mind naturally works.

We decided to investigate this further and explore to what extent this principle is true. We conducted a scientific study, which provided some very interesting insights into how we process data and how we can become more efficient, with the key point being the use of visualisation.

Carried out by Mindlab International at The Sussex Innovation Centre, the study looked into how office workers manage existing data through traditional software and what developments could be made to impact on the efficiency of how it was managed.

And as we first suspected, integrating visualisation into the way we manage and process information increases how efficient we are – but the results were far more startling than we thought.

For example, one of the key findings of the research suggests that when carrying out routine, everyday tasks in the office, if the data is displayed more visually, such as through visual maps, individuals are 17% more productive and need to use 20% less mental resources.

What’s more, teams collaborating on a joint project use 10% less mental resources and are a whole 8% more productive when using visualisation tools.

So if we need to use such a substantial amount of mental resources less to deal with the same information once displayed in a more visual way, this instantly increases our efficiency levels, as we’re able to deal with a greater amount of information in a successful and effective manner.

But what does this mean?

We spoke to Dr. Lynda Shaw, PhD CPhsychol, who explained “The results underscore that the human brain loves visual images and processes information presented in this way much more easily. …[the brain] stores information in sensory cortical areas and reconstructs meaning based on previously obtained knowledge, tied together by a complex web of connections. Visual mapping emulates this process with visual items that engage more areas of the brain, allowing us to see, explore and understand large amounts of data at once and convey abstract information in intuitive ways.”

Throughout the last few decades in particular, the amount of data we have to process has increased substantially, but we’ve made very little movement forward in how we’re helping our brains to cope with such a huge influx. In the last 150,000 years, our brain’s structure has developed minimally, if it all, yet we’re still expecting them to be able to cope with more and more increasingly complex documents, spreadsheets, databases, e-mails, social resources, specialist software and everything else above and beyond.

There’s no doubt we can continue to process data in the same way many of us are doing now and see the same results we’re currently seeing, but there’ll come a breaking point. A time where we physically can’t cope with the data that’s needed – and expected – to be managed.

And according to our research, a visualisation-based way of working could prove to be the shining light at the end of what is likely to be for many a very dark and difficult tunnel.

Enjoying this blast from the past? Then, feel free to embed this on your own blog. The embed code is below:

<a title="Famous IPOs: Where Are They Now?" href="http://bit.ly/JTurRj"><img src="http://info.mindjet.com/rs/mindjet/images/JESS3_Mindjet_IPOs_Design-v6.7.jpg" alt="Famous IPOs: Where Are They Now?" /></a> Infographic from <a title="Collaboration Tools from Mindjet" href="http://www.mindjet.com">Mindjet</a> 

TheGlobe.com

Way back when we had movies like Hackers, and The Net, – can you believe that they were fifteen years ago! Time flies… – the first “social media” company was born. Back in 1995, two Cornell college students, Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman launched a website that tried to make the web more accessible to all – TheGlobe.com.

Their Pitch
Krizelman and Paternont had a dream. They wanted to make the Internet more accessible to everyone, by allowing users to easily register their own, personal web pages. The hype created by this company allowed Krizelman and Paternot to raise $20 million in funding from Dancing Bear Investments.

What Happened?
In 1998, just three years after its creation, TheGlobe.com filed for their IPO. In November, they had an initial offering netting them $841.8 million. TheGlobe.com’s IPO set a record for the largest first day gain of any IPO in history at that time, closing up 606%. Two years later amidst a growing concern about the new Internet economy, TheGlobe.com’s stock suffered and the two founders were replaced. A year later in 2001, TheGlobe.com was delisted from the NASDAQ and the company shut down.

Pets.com

I’m willing to bet that every one of you remember the dog sock puppet mascot of internet bust Pets.com. Did you know that Pets.com was founded back in 1994 as an online community for pet owners? Several years and many changes later, Pets.com became that online pet supply mega-store we remember.

Their Pitch
All your pet supplies in one place, online at everyday low prices. This idea was so well-received that Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, decided to invest $50 million in the company; giving Amazon a 54% stake in Pets.com.

What Happened?
Despite their prominent, expensive and memorable advertising campaigns – including an ad in Super Bowl XXXIV and a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon – Pets.com didn’t even manage to make it a full year. They IPO-ed in late 1999, only to close their doors later that same year amidst the famed dot.com fallout of 2000.

eToys

Back in 1996, a former Disney exec, Edward C. Lenk, wanted to do something that no one else had: launch the world’s first online toy store. So he quit his job at Disney and founded the web’s first online toy store, eToys.

Their Pitch
eToys seemed to be situated perfectly at the crossroads of technology and timing. No other toy store had even thought about creating an online toy store. eToys was primed for market dominance. Lenk wasn’t the only one who thought that eToys was perfectly situated for success. By the end of 1997, eToys had secured $15 million in funding from Sequoia Ventures and Intel Capital.

What happened?
A year after the site launched in 1997, it all looked good for eToys. Christmas 1998, the company say 3.4 million visitors and recorded sales in that quarter that was 20 times larger than in 1997. Several months later in 1999, eToys enjoyed a hugely successful $7.7 billion IPO. Despite this success, it was not to last. In 1999 Lenk embarked on a very expensive advertising campaign, and by 2000 the company was confronted with substantial financial problems. A combination of strong blizzards in the North East and the fact that the customers decided to visit brick and mortar stores the 2000 Holiday Season spelt real trouble. By February 2001, eToys only had enough cash to stay open through the end of March. By the end of the month, it filed for bankruptcy selling off its intellectual assets to KB toys for $3.4 million.

WebMD

Co-founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) and famed Internet executive, James Clark had an idea. In 1995, Clark noticed that the medical documents industry needed streamlining and updating leading to the founding of Healtheon – aka WebMD.

Their Pitch
Clark’s Healtheon was created to be a central depository for medical records and billing. After gaining support and backing from Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr influences Clark to change the company’s direction.

What Happened?
By 1997, Healtheon had shifted its corporate strategy to focus on medical software development. Healtheon started developing software that would allow doctors to accomplish certain tasks such as check a patient’s coverage or making a referral to a specialist online. A year later, Healtheon acquired ActaMed (medical records clearinghouse for Dr. and insurers) for $150 million. In 1999, Healtheon and Atlanta based WebMD merge, dropping the Healtheon name. By 2004, WebMD became marginally profitable posting $150 million in profit and finally IPO-ed in 2005.

Research In Motion (RIM)

The all-too famous creators of the Blackberry, created back in 1984 by Mike Lazardis. Since inception, RIM has undergone various strategy shifts before finally focusing on mobile technology in 1987.

Their Pitch
Lazardis was always interested in technology. It wasn’t until the Canadian telephone company, Rogers, contacted RIM to help them maximize their new mobile network, the Mobitex network, that led RIM to focus on mobile technology. A lot was learned during these early years with Rogers. However, it wasn’t until the proliferation of the internet and email that RIM’s corporate strategy solidified. From that point on RIM really became the company that we know it as today.

What Happened?
The company’s smash success with their Inter@ctive Pager in 1996 propelled the company to IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1998.That same year, RIM launches the RIM 950 Wireless Handset. This was the first RIM Handset that could send and receive emails, pages, faxes and do text-to-voice message. This success enabled the company in 1999 to list on the NASDAQ. In 2002, RIM launched the Blackberry 5810 – the first Blackberry with the capability of handling phone calls. The product subsequently, wins Infoworld Product of the Year & the 2002 PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award. By 2009, RIM has more the 15,000 employees; BlackBerry becomes an icon of the corporate world. A year later in 2010, RIM Previews their 1st tablet, the Playbook, and a new OS to compete with the iPad. In April of 2011, the Playbook launches late to market and receives disappointing reviews. Months later, amidst slowing sales, RIM announces it will cut 2,000 jobs (~11% of workforce). In October 2011, a Global BlackBerry outage disrupts service to millions of customers and last December RIM announced possible strategic changes to be made. Unable to turn the tide for RIM, Mike Lazaridis decides to step down from the CEO position and was replaced by Thorsten Heins this past January. Are we witnessing the end of RIM? You decide.

I hope that this brief walk down memory lane was as exciting for you as it was for me. It should be interesting to see what the future holds for Facebook. Will it fizzle out? Or it this one of the few times that the hype is justified, and Facebook is destined for greatness? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

As I’ve previously discussed, just because you have purchased collaboration tools does not mean that collaboration will occur. It’s difficult to motivate people to want to change their habits. I know that I hate it when my morning routine is altered, even if it’s on a small scale. Imagine then, trying to change the habits of a whole sea of people like myself – that’s the real challenge.

Successful collaboration stems from instituting a collaborative culture – there, I’ve said it. But if you’re an organization that hasn’t focused on cultivating a collaborative culture, it’s not easy, especially because most team’s/organization’s culture evolves organically. If you’re a bit stumped or unsure what some characteristics of a collaborative culture are, you’re in luck. I want to share an interesting article by J. Clint Anderson that outlines four good characteristics of a collaborative culture.

Set Group Expectations

Most managers are very good at setting individual expectations. You sit down with your boss and typically outline what you are going to try and achieve that week/month/quarter. However, most managers fail to set team goals. “If you want a positive team culture, you have to know what behaviors define that kind of group experience,” suggests Anderson. I hope you just had an A-ha moment there. Anderson has a great idea. Why not have managers lay out some team expectations. He writes, “Once you identify the behaviors consider what values develop those behaviors. Values such as mutual respect, openness, honesty, mutual support etc…” You’ll find that you can easily lay a foundation for a positive team culture by introducing these values as expectations.

Define Collaborative Behavior

Once expectations have been set, it’s important to then outline what it is you’re looking for. Collaboration has a lot of different meanings, and it’s important to take some time and try to define what you want it to look like. IDEO founder, David Kelly, did just this. He outlined what he wanted collaboration to look like at IDEO. For example, “Before a person can make a decision, that team member must consult with colleagues it will affect and if it will have a negative effect, that person does not follow through.” Devising a process like this fosters collaboration. According to Anderson, “A positive team culture will develop as team members approach individual responsibility in a manner that ensues a positive result for everyone else on the team.” Additionally, by creating a process that focuses on fostering discussion, teams are more likely to have better results and “it strengthens team members’ connection quality.”

Embrace Team Diversity

“It has long been recognized that personality differences can either improve or hinder a positive team culture,” writes Anderson. It’s no surprise that personality diversity can make or break teams, “Teams that benefits from different personalities work to understand and accept one another.” Odds are the guy that drives everyone nuts, is the one you realize you need the most. A positive collaborative culture develops as everyone begins to understand and accept their own personality and those of their fellow team members.

Provide Accountability Through Feedback

One of the cornerstones of creating a positive team culture is creating accountability through feedback. You must go beyond information and lead by example. Expect some time to elapse before you see team mates start to embrace this desired culture. It’s important to establish accountability for the new practices by observing individual and group behavior and most importantly providing feedback. Feedback should help guide team members through desired changes and help them enjoy the new culture.

The modern workplace is now experiencing increased diversity, growing workloads, geographic dispersion, and organizational changes. This clarifies the reason why you should invest time and energy in your team’s culture. While you cannot control the external factors that affect the team, you do have the ability to directly influence how your team responds to those factors as you develop a positive team culture.

Following Up with the Famous

Since history often repeats itself, we looked to JESS3 to help us put together an infographic that examines the outcome of a few well known IPOs (click to expand; code is at the bottom of this post if you want to share it on your own blog):

Note that the only companies whose investor returns have seen an increase since going public are those that focus on corporate users and business folk.

Obviously hype doesn’t help numbers. The press was all over Groupon when it dissed Google’s purchase offer and instead continued down its own public path. It was considered brave at the time, but now that the company is trading at roughly half of its debut price, many wonder if it was the right move. Zynga, an immensely popular gaming company (responsible for a whopping 19 percent of Facebook’s revenue in 2011) is another recent and surprising disappointment.

Meanwhile, Jive, RIM and LinkedIn are all currently enjoying a trading price that is higher than it was when they made their first public appearance.

This paradox hasn’t gone unnoticed. Tableau Software Inc., for example, offers a very cool interactive report on “The Forgotten Enterprise IPOs” here.

Facebook as the Exception?

If the trend continues, then we can ultimately expect to see a dip in Facebook’s valuation. But then again, the social network has been something of an exception since inception (please forgive the rhyme).

Even its route to IPO-land has been an unusual one. Most technology startups with sizable audiences either seek a buyer or go public as quickly as possible. Facebook has done neither of those things, choosing instead to focus primarily on building up its user base and business model. While this makes for a much more mature debut than than the typical consumer-focused IPO, one could also argue that it means much less growth potential.

The uncertainty surrounding this move is being reflected pretty much everywhere. Bloomberg and Reuters are even battling it out with titles like Facebook IPO Said to Get Weaker-Than-Forecast Demand and Facebook’s IPO Already Oversubscribed: Source, respectively.

Place Your Bets

If there’s one thing we can be sure of in this rare intersection of Wall Street cats, Silicon Valley nerds, and everyone in between, it’s that it will be the ultimate test of Mark Zuckerberg’s genius. And I hope that the lessons we learn from the outcome, whatever that outcome may be, will far outweigh any commentary about what one should or shouldn’t wear in a board room.

Care to share which side of the fence you’re on? Please do in the comments below.

Dig the infographic? Share it on your blog with this code: 

<a title="Famous IPOs: Where Are They Now?" href="http://bit.ly/JTurRj"><img src="http://info.mindjet.com/rs/mindjet/images/JESS3_Mindjet_IPOs_Design-v6.7.jpg" alt="Famous IPOs: Where Are They Now?" /></a> Infographic from <a title="Collaboration Tools from Mindjet" href="http://www.mindjet.com">Mindjet</a> 

A Trending Argument

It’s a transformation that’s making more than just a few people uncomfortable (research shows that in 2010 50 percent of CEOs prohibited the use of social media at work), but the reasoning behind it is getting harder to ignore. Keas and Column Five put together a cool infographic that highlights a few of the more convincing benefits of making social platforms a part of your work day, including health, happiness and — surprise, surprise! — an increase in productivity:

(click to expand)

“Overall evidence suggests that when allowed a few minutes of free time, employees are happier and more productive,” reads the graphic. “What if management took it one step further and brought back the idea of recess?” (I love this idea.)

Research giants are also tuned in. Earlier this year Gartner released findings that claim fewer than 30 percent of large organizations will block social media by 2014, and I’d be willing to bet that when that time comes we’ll find it to be much fewer.

“Even in those organizations that block all access to social media, blocks tend not to be complete,” said Andrew Walls, Gartner’s research VP. “Certain departments and processes, such as marketing, require access to external social media, and employees can circumvent blocks by using personal devices such as smartphones.”

Work-Life Balance Integration

And so for all the naysayers out there, here’s the thing: the sheer magnitude of social media coupled with the rise of mobile makes social at work an unavoidable thing. And in Steven Johnson’s words: “Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination.”

Here’s the other thing: balancing acts are kind of a bummer. Anyone who can actually stick to a schedule that precisely maps out when they’ll work and when they’ll play deserves to be saluted, but most people find such confines to be too tight. In addition to denying ourselves the constant connection we increasingly crave, schedules don’t leave room for unpredictable — yet inevitable — disruption (e.g. a sudden behemoth of a project, your kid telling you last minute about his school play, a family emergency, etc.).

In the end I think what the ubiquitous nature of Facebook and other networks will quite literally force us to accept is that we no longer have to define ourselves as “career-focused” or “life-focused.” Now we can be both. And why fight that?

Image credit: Keas.com

Creating Your Dream Team

So, how do you build strong teams? Well Douglas Conant offers some excellent words of wisdom in his recent Harvard Business Review article, Building Effective Teams Isn’t Rocket Science, But It’s Just as Hard.

Hire Highly Effective Team Members

The best teams are built around strong players; however striking the right balance between those superstars isn’t as easy as you might think. When building out your team, Conant recommends keeping an eye out for what he calls the “4 C’s: competence, character, courage and collaboration.” Conant believes that “The best contributors that I have recruited over the years know what they are doing (have competence), do what they say they are going to do (display character), meet challenges head-on (have the courage of their convictions) and delight in working with others for the good of the enterprise (are spirited collaborators).”

Focus on Trust

After recruiting your team, the next step according to Conant, is focusing on creating trust. This is not an easy task and should not be taken lightly. If you successfully establish trust between your fellow team members, “it is the one thing that changes everything.” However, if you are unsuccessful here, than anything you do can feel like a huge undertaking. Conant believes that trust, based on competence and character surpasses all other attributes.

Encourage Candor

Fostering an open, honest environment, and developing trust go hand-in-hand. If you can successfully create trust, then fostering candor and collaboration should come naturally. However, it’s still good to actively foster this. Conant believes that fostering an open workplace environment is important. Establishing an environment where “the team acknowledges mistakes and celebrates progress in a timely way” is very important for success.

Set Clear Expectations

I couldn’t agree any more with Conant’s belief that “the greater the clarity of the mission, the greater the odds of success.” Team members need to understand what’s expected of them. The clearer the understanding of their roles and expectations, the greater the chances are of success.

While your next project may not be very complex, if you leverage Conant’s suggestions you will certainly see your team soar to new heights.

To put this hypothesis to the test, I conducted a very unscientific Internet meme experiment.

I see this cat dancing clockwise. Result = right brain.

I scored a 71% “Right” in The Brain Test. Result = right brain.

I scored 25/75 on the Creativity Test. Result = right brain

Although my “methods” may be a bit unorthodox, I was still excited to find that I was right (pun definitely intended — sorry).

To expand even more on this subject, Mindjet created a new infographic for its “Between Minds: An Ongoing Taxonomy of Team Dynamics” series that explores how Left Brain vs. Right Brain thinkers process information, engage in projects, perceive the world, and problem solve.

Click here to see if you use more of your left brain or right brain

You’re welcome to embed this image on your blog, the code is here:

<a title="Team Dynamics Infographic: Left Brain vs Right Brain" href="http://bit.ly/KVuWXe"><img src="http://info.mindjet.com/rs/mindjet/images/JESS3_Mindjet_BetweenMinds_RBvLB-final.jpg" alt="Team Dynamics Infographic: Left Brain vs Right Brain" width="690" height="476" /></a> Infographic from <a title="Collaboration Tools from Mindjet" href="http://www.mindjet.com">Mindjet</a>

Daniel H. Pink, author of several bestselling books about the changing work world, drew on international research regarding left brainers vs. right brainers and compiled it in his book A Whole New Mind.

“The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, is sequential, specializes in text, and analyzes the details,” writes Pink. “The right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, is simultaneous, specializes in context, and synthesizes the big picture.”

Lead Life Institute’s founder and author of Right Brain/Left Brain Leadership and Right Brain/Left Brain President Dr. Mary Lou Décosterd further describes the differences between right and left brainers: “You could say that left brainers are more focused on the here and now.They are more verbal, tangible (need to see it to believe it), and pragmatic. Right brainers are visionaries and innovators, interested in what might or could be. They are more intuitive and emotional — they trust their gut.”

She further explains how this relates to leadership. “Left brain leaders excel in and target the sheer volume of a leader’s day-to-day tactical demands. Left brain leadership is about in-the-moment planning, communicating, stabilizing and driving,” she told us. “Right brain leaders excel in and target the development of a desired state. Right brain leaders look out at possibilities and from those possibilities identify opportunities for change.”

Andrea Learned, a sustainable business leadership and marketing to women expert, told us that gender has had a traditional role in what people perceive left and right brain thinking to be. “Women are thought to ‘tend’ to be guided by those right hemisphere characteristics. Meanwhile, men are thought to ‘tend’ to be guided by the more left hemisphere characteristics, because that is what they’ve traditionally been most rewarded for (making money, winning, thinking linearly…),” Learned said. “If you look at social media and social business today, it is pretty clear that the right hemisphere characteristics will find more of the reward in the 21st century.”

Is it possible to use your whole brain? Would doing so create some sort of superhuman? Dr. Décosterd says President Obama is a good example of someone who uses both. “His is a fully integrated right and left brain approach. While high level leaders can be adept at certain right  and left brain abilities, most leaders get caught up in their preferences…More to the point, a leader is less likely to shift style from right to left brain thinking or vice versa with the ease as Obama does.”

So can someone who tends to be more of a right brainer train themselves to develop their left brain and vice versa? Dr. Décosterd believes so. “The best way to encourage a shift in brain style is to make your brain more pliable. To do so you could introduce novel stimulus to your brain — new sights, tastes, scents for example, as well as being OPEN to new ways of thinking — listen to differing views without being dismissive,” she told us. “Another way to encourage a shift is through engaging in behaviors that are more alter-brain.”

What kind of thinker are you? Left brain, right brain, or both? Last week, we asked you to give us some examples of each. After receiving a ton of feedback via Twitter and Facebook (and after much deliberation), we’ve selected a few of the many great examples you gave us to create this updated version of the infographic.

You’re welcome to embed this image on your blog, the code is here:

<a title="Right Brain vs. Left Brain Thinkers" href="http://bit.ly/Jf0gGs"><img src="http://info.mindjet.com/rs/mindjet/images/JESS3_Mindjet_BetweenMinds_RBvLB_Names-final.jpg" alt="Creative Leader versus Do Leadership" /></a> Infographic from <a title="Collaboration Tools from Mindjet" href="http://www.mindjet.com">Mindjet</a>

Also, be sure to take a look at some of the explorations of how the infographic came to be below.

It’s an intimidating fate for any organization, but nonetheless sealed: take action now, or someone will do it for you.

The Speedy S-Curve

Every business is familiar with the s-curve cycle. It essentially assumes that after a start-up phase, a rapid increase in revenue occurs, and is then followed by an eventual decline. Best-case scenario, successive curves will follow to continue the growth of the business in an upward direction. History tells us that these cycles take a considerable amount of time to complete, but like most other areas of business, today’s fast-paced and collaborative world has altered the norm considerably.

Let’s take cars for example. In 2000, Zipcar’s debut was a pretty radical move in the American transportation industry. By appealing to native travelers rather than out-of-towners, they managed to offer a more convenient and cost-effective option than traditional rental agencies. In 2010, RelayRides went a step further with peer-to-peer car sharing, allowing individual owners to rent out their vehicles on their own pricing terms. What an environmentally friendly solution for getting someone else to pay off your car.

Then again, it’s not all about saving money. Consider how Uber, a 2011 venture-funded start-up, rattled the longstanding taxicab industry — a service that can be traced back to carriages for hire in 1640 — by connecting consumers to luxury cars via mobile application. Uber’s prices are currently twice what conventional cabs charge, and yet the demand is so high that the company plans to add 25 cities (all outside of the U.S.) to its service list by the close of this year.

What’s next for the vehicular landscape, I don’t know. What I do know is that each offering decreased the legacy companies’ consumer bases, and that instead of seeing successive s-curves, they are more likely to find themselves at a dead end.

No Exception to the Rule

If you think you might be exempt from this shift, think again. Between 2000 and 2005 the music industry went from a global marketplace of $40 billion, to $28 billion and digital sales went from zero to $700 million. That’s major disruption in an enormous marketplace.

Or how about Kodak, Polaroid and Borders, which, despite their popularity, were also nonetheless affected by digitization. Instead of embracing the movement they attempted to maintain their normal ways of operating, and in the end completely lost control of distribution, pricing and marketing. Eventually, each company relegated itself to a specialized and dwindling niche, if not a complete shuttering.

Wanting to hold tight to what made you successful from the start is understandable, but not practical and, as you can see, potentially fatal.

Forgiveness is Achievable

The good news is that disruption doesn’t have to be one-shot type of deal. Should the path you choose lead you astray, there’s a good chance you can course correct in time.

When Netflix inflated its pricing model to reflect the switch from discs to streaming, their stock dropped 20 percent and they lost a whopping 800,000 U.S. subscribers in Q3, 2011. When the company realized they’d made a mistake, they released the following statement:

The last few months…have been difficult for shareholders, employees, and most unfortunately, many members of Netflix. While we dramatically improved our $7.99 unlimited streaming service by embracing new platforms, simplifying our user-interface, and more than doubling domestic spending on streaming content over 2010, we greatly upset many domestic Netflix members with our significant DVD-related pricing changes, and to a lesser degree, with the proposed-and-now-cancelled rebranding of our DVD service. In doing so, we’ve hurt our hard-earned reputation, and stalled our domestic growth. But our long-term streaming opportunity is as compelling as ever and we are moving forward as quickly as we can to repair our reputation and return to growth.

Netflix’s stock, which traded as low as U.S. $63.85 in 2011, rose 80% at the beginning of this year, and they currently hold a record number of subscribers. It’s not a complete recovery, and I can’t say how the looming competition (Redbox, Hulu, etc.) will ultimately affect business, but it’s clear that their apology has been accepted.

Disrupt When You’re Ahead

In light of companies that have been disrupted, failed at disrupting and ultimately been forgiven for disrupting badly, it makes sense to say the best time to take action is when you’re ahead. With that mindset, perhaps car rental agencies would have thought of Zipcar’s idea, or Yellow Cab would have thought of adding luxury and mobile functionality like Uber. Maybe Kodak would have survived, and maybe Blockbuster wouldn’t have been ousted by Netflix.

As a CEO it’s in my job description to seek out opportunities for healthy risk taking, but as employees of the 21st century we could all benefit from this mentality. A good dose of paranoia goes a long way by keeping us on our toes, thinking differently and prepared to pivot when need be. In time I think we’ll all see that it’s this kind of momentum that truly allows course correction as well as successful business agility.