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The Magic of Mind‐Mapping for Business Summary/Description Discover the benefits of mind‐mapping to help you to run your business more effectively. This is a guide that shows how business owners can supercharge their performance. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ Are you a really organized person? Does everything always get done on time? Are you a to‐do list addict? Do you manage meetings effectively? Do you ever brainstorm with your work colleagues? Do you find planning is easy for you? Are you effective at making presentations? If you can do all of these things without some sort of tool for managing all of these activities, congratulations! For most of us, it is simply impossible. As a management consultant, I have introduced the concept of using mind mapping to business owners to help them run their businesses more effectively, for the past 15 years. Prior to that, I used mind mapping in College to help me take effective notes and to prepare for examinations. So what is mind mapping? It is a structured way of collating information that allows you to quickly summarize the information in a visual way. Take a simple example of a business owner with 5 different departments in his business, with 5 different department heads reporting to him. Assume that each department has 5 different business issues that are critical for its success. Now assume that the business owner is directly responsible for 5 additional key areas as the chief strategist in the business. These might include key account management, product innovation, financial management, supplier management and new market development. In this simple model there are 30 different variables that require active participation and management by the business owner. If you take this to its next logical level, there could be 5 to 10 secondary tasks that need to be managed within each of these 30 different variables. For example, within key account management, the business owner may have 5 specific tasks to carry out or manage for 5 different key customers. He may also have 5 or more initiatives on the go with relation to new market development. The implications of this are astonishing in that the owner may have more than 100 things he needs awareness of on a consistent basis if the business is to be successful. How on earth can one individual deal with so many things on an ongoing basis and not drop the ball occasionally? Mind mapping provides the answer. In the scenario described above, I would recommend that the owner create a mind map at least once per month with the title of Key Initiatives for X Month in the centre of the page. Extending out from this central bubble he should create a bubble for each of his departments and a bubble for each strategic area he directly manages. Linked to each of these second level bubbles, all of the subsidiary tasks and initiatives that are critical to the business should be listed. Now the owner has an ordered list of all that is moving and shaking in the business on one single page. It allows him to actively manage every single key initiative and interact with his direct reports to ensure
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nothing slips by him. Every time something happens with any of the tasks or initiatives, the owner simply adds an additional item to the mind map but one step removed from the original item. This is a really easy system to use and is childlike in its simplicity. You can start doing it on a single sheet of paper with a pencil or you can buy one of the electronic versions available on the internet for less than $250. With some of the electronic versions, it can be used in work groups or across a network so that all of your team are looking at exactly the same information and controls. Many of the electronic versions come with ready‐made templates that support the most complex of business tasks to the more mundane day‐to‐day routines. This is just a simple example of using mind mapping as a barometer for measuring how your business is doing and managing key initiatives. It can also be used for a wide variety of other business purposes such as: ‐ Planning ‐ Project Management ‐ Presentations ‐ Meeting Management ‐ Problem Solving ‐ Brainstorming ‐ Workload Management ‐ Report Writing ‐ SWOT Analysis ‐ Business Process Development Mind mapping has literally hundreds of different applications and it can turn you into a structured thinker as well as supercharging your business performance.
BIO Resource Box Niall Strickland is an MBA with more than 20 years of business coaching and management consulting experience working with CEO’s in small and medium businesses. He can provide additional information about the benefits of MindMapping in your business at www.NiallStrickland.com. This article has also been published on www.EzineArticles.com
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