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Mike Brown

Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, market analysis and planning, communications, and sponsorship marketing. His blog, Brainzooming, combines lateral thinking techniques, strategic planning processes, humor, and a DIY sensibility to give readers a steady stream of highly engaging and practical ideas for success.
Picture of Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, market analysis and planning, communications, and sponsorship marketing. His blog, Brainzooming, combines lateral thinking techniques, strategic planning processes, humor, and a DIY sensibility to give readers a steady stream of highly engaging and practical ideas for success.

Helping Other Talented People to Help You

Are you (or someone you know) having ongoing career challenges that to go beyond, “It’s a tough business environment these days and everybody feels stressed”? Do you feel as if you have so much work you can never get even the important things accomplished? Worse yet, does it seem you can’t get those around you – even members of your own team – to cooperate, contribute, and do their part in moving projects and deliverables forward? Have these types of challenges followed you through multiple positions, even multiple companies? If you are answering “Yes” to most or all of these questions,

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7 Personal Tune-Ups for Tough Times

We had lunch last weekend with friends we had not seen for quite some time. My former co-worker’s spouse looked at me, as I was now more than 20 months away from the corporate world in which she’s still immersed, and said, “You look so calm.” Her comment was both a surprise (since I do not necessarily feel calm), and exactly what I try to work on all the time. With lingering economic issues and recent wild stock market swings occupying news daily, it is clear challenging times are not going to be over any time soon. While the economy obviously

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Sharing Accomplishments: Make Self-Promotion Easier

I received a career-oriented email recently featuring an article for introverts on overcoming challenges in  job seeking and career advancement. Two days later, I attended a regional conference on innovation where a presenter remarked that Midwestern entrepreneurs are generally uncomfortable touting their business ideas to potential investors. The same week, someone I know was asked to write an article for an upcoming  magazine. The publisher said it would be great for the person to be able to say he wrote a cover story for an emerging print magazine. The potential author responded it would be cool, but he’d never put it that way

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3 Steps When Your Career Is Lacking Mental Stimulation

How are you feeling about your job and your career? Finding it boring and unfulfilling? As your organization has cut costs and corners, do you have more, but unfortunately, less rewarding work? Are you back to doing things you’ve already accomplished earlier in your career because you’re the only one left who has done them before? Are the new areas you’ve been stretched to cover not providing the same mental stimulation you enjoy from working with talents closer to your interests? A variety of people have been raising these issues with me lately. Individuals ranging from those early in their careers

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Make Your Team More Creative

Throughout my career, I’ve heard many managers complain about the need for their teams to be more creative and to demonstrate innovative approaches. The conversations usually moved quickly to the topic of deficiencies of team members and what to do to get them to be more innovative.

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Taken Out of Context

For a long time, a large corporation provided the context for my career.  Even amid dramatic change and outright chaos, relationships between me and just about everything in the big company – work variety, pace, people, meetings, surroundings, interpersonal interaction, moral support, etc. – remained very familiar. Now though, having ventured out to build my own business, I find that I’ve taken myself almost completely out of that familiar (and thus, comfortable) context. I’m sure I felt similarly when I moved from a two-person research company to the Fortune 500 world many years ago, yet I don’t recall the changes being

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