Mitchell Ditkoff

Mitchell Ditkoff: Program Outlines

Indeed, recent U.S. Department of Labor data shows that the number one reason people leave their jobs is that they do not feel appreciated. When you quantify the cost of recruiting, orienting, and training people, that adds up. Big time. Time and again it has been proven: money is not the key driver of employee satisfaction. It is the experience of being appreciated. There is a direct correlation between appreciation and success. The more appreciation, the more morale improves and the more moral improves, the more willing people are to go the extra yard.

Creating a Culture of Innovation
When, Where, Who, Why and How
All business leaders want the same thing — and that is an organizational culture that is agile, adaptive, and conducive to sustainable innovation.

Easier said than done, however.

When you think of how difficult it is for just one person to lose five pounds or stop smoking, imagine how difficult it is to engage an entire workforce in the effort to innovate.

But just because it's difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible. You've got to start somewhere. And Creating a Culture of Innovation is the best way to start — a highly engaging wake up call that demystifies innovation, sparks creative thinking, and provides an easy-to-adapt model that each participant can immediately apply on the job.

Face it. The days of depending on R&D to ensure your organization is innovating are over. The times have changed. Now, everyone needs to get into the act.

Includes:

• Best innovation practices of leading organizations
• A robust business case for why innovation matters
• Hundreds of actionable culture of innovation ideas, sorted into eight categories
• Three culture-building tools and techniques
• A free, one-month license of Free the Genie

Catalyzing the Creative Mind
There's a lot of talk these days about the need to raise the bar for innovation and creativity. Understandably so. These are challenging times we find ourselves in. The game is changing, big time. Talk, however, is cheap. What your workforce needs is more than talk. What your workforce needs is a way to activate, accelerate, and apply their innate creativity on the job. So they can intelligently respond to changing times. So they can solve old problems in new ways. So they can generate new ideas — both incremental and breakthrough — that grow the business.

Your workforce doesn't need to be taught how to be creative. (They already are.) What they need is a simple way to catalyze their creativity. Enter Catalyzing the Creative Mind — Mitch Ditkoff's engaging interactive keynote that dramatically increases the odds of each member of workforce becoming proactive innovators on the job. Not next month. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.

Includes:

• Pre-session 20 Qualities of an Innovator poll
• Compelling business case for why creative thinking is important
• Creative thinking jump start in eight key domains:
• Balancing left brain analysis with right brain thinking
• How to recognize and go beyond limiting assumptions
• The art of framing powerful questions
• Seeing opportunities with fresh eyes
• Blue Sky Thinking (how to unleash the imagination)
• Synthesizing innovation: How to spark new product and service ideas
• How to nurture the "seed of innovation" moment
• Diffusing nay saying and idea killing behavior
• A sampling of best practices and inspiration from creative luminaries
• Free one month license of Free the Genie (online brainstorming tool)

Team Innovation
(Best as a 1.5 to 3 hour interactive workshop / keynote)
Let's cut to the chase: Your team is under the gun and stressed to the max. You want it to accomplish great things, but finding the time to reflect, innovate. or even plan seems like a pipe dream. Your team has all the talent and expertise to work smarter, but lacks the connectedness, vision, tools, and alignment to make the necessary shift.

Team Innovation — a highly engaging keynote or workshop — helps teams get their act together. A lively hybrid of reality check and all “hands on deck” pow wow, Team Innovation weaves together the very best of what Mitch Ditkoff does: open doors, open minds, and help people rally around a compelling, collaborative goal.

Team Innovation is not a magic pill, but it will work magic. How? By creating the kind of learning environment that allows real behavioral change to happen. If your team (or department) lacks an inspired vision, needs to tackle business challenges more creatively, or needs to explore better ways of working together, Team Innovation is for you.

HOW IT WORKS: Weeks before the session, we forward you a link to our online, Team Innovation poll, which you then forward to participants. The results of the poll will provide us with the input we need to customize your session accordingly – a session that will be blend of experiential problem solving, norm setting, awareness building, group discussion, and brainstorming. People connect. Fences are mended. Everyone gets on the same page. New ideas are generated. And all without participants feeling self-conscious, lectured to, or in the middle of some kind of kumbaya waste of time.

Team Innovation will:

• Foster a safe and open team environment
• Build awareness of how to become a high performing team
• Enhance feedback, communication, and meeting skills
• Increase synergy, trust, and commitment
• Spark creative solutions to pressing business challenges
• Clarify agreements, standards, and next steps
• Provide the positive momentum your team needs to succeed

Awake at the Wheel
What You Can Learn About Innovation from a Neanderthal
These days you've probably had your fill of stories about Google, Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Dell — the so-called golden boys of innovation. Stories about them are everywhere. Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Inc, Fast Company, Forbes, and every blogger looking for a few more fans are waxing poetic about the wisdom of these innovation-savvy organizations.

I'd like to put a stop to this madness.

Not because the stories are untrue. And not because the stories are uninspiring. But because the stories don't always translate to your business, your industry, and your workforce.

It's time for a new story that everyone can relate to — and that new story is the story told by Mitch Ditkoff in Awake at the Wheel, his award winning business parable about the invention of the wheel by the world's first innovator, Og the Neanderthal.

What Og had to go through to get his idea out of his head and into the world is the same journey we all have to go through — the journey from idea to execution.

Includes:

• A copy of Awake at the Wheel for each participant
• Best innovation practices from the Stone Age to the Information Age
• Teaching and practice of three creative thinking techniques
• Launching of your company's "Best New Idea" campaign
• Free annual license of Free the Genie (an online brainstorming tool)

Free the Genie
Innovation Town Meetings
In today's financially challenged marketplace, most organizations can no longer afford to throw money at problems or hire more "head count." Those days are over.

What's needed now is a far more intelligent, collective response — a way to access the existing brainpower and imagination of your workforce. You've got the horses. You've got the horsepower. What you don't have is a simple, cost-effective way to unleash it.

That's what Free the Genie is all about — a highly interactive large group ideation event that makes it profoundly easy for participants to generate, develop, and collaborate on compelling new ideas to grow the business. Incremental ideas. Disruptive ideas. And everything in between.

What's unique about a Free the Genie session is that the newly unleashed creativity of your workforce doesn't end when the meeting is over. Our service includes an annual license Free the Genie, our online brainstorming tool — a simple way to provide everyone with the means to continue developing their new ideas, post-session.

Includes:

• Pre-session, online Qualities of an Innovator poll
• Tutorial on the art and science of creative thinking
• Best innovation practices from leading organizations
• Teaching and practice of LCS (idea feedback tool)
• Free annual license of Free the Genie

The Seed of Innovation
How to Foster Extraordinary Possibility in Others
Let's cut to the chase: Innovation doesn't begin with processes. It begins with people — inspired, committed, and collaborative people.

When people are in the right mindset, your company has thousands of daily, spontaneously occurring opportunities for innovation to take root. All too often, however, these opportunities are missed.

Why? Because they are usually invisible to people. Like the rarely seen white arrow in the FedEx logo, people have a hard time seeing what's right in front of them — the opportunity to identify, spark, and co-develop promising new ideas.

The Seed of Innovation teaches people how to create the conditions that radically increase the odds of bold, new ideas being identified, nurtured, and developed on the fly.

It does so not by requiring people to add another initiative to their already maxed out schedule, but by leveraging the countless interactions they are already having on the job — in hallways, elevators, parking lots, lunchrooms, bathrooms, conference rooms, and cubicles.

Includes:

• The art of listening
• Best innovation practices from leading organizations
• Teaching and practice of LCS (idea feedback tool)
• Seven ways to maximize the seed of innovation moment
• Free annual license of Free the Genie (online brainstorming tool)

Assumption Busting 101
The Art & Science of Going Beyond the Status Quo
Of all the obstacles to innovation, the most destructive is the tendency individuals and organizations have to be ruled by limiting assumptions.

Better known as "blind spots" or "lines in the sand," limiting assumptions prevent people from trying anything new. Stopped before they've even had a chance to start, people bound by limiting assumptions bail out at the status quo.

Ask them to explore new possibilities and they will give you countless reasons why nothing new can happen. They have "proof," based on past experience. Probe a bit, however, and you'll discover their inability to consider the new, isn't because they don't want to innovate, but because their limiting assumptions prevent them from seeing opportunities to innovate.

Assumption Busting 101 is a way to turn this phenomenon around, helping even the most curmudgeonly "no can do" person to open their mind to new possibilities. The takeaway from this keynote is not just the generation of great ideas, but a palpable change in mindset. From "no" to "possible." From "can't do" to "will do," From the "cup's half empty" to "who said we have to drink out of that ridiculously small cup, anyway?"

Includes:

• Pre-session, online limiting assumptions poll
• Review and discussion of famous innovation-averse assumptions
• Action learning (hands on experiential challenge and debrief)
• Small group brainstorming
• 16-page Lead Into Gold assumption busting guidebook