No one likes to be sold to. If you are in business and you survive by, well, selling things, that’s a problem. It’s one of life’s great ironies that the people we hate ...

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he says “The world does not accord with our intuition.” His point is that human behavior and communication are generally counterintuitive. ...

Success in business can be summed up with the following illustration:      While each of those three categories can be broken down into all sorts of important roles and disciplines, ...

I’ve read a number of books that reference the perils of line extensions. That’s basically where a company decides it needs to grow by marketing something new. It’s usually talked about ...

I have a theory that every success in business is tied to successful branding at some point in the process. As a point of validation for my hypothesis, I was happy to discover that Jim Quigley, CEO ...

I’ve started looking for “brand discrepancies” in the world around me. It’s like once you see the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo, you can never stop looking at it. So here is a ...

Branding is usually referred to within the context of a business. When you consider the definition of a “brand” to be the feeling or perception that someone has about something else, it opens ...

  Garbage In, Garbage Out   Like a hat on a hook, expectations are the pegs that relationships hang on. We estimate that 99.72% of all angry feelings in life are a direct result of upset expectations. ...

It’s not about you Certainly you’ve met a "frustrated artist." Why are they frustrated? Chances are, their soul musings reincarnated to physical mediums aren’t keeping ...

Geeze, don’t expect so much from the little guy   Business owners want their logos to be big and loud and to tell the entire story of their company while simultaneously being wildly entertaining, ...

We are often approached for help with logo design. People have new ideas all the time and a logo seems like the best place to start in terms of marketing. Sadly, the little element sure causes a lot ...

Hi, we're the Mine Academy and we're happy to be here.   Our new little slice of the blogosphere is going to focus on important principles of creativity and problem solving. We like to help people ...