Inspiring Success With Mind Genius

8/4/2019 Inspiring Success With Mind Genius

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/inspiring-success-with-mind-genius 1/5

MindGenius is a registered Trade Mark of MindGenius Ltd. Copyright MindGenius Ltd. 2011.

Inspiring Success with MindGenius

Having worked at a senior level in business for over 20 years now,

where mapping has featured prominently in helping me to succeed, I

am going to be writing a series of articles to share my experiences and

knowledge with you and hopefully inspire you to get the most out of

MindGenius.

I would also like to encourage you to share your own experiences, and

if there are any particular subjects you would like me to consider

covering, please get in touch.

As the Product Development Executive, my primary role is to research,

analyse, record and communicate how people work in different

business sectors and identify the obstacles and challenges that they face so that we can develop

appropriate software solutions to sell to them. I also support the senior management team in the

delivery of specific improvement initiatives.

I am a doer, not a theorist. I have to deliver tangible results and break new ground. Stepping into the

unknown is the exciting part of my job. I use MindGenius on a daily basis as it provides me with a

creative, effective and versatile way of working. I couldn’t do my work as effectively without it. If you

were to take MindGenius away from me, you would see a grown man cry – not a pretty sight.

Also, I’m not a purist. Although I have been a Buzan Licensed Instructor and have worked with TonyBuzan, I will not be discussing the ‘theory’ of mind mapping. I use what is appropriate for the task and

its target audience. MindGenius and mapping support the performance of a task. The task and its

outcome is what is important, not the intricacies of the tools/methodologies used.

So I will be sharing with you how I perform tasks using MindGenius. I hope this will give you an insight

into how you could use MindGenius to your advantage. It may even inspire you to think of different

ways to use MindGenius to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. There will also be an

opportunity for you to ‘Ask Gordon’ about any query you may have as a result.




My background is electronic engineering. I started working life designing aircraft radar systems then

onto cheque encoding machines for the worldwide banking sector. My career progressed into senior

management (development & support). I then worked in a Total Quality Management programme in

the nuclear industry before joining Gael and MindGenius 11 years ago. As well as my tasks as Product

Development Executive, I have had the opportunity to work in Marketing, Sales, Training and

Consultancy as well as being an external University lecturer and a Lead Assessor (10 years) for the

Scottish Business Excellence Award (EFQM based)

The nature of the activities that I do are varied, e.g. researching, analysing, presenting findings, writing

training material, delivering training, consulting, auditing. I need to be versatile and so do the tools and

methodologies that I use. That’s why MindGenius has proven to be such a valuable application. Its use

can be adapted to a wide variety of tasks. Also, its ability to stir the creative juices is invaluable. One

application, many uses, many benefits. That’s what I hope to share with you.

The ‘mapping’ journey started many years ago when I first came across Tony Buzan’s mindmapping

technique. I could see the benefits, but felt it was more suited to memory retention (my personalview) than as a medium for performing business tasks.

My organisation was not ready for me to be seen doodling with coloured pens, and the output was not

in a form that would be viewed as suitable for business communications.

So I resorted to drawing ‘spider’ diagrams and basically used them for my own purposes. Another

problem was that they were paper based so it was difficult to rearrange them without starting again

from scratch. A short term solution I used was to create them using lines and text in MS PowerPoint™.

Time consuming, but it still gave me some benefits.




Fig. 1 Hand Drawn Spider Diagrams

Fig. 2 MS PowerPoint™ version




Back in 2000, at Gael, the Directors wondered what I was doing. However, it got them thinking. To cut

a long story short, MindGenius was born and I got my favourite and most productive software

application.

So to re-iterate, I will be writing a series of articles to share my knowledge and hopefully give you a bit

of inspiration on how you can use MindGenius to help you succeed in business. They will not be step-

by-step descriptions of how to use a specific function within MindGenius. The articles will concentratemore on the nature of the task to be performed and how MindGenius can help you perform them. You

will also have the opportunity to raise queries about the areas discussed.

I look forward to sharing my MindGenius experiences with you and I hope it will be an interesting

learning and sharing experience for you. I certainly expect it will be for me.

Gordon

PS This article was developed using MindGenius.

Fig. 3 First Article




Fig. 4 Article Introduction

I was faced with the ’dreaded’ blank canvas. First I mapped out in MindGenius some key areas that I

felt needed to be included in the article.

Then I simply let the ideas flow and captured them as they occurred. Each entry entered seemed togenerate other ideas/avenues of thought.

MindGenius allowed me to quickly and easily drag and drop these thoughts into appropriate parent/

child relationships. I was also able to drag the branches to form a meaningful flow to the article.

What I ended up with was an article which was different from what I first envisaged (e.g. combine an

introduction article, the main deliverable, with a brief description on how it was developed using

MindGenius

I think it resulted in a better article. That's the beauty of MindGenius.

Documents

Inspiring Success With Mind Genius