The CEO of the Creative Class Group consulting firm has spent the past few years soliciting advice from visionaries across the board – PhDs and pop stars, CEOs and celebrity chefs. The accumulated wisdom appears in her new self-help book Upgrade: Taking Your Work and Life from Ordinary to Extraordinary. Here, Rana Florida shares some of her favourite strategies for success.
Rana Florida is the CEO of the Creative Class Group, an advisory firm that works with premier organizations on building economic competitiveness, cultural and technological innovation. Florida is also one of the leading thinkers on trends that are shaping the future of work and recently published Upgrade: Taking Your Work and Life from Ordinary to Extraordinary, in which she explores what makes innovative thinkers, creative leaders and CEOs successful.
The CEO of Creative Class Group shares a few principles that can mean the difference between settling for an ordinary career and living an extraordinary life.
Jobs had Wozniak. Gates had Allen. Lennon had McCartney. Successful creative enterprises typically have two leaders: a visionary and a strategist who can execute. Creativity is a team-based process. It requires collaboration.
Most people believe that writing is the hardest part; once their book is published, they think, it will fly off the shelves. The reality is that they will be lucky if their book even gets any shelf life. The most important lesson that an author can learn is that the work doesn’t stop after you’ve turned in the manuscript. That’s when the hardest work begins. If you want your book to be bought and read by the widest possible audience, you have to start marketing it long before its publication date. Here are some simple tips on marketing that every author should take to heart.
Adapted from Rana Florida’s new book, Upgrade. We need to create a new definition of failure. Truly successful people embrace failure as part of the learning process, as an opportunity to grow, reflect, reinvent, and ultimately to push forward.
Adapted from Rana Florida’s book, Upgrade. Leaders who inspire, mentor, and teach — rather than dictate and order — will have more productive, more engaged and more loyal teams.
It’s time to kill the breakfast meeting.The notion of a 7 or 8 a.m. breakfast meeting is unnatural, exhausting, stressful and completely unnecessary.
Excerpt from Rana Florida’s new book, Upgrade on risk taking. For most people, assessing and accepting risk takes a severe emotional toll; it causes fear and confusion and it can lead to stress and fatigue. Life is already risky, many of us think — why ‘rock the boat?’ But most successful leaders, thinkers and innovators understand that new opportunities and rewards come only after taking risks.
“I don’t care when you work, how you work, or where you work.” In an excerpt from her upcoming book, author Rana Florida explores unconventional ideas for letting employees be their best selves.
