Mzinga's CEO, Rick Faulk, gave the Mzinga team an interesting challenge recently. He asked everyone in the company to draw the Mzinga strategy on the back of a napkin and announced some good rewards for the best. To inspire us, Rick pointed us to the book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures which is a great read about clarifying arguements with relatively simple drawings. Examples of other companies going through this exercise can be found at Fast Company.While this contest is fun and gets everyone to really think about what we are trying to do and articulate it in a way everyone can understand it, it also addresses a significant tactical problem. Firstly, too much experience with Powerpoint can lead to some complicated slideware. Working with a smaller group of us, this is the result:Now, don't get me worng, I think this is a great slide that is pretty comprehensive...but it really doesn't have much of an emotional connection - and doesn't make me feel why this is important. And one thing that I think is really important is that Mzinga is structured in a way and invests in ways that are geared to make our customers as successful as possible. The above Powerpoint doesn't really convey that passion or focus.So... being a good crowdsourcing enthusiast, I shot out a note to my Twitter pals (can I submit the best of the sketches that my social network does?!?!?) about the contest and in quick order, Tom Humbarger took the bait. And without the benefit of the slide above, he came up with a brilliant submission:This blew me away because it incorporated so much of what Mzinga tries to get across - and how we go about supporting that vision. So, Tom has raised the level of play....now I need to go figure out how to improve on that. Want to play too? You can either post your version on a blog and add the link to the comments below or send it to me at rachel at mzinga.com
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