Mind Maps for Business

Mind Maps for Business

February 27^th, 2012

A mind map is a sketch used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. It is an external tool that maps what’s going on inside the mind. The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Brain thinks with imagination and association with words or numbers. If you do not build connections then it affects both your memory and thinking.

To get a better perspective on Mind Maps and how the concept could to be used for the benefit of individuals and organizations, IAIP had an opportunity to host Dharmendra Rai, Mumbai’s first Mind Map Trainer, at the speaker event in Mumbai on February 27^th.

[slideshow]

He began by dividing the audience into two teams with one of them exposed briefly to the concept. Later two teams were asked to write as many words related with ‘Finance’. As expected the average number of words with the team ‘exposed’ was higher at 44 words than the average of 32 words for the other; thereby proving that results could improve with little conditioning. Second, was the number of words, which were common amongst individuals coming from same organization. Surprisingly, less than 10% of the words were common amongst them. This indicates that each individual is unique with his/her own ideas and views and can contribute significantly to corporations if his/her ideas or views are channelized properly. Majority of the time in the corporate world, meetings (e.g. sales meetings) fail to bring out satisfactory ideas & conclusive results as people start evaluating the ideas with half favoring and other half opposing the idea, which could lead to the change in the course of discussion and destroy the purpose of meeting. However, the outcomes could be improved substantially if a meeting is structured properly, for example, asking each member to make list of their ideas handy before the start of the meeting, and discussing only positive points about an idea till all options are exhausted before switching to all possible negative points about the same idea.

On the individual front nearly 95% of the working people complain having trouble remembering, concentrating, planning, managing time etc. Amongst the primary reasons cited by Dharmendra are distraction and multi-tasking. In case of distraction the span of attention has dropped from 11 minutes a decade ago to probably 1 minute now as cell phone usage has increased. After answering one call it takes a couple of minutes for oneself to get back to initial level of intensity for continuing the previous work. Likewise for multi-tasking – talking on mobiles and driving cars simultaneously is dangerous as both activities require serious attention.

These were some of the few examples shared by Dharmendra. For more information you could visit http://www.mindmapstrainer.com/mind-map-trainer.

About the Speaker:

Dharmendra Rai is Mumbai’s First Mind Map Trainer. Trained by the inventor Tony Buzan, he has done almost 100 Mind Map Seminars in the last 2 years. He has worked with companies like Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital, Karvy Consultants; the last one being Benchmark Mutual Fund (now Goldman Sachs), as Sales Head.

Contributions from: Chetan Shah, CFA,  Dheeraj Aggarwal, CFA,  Jignesh Kamani, CFA, all IAIP Volunteers