A great culture doesn’t just happen; it must be planned, taught, nurtured, and encouraged. Your culture is formed by how people work together, connect, interact, and socialize. You can unlock passion and potential when you enable real bonds among your team, and build a culture of positivity, trust, kindness, and respect. Here are seven ideas to help you establish and develop a great culture.

Over the last few years, the business environment has changed. Businesses are adopting new technologies, processes, and ideas faster than ever before. In order to stay competitive, leaders must keep up with their customer expectations and the latest innovations within the market.

If there’s one way to explain human behavior, look at mice. In the book ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’, Spencer Johnson describes the world of mice who vie for a block of cheese. People aren’t mice, but we suffer from the same resistance to doing things differently, says Pace. This is why the principles of change management are so important for a company. Simply put, change management is a term for preparing and supporting individuals, teams, and organizations to make organizational change. And it’s not an easy task.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving framework that has been steadily gaining popularity in the last decade as organizations strive to become more human-centric. The hallmarks of design thinking–empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing - influence major companies like PepsiCo, Charles Schwab, and Walgreens to solve problems for a better customer experience. We sat down with Troy Atlas to discuss insights from the conference, trends in this field, and what’s in store for the future use of Design Thinking.

For many manufacturing industries, the Internet of Things is already here, and the race has already started. The following are Stonehill’s analysis and findings, based on what we have seen, on how to win this new arm’s race.

Design Thinking is a central tenant of our philosophy at Stonehill, and we love to share the benefits of this mindset. We use workshops and organizational consultations to help bring Design Thinking principles to a wide range of industries. We recently had an opportunity to help a client strategize plans for customer retention and longevity. This client works in an industry that provides both short-term and long-term services, so together we discussed innovative ways to transition short-term clients into longer-term customers.

At Stonehill, we have the privilege of working across industries to help innovate and implement process improvement strategies. We are seeing increasing trends toward business-to-business partnerships in standardizing pricing structures and ensuring quality services. In the insurance industry, this translates to preferred provider networks. These have a proven track record in the auto and health insurance industries, but very little presence in other insurance sectors. This missed opportunity for many insurers is poised to radically change the insurance landscape.

Like all doctors, her office has a reception desk and waiting room, so recently, while I was waiting to see her, I began to process how Design Thinking could improve a visit to the doctor’s office. As a Design Thinking consultant, someone who helps businesses grow by focusing on customer empathy and prototyping innovative concepts, I couldn’t help but envision changes. We've become an experience-centric society, and what could be more human-focused than a visit to the doctor?

Over the last few weeks, we have been asked to facilitate multiple sessions for corporate innovation. Our clients end the session filled with excitement about Design Thinking and ask us for a few tools that they can use once we leave. We are dedicated to making others successful compiled some of our favorite innovation concepts below. We encourage everyone to explore each of these concepts to see if they have a place in their organization.

One of the most interesting books written in the last few years is Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. The book explores organizational dynamics in the military and how they can best be applied to corporations. The main concept within the book is that a small, well-trained team, with a clear mission, superior communication, and mutual trust can defeat a larger force that is less agile.

Over the past few months, many people have asked why we named the company Stonehill. They comment that it seems to be a very boring name for a company that is involved in such exciting projects. With the work that we do in data analytics, customer experience, automation, and growth they would have expected something a little cooler. Everyone is surprised when we explain the story.

Over the past few months, we have worked with numerous businesses to help them establish new services and design innovative customer experiences. Many of our engagements leverage the Design Thinking methodology as the basis for our interactions and clients are always intrigued by the approach. Last week I was approached by one of our customers who asked the simple questions of “what is the magic to the Design Thinking methodology. Why is it so special?”

I believe innovation is derived from collaboration and that genius comes from a group - not an individual. As organizations become more mature they become very process-oriented. This allows people to become complacent and less innovative. In short, innovation burns more calories than just following the process.