Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Mindjet LLC
Larkspur, CA

MindManager 2002
> Organizational Planning and Communication Tool

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

People are the biggest investment that global companies make to secure future competitive advantage. Mindjet’s customers are interested in maximizing the value of employee idea generation and face-to-face communication, particularly during the initial stages of critical business planning processes. A leading technology provider, an automotive company, and a financial institution were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Improving the speed and value of planning processes (e.g., project, strategic, IT implementation) and agenda-setting activities

§ Boosting the productivity of existing business teams by facilitating the capture and communication of tacit and/or explicit information

§ Improving communication between and interaction among global teams

WHY MINDJET?

Mindjet has developed an intuitive digital environment that businesses leverage on an individual level, in teams, and across organizations. Users develop “mind maps” that link visual imagery and keywords to communicate strategic concepts. As groups develop sets of maps, they can easily organize them to lay the foundation for documents, Web sites, or presentations. Employees can send mind maps to one another via email or share them interactively over the Internet.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Individuals and teams find Mindjet’s MindManager software to be a cost-effective addition to their organizational toolkits. A number of companies have distributed the application to all of their higher-level managers. Executives report an immediate impact in terms of time savings, more effective meetings, and better team communication.

Enterprise innovation: Better, not more, communication is the key to aligning execution with vision. The effective capture and communication of team members’ best thinking during the initial scoping phase, and as part of periodic assessment, supports both clear vision and proper execution. Strategic communications must transcend organizational and cultural barriers. A leading high-tech company is using MindManager to improve the process of training a diverse multinational engineering workforce. MindManager allows teams to work from conceptualization to a communication endpoint through a process of building a visual landscape of information.

Technology gains: Managers frustrated with running meetings from PowerPoint slides or via flipcharts find MindManager to be a tremendous resource. Local or remote teams can build a mind map in the course of a meeting and immediately archive it on disk or disseminate it to a larger group via email. MindManager’s visual metaphor and hyper-linked structure is easier for Web-ready users to digest than a lengthy slide presentation or document.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Most of Mindjet’s customers have started as individual users and then gradually expanded the scope of their company’s adoption. In all cases, mind mapping is one of many techniques that knowledge workers use to organize ideas.

Learning: At the enterprise level, companies adopting MindManager as a tool should provide potential users with a basic introduction to mind mapping. Although the tool is extremely intuitive, experienced customers suggest that users benefit from an initial demonstration.

Resources: The mind mapping technique encourages users to give careful thought to keywords they use with a map. Keywords play a pivotal role not only in the organization of a given map but also in the longer-term retention of the information within the map.

Fit: Complex organizations that need to bring everybody onto the same page to optimize revenue and profits should consider MindManager as a personal and group productivity tool.

COMPANY INFO

Mindjet is a private company with 70 employees.

415.925.3120
www.mindjet.com
Published: January 2002