Michael Hollauf and his business partner, Till Vollmer, founded MindMeister out of a personal need for a tool that would allow them to brainstorm collaboratively in the form of a mind map. Now, seven years after the beta release, MindMeister is one of the market leaders in online mind mapping. Michael Hollauf talks about obstacles, current and past, and reveals for the first time what’s been going on at MeisterLabs these past few months.

In my previous article, I wrote about how to use mind mapping to discover the reasons you would want to publish an eBook. Once you’ve established that, the next step is to actually write the book — which can seem an incredibly daunting task.

So, I enlisted the help of authors who literally and figuratively wrote the books on writing: Anne Lamott with Bird By Bird, Stephen King’s On Writing, The Artist’s Way’s Julia Cameron with The Right to Write, and screenwriter Robert McKee’s Story. After re-reading each book with an eye on how mind mapping might be most beneficial to the writing process, I came away with one clear answer: synthesizing.

One way to significantly improve the quality of your mind maps and the effectiveness of how they communicate your intended meaning to others is to include a legend in them.

If you frequently share your mind maps with colleagues and coworkers, they may not completely understand the meaning and context of what you’re trying to communicate. That’s because mind mapping lacks a commonly accepted visual vocabulary – a set of de facto standards that governs how mind maps should be constructed, what common icons and symbols mean, and so forth.

MindManager has always been an excellent tool for hosting effective and efficient meetings. We created the Meetings Jetpack to make it even easier for you to get the most out of all your meetings. Here are a few tools, tips, and techniques from the eBook included in Meeting Jetpack, A Guide to Better Meetings

Do you have trouble remembering telephone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries?

Do you struggle to remember a sequence of more than seven digits?

It is the fusion of the emotional and logical aspects of the human brain that shapes long-term memory and recall of information. However, most people struggle to recall information because they simply don’t yet understand the power of patterns, imagination and association.

The Number Associations IQ Matrix map will help to shed some light on the process of remembering numbers through the application of shapes and rhyme.

Tony Buzan, in ‘The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps’ introduced me to a method called ’TEFCAS’.

• Trial
• Event
• Feedback
• Check
• Adjust
• Success

I was always intrigued by this, but never really applied. But, after reading the book, ‘Running Lean’ by Ash Maurya, I found a practical tool to apply this method.

“Getting to Yes” is one of the all-time bestselling books on negotiation. The book teaches you about the four points of Principled Negotiation (Negotiation on the Merits): 

1. People: Separate the people from the problem. 
2. Interest: Focus on interest, not positions. 
3. Options: Generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do. 
4. Criteria: Insist that the result be based on some objective standard.

This is great to know… but the book missed to teach you about a very important topic: “Dirty Tricks in Negotiation” a challenge and a trap that many people fall into.

In this article we will focus on the most common dirty tricks in negotiations and what you can do about them

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