By: Ashish Monga

What’s in a name?

Think of your business name as an external mask for your business. If it’s something your target audience like, they would consider checking it, if they don’t, in most cases you have lost a customer even before you could tell them what your product or service is. Your marketing campaign is usually like a beautiful outer covering for your business which attempts to portray it as best business on earth for various reasons and quality of your business name can have a great positive or negative impact on your marketing campaign. Many marketing campaigns are solely based on business names. Despite this many people, completely ignore spending time picking a good business name. This very often happens, when someone believes to have a winning business idea, and wants to kick it off as soon as possible.

Brainstorming for your name

Here are a few techniques which would help you brainstorm for ideal business names and come up with a wide variety of options to choose from.

Tools Needed:

Before you begin using techniques below here are some tools you would need to make your brainstorming session successful

1.A Notepad and Pen 2.A thesaurus (online of offline) - Online ones save a lot of time 3.A computer with Internet access 4.A language conversion tool (Preferably online)

Process:

Before you begin your brainstorming process, remember that you are brainstorming for ideas and goal is to generate as big a list as possible, therefore do not evaluate or criticise any ideas, and keep flow going.

1.Make a list of all suitable keywords you can think of, which relate to your business, or help describe your product or service. 2.Think of companies selling similar products or your competitors and note down their names. 3.Use a Thesaurus to look for synonyms of all words you have gathered. You should have a good list of words by now. 4.Use a language conversion tool such as one at freetranslation.com and look for French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, etc. meanings of your words. Some of those words can be very trendy and especially suitable for businesses targeting youth market, or in hotel & entertainment industry. 5.Make combinations of partial words. You can even try combinations of English + Other Languages. Although these would be suitable only to certain creative business types.

Questions to help your Shortlist Your Selections

CEOs And Boards Are Locked In A Spiral Of Doom

by Brent Filson

American CEOs are dropping like flies. Boards, armed with new federal rules and stock exchange requirements coming in wake of corporate scandals of past few years, are getting rid of underperforming CEOs at record rates. This trend is all more notable because it's happening during an improving economy and stock market.

However, real reasons for CEO bloodbath are being overlooked. Analysts pin bloodbath on CEOs. But it's not just CEOs who are failing. Boards are failing too. Working with thousands of leaders worldwide for more than twenty years, I've learned that there is a "spiral of doom" in relationship between many company boards and their CEOs. Most boards are clueless as to what leadership skills are needed for CEOs to succeed. So they hire clueless CEOs. Clueless boards hiring clueless CEOs -- it's classic spiral of doom.

The reason boards and CEOs misunderstand leadership is that recently there has been a tectonic shift in leadership skills CEOs need to succeed. In 80s and 90s, autocratic CEO reigned supreme. Many companies were like slow-moving ocean liners with autocratic captains giving orders to mates and mates giving orders to crew. But today combination of globalization and new, differently-manageable generations coming into workforce is creating need for new kinds of leadership. CEO leadership is no longer like piloting an ocean liner but like white water canoeing that calls for flattened organizations that can change rapidly and accurately, decentralized decision-making, motivated employees, and inspiring relationships.

The era of autocratic leader is over. Yet most boards know no other way of leadership but autocracy.

Here are three things boards and CEOs can do together to stop spiral of doom.