One of the best business development strategies you can use to grow your core business is to look beyond it for adjacent markets, technologies or areas of focus where you can expand. Here’s how to do it visually.

Mind mapping is only one flavor of visual thinking. Here’s a challenge to “think visual” – to engage in out-of-the-box thinking to further your career and your life, using more of the tools at your disposal.

Dan Roam’s new book explores visual techniques for helping us to bring greater clarity and impact to our communications – and to avoid “death by detail.”

Linkedin has evolved into a popular platform for forming groups where professionals can ask questions, get answers and discuss topics and issues of mutual interest. Here are 7 worthwhile groups focused on mind mapping and visual thinking.

If you want to be able to express yourself more compellingly in writing and visually, then you really ought to pick up a copy of Writing for Visual Thinkers by Andrea Marks.

Dan Roam, in his new book Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-on Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures, shares a series of questions that you can use to refine and improve your visual thinking. This simple process is very applicable to creating and refining the content of a mind map.

David Sibbett, in his excellent new book, Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity, shares a number of tips and strategies for sharing key charts, maps and diagrams with meeting participants.

During the last year or so, a wealth of new books have been published that aim to help business people solve complex problems by thinking them through visually. Which ones are your favorites?

For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem. Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of the Gordian Knot, and visual thinking is the powerful sword that we can use to cut through complexity and develop innovative solutions to them.

In much the same way that developers have written a significant number of mind mapping apps for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch platform, similar apps are starting to emerge for the Android smartphone operating system. Here are two of the most popular: Mind Map Memo and Thinking Space. One looks very promising, the other one, not so much.