Monthly Archive for July, 2007

strategic leadership skill of the future : design

Required reading alert: Business Week’s blogs tend to be of superb quality, but if you don’t have space for much else in your overstuffed reader at least wiggle Bruce Nussbaum’s column into your RSS. This from his “CEO’s must be designers not just hire them“..

the very old and very boring question is whether or not designers and their teachers have ended their distaste for commerce and business culture. I have nothing to say about this except that this debate about art and commerce is so last century. If you are even discussing the issue, you are way behind. If you haven’t fully integrated your design, engineering, business and marketing students and faculty into teams on a regular and systemic basis, you are behind.
..
There are two great barriers to innovation and design in the world today. Ignorant CEOs and ignorant designers. Both groups are well-intentioned and well-dressed—in their own ways—but both can be pretty dangerous characters.

I read that and cheered because I popped up a quick blog: Business Acumen for Artists and some online PR in support of a superb course that bridges the divide. The program will be run by the GSB’s visionary Executive Education director, Elaine Rumboll and all proceeds of the 13 week course go to strengthening the Observatory Community Centre. We’ve reached the point where we can’t afford to be lopsided in using our brains. Operating from both hemispheres is imperative to future success. Dan Pink’s “Whole New Mind” is a worthwhile read if you haven’t picked it up yet. Business leaders need to be visionaries and creative problem-solvers, and artists to be balanced with practical administrative skills for success.

Dostoyevsky once said: Continue reading ’strategic leadership skill of the future : design’

The UCT Business School pioneers a course on Web2.0 for practical business application

The first morning of Nomadic Marketing has begun.. an unusually structured collaborative learning experience into the heart of the “new internet”. For practical business use. Particularly for marketing. The kernel of this course is how to harness the best ideas at the outer edge of social media for potent strategic advantage in a phenomenally fast and unpredictable moving market. This is going to be an exciting journey.

Thank you to Elaine Rumboll, Director of Executive Education at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town for initiating this course;  and to Dave Duarte (Course Director) who started making the most of many minds and quickly invited some of South Africa’s finest thinkers in this space to co-create this powerful course1

Today’s line-up includes: Mike Stopforth - Web 2.0 Beyond the Hype; Mike Perk - Search Engine Marketing Basics; Graham Knox - Blog Marketing; Jon Foster-Pedley - Strategy and Innovation since Web 2.0.

The Marketing Geek has done a superb job of collating a wealth of information for course delegates on the course wiki and blog, herded a wild bunch of those of us who made up the faculty and with the superb GSB team created something fairly innovative for any business school anywhere on the planet right now. I’m looking forward to seeing if we can effectively translate the reality that we digital nomads live, work and play in, to South African business leaders attending this course.

  1. I was privileged to contribute to the course in helping to design the educational experience with Dave. Making it engaging interactive and ensure that what could ordinarily be a daunting subject is rendered human-scale and brain-friendly. Lucky me! []

What makes Genius : Part 4 : Clarity

Until fairly recently most of life was largely predictable. knowable. controllable. Systems, management strategies, “the way we do things around here” could be passed hand to hand through organisations, schools, families.

Clarity, for those of us alive now, is as assuringly accurate as financial projections on a start.up business plan1.

Somewhere along the way we seem to have crashed through some kind of sound barrier, resistance gave way and en-masse we’ve hit a higher frequency. Everything appears to be accelerating to the point where the stable rules have been rendered redundant - even laughable.

Like a car, as we speed up we find that the world outside gets blurred. Without the luxury of advanced warning we have at slow speeds we can only rely on our reflexes to deal with surprises on the road, or a blink moment to catch a sign for a turn-off. Clarity? Only those a few metres ahead.

Please point me to the one person who could have predicted the depth & breadth of Facebook2. Not just a category killer, but evolving into a staggering sociological force of nature. Social media is reshaping our private and professional lives profoundly.

Honestly, no-one can guarantee the Next Big Thing. Money, labour, political clout - none offer this certainty. Don’t bother listening to any business school stalwart who may assure you otherwise. Would you have placed a bet on a drop-out3 with no car, house or job being offered a billion dollars for his brainchild - and turning it down. WTF?!

The outer bounds of age been pushed out forcefully by an entire generation. The boomers. Pioneering a new stage of adulthood untested before: the 60 of today is more like 40. Retirement is what we strive to achieve in our 30’s. Job for life a joke.

Science, particularly physics and mathematics have witnessed some particularly odd phenomena over the last few decades. The findings bubbled out into quantum mechanics, string theory, fractals, strange attractors and chaos theory. Reality as we know it, has been collapsing in labs for years.. the rest of us are just catching up now. Continue reading ‘What makes Genius : Part 4 : Clarity’

  1. if you’re an entrepreneur, VC or a bank manager you’ll know just what I mean! []
  2. Rupert Murdock could have saved himself some pocket-change! LOL []
  3. Ivy League it needs be noted - Harvard’s not a shabby place to leap from []

one hot mama

Are you going to be rocking at one of the global Live Earth concerts tomorrow?

Lucky beast if you are!

For those of us who aren’t going to be there :-( there is still the option of hooking up a live feed1 & throwing a house party to support Live Earththe chilling-out of our gorgeous Gaia2

[In case you got left out of the PR 7.7.07 Live Earth Concerts (em, make that Al Gore) has attracted some of the planet's hottest musicians to rock the world to start turning the tide against global warming. Smart fellow, applying a time.honoured strategy. I believe in an old maxim of economics that shows how throughout history ..culture precedes commerce.. entertainment is a clear & very useful way to gather power around the issue. Not just feelgood fluff3 ] Continue reading ‘one hot mama’

  1. oh heavens - mustn’t forget sadass SA bandwidth could hamper this plan []
  2. the great ole Mother Earth []
  3. Emperor Nero knew it well with his bread & circuses []

The occasional downside of supporting the freshest innovations

yuck yuck yuck… after the near digital death experience on my site [due to an all too hasty Wordpress 2.2 upgrade that conflicted horribly with the underlying K2 theme] I deleted my custom css files that I’d tweaked for maxkaizen.com by mistake - utterly gone! :-/ so now I’m paying for my idiocy

So plz forgive the mangle & ugliness here for now - under re.construction & re.creation.

good gracious I am an ass! Linkloving in the blogroll needs unscrambling & reclassifying.. who knows what the hellacious is happening with the sidebars.. and boy Ultimate Tag Warrior not happy - - - - intravenous caffeine please!!




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