Category Archives: Uncategorized

Why higher education requires a new underlying philosophy

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in future, knowledge, philosophy, society, technology, Uncategorized

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Futurists, scholars and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.

My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.

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Empowering true talent

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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talented

“Managing” true talent is a misnomer. Subjecting the truly inspired to rules is akin to plowing fields with Ferraries – yes it might just work, but it sure is stupid. Use the talented rather for creating the recipes around which the hoards of less inspired can be assembled and scaled. In the same vein, don’t compensate the truly talented by the hour or with a fixed income: you would in effect incentivize them to limit their imagination. Strategy and vision are holistic products, they cannot be bought or measured by the hour, and don’t bow to quantitative rewards.

So then how can you empower the talented? Here’s a few hints.

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Life lessons – on compromise and conflict, and the importance of chemistry

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Crisis, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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Compromise when you can, but accept that sometimes conflict is unavoidable.

Conflict is always lurking, only a well articulated opinion away. But sometimes conflict is irrational, it has nothing to do with what one thinks or does. Conflict can appear simply because of the way someone is reflects badly by contrast on what someone else is not.

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Never be afraid to ask crazy questions, or in Buckminster Fuller’s words, dare to be naive

22 Saturday Jun 2013

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“There are no stupid questions” has become an accepted cliche. But then again, you’ve never run into my flavor of “stupid” questions. Joking aside, I was never afraid of stupid questions. Rather it is some of the questions I have asked of myself in the past that scare me into thinking I might have lost it. I want to give you two such examples that scared me at first, only to find that others have thought those same apparently crazy thoughts. Which is not to say I am not crazy, but rather than I am not the only crazy one. And that my friends, sits just fine with me!

Let me time-teleport you with a younger version of myself, laying sleeplessly in bed on a dark night about thirteen years ago. I decided to really challenge myself with the toughest question I could invent. Being that it was night and dark, my mind of course jumped to alien abductions. I asked myself: if aliens suddenly abducted me that very night, and decided to see how smart the human race really is, what would they ask me?

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Passion: the best competitive strategy

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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Napoleon

Let me attempt a positive twist to Napoleon’s “all’s fair in love and war” as applied to the world of business. Let me first propose that Napoleon’s insightful correlation can be extended to business in the first place. Love, war and business all have in common the competitive side of human nature – for the sake of procreation in the first case, and for survival in the other two. In all cases things have a high likelihood of becoming (very) personal, and when things get personal emotions usually flare.

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