Entries Tagged 'learning' ↓

In these days and testing times, what need to be done? I have read an interesting article from Mc Kinsey which would be of us to entrepreneurs. Do put in your comments.

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.

Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralized innovation; the Linux operating system, for example, was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. But companies can also create physical goods in this way. Loncin, a leading Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, sets broad specifications for products and then lets its suppliers work with one another to design the components, make sure everything fits together, and reduce costs. In the past, Loncin didn’t make extensive use of information technology to manage the supplier community—an approach reflecting business realities in China and in this specific industrial market. But recent advances in open-standards-based computing (for example, computer-aided-design programs that work well with other kinds of software) are making it easier to cocreate physical goods for more complex value chains in competitive markets.

If this approach to innovation becomes broadly accepted, the impact on companies and industries could be substantial. We estimate, for instance, that in the US economy alone roughly 12 percent of all labor activity could be transformed by more distributed and networked forms of innovation—from reducing the amount of legal and administrative activity that intellectual property involves to restructuring or eliminating some traditional R&D work.

Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.

Further reading:
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2006.
Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, New York: Doubleday, 2004.
Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. But the differences between the way companies cocreate with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

As the Internet has evolved—an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies—it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism. Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit.

OhmyNews, for instance, is a popular South Korean online newspaper written by upwards of 60,000 contributing “citizen reporters.” It has quickly become one of South Korea’s most influential media outlets, with around 700,000 site visits a day. Another company that goes out of its way to engage customers, the online clothing store Threadless, asks people to submit new designs for T-shirts. Each week, hundreds of participants propose ideas and the community at large votes for its favorites. The top four to six designs are printed on shirts and sold in the store; the winners receive a combination of cash prizes and store credit. In September 2007 Threadless opened its first physical retail operation, in Chicago.

Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles. But a company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn’t unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations.

Further reading:
C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2006.

3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

Top talent for a range of activities—from finance to marketing and IT to operations—can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business services provider. Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders, and this development opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions.

The implications of shifting more work to freelancers are interesting. For one thing, new talent-deployment models could emerge. TopCoder, a company that has created a network of software developers, may represent one such model. TopCoder gives organizations that want to have software developed for them access to its talent pool. Customers explain the kind of software they want and offer prizes to the developers who do the best job creating it—an approach that costs less than employing experienced engineers. Furthermore, changes in the nature of labor relationships could lead to new pricing models that would shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results.

This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it. As companies move in this direction, they will need to understand the value of their human capital more fully and manage different classes of contributors accordingly. They will also have to build capabilities to engage talent globally or contract with talent aggregators that specialize in providing such services. Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.

Further reading:
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live, New York: Warner Books, 2001.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.

The application of technology has reduced differences among the productivity of transformational and transactional employees, but huge inconsistencies persist in the productivity of high-value tacit ones. Improving it is more about increasing their effectiveness—for instance, by focusing them on interactions that create value and ensuring that they have the right information and context—than about efficiency. Technology tools that promote tacit interactions, such as wikis, virtual team environments, and videoconferencing, may become no less ubiquitous than computers are now. As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations—smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions—that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate. Companies in sectors such as health care and banking are already moving down this road.

As companies improve the productivity of these workers, it will be necessary to couple investments in technologies with the right combination of incentives and organizational values to drive their adoption and use by employees. There is still substantial room for automating transactional activities, and the payoff can typically be realized much more quickly and measured much more clearly than the payoff from investments to make tacit work more effective. Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging—but critical—for managers.

Further reading:
Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee, “The next revolution in interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, November 2005.
Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika, “Competitive advantage from better interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2006.
Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

During the late 1990s FedEx and UPS linked data flowing through their internal tracking systems to the Internet—no trivial task at the time—to let customers track packages from their Web sites, with no human intervention required on the part of either company. By leveraging and linking systems to automate processes for answering inquiries from customers, both dramatically reduced the cost of serving them while increasing their satisfaction and loyalty. More recently, Carrefour, Metro, Wal-Mart Stores, and other large retailers have adopted (and asked suppliers to adopt) digital-tagging technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), and integrated them with other supply chain systems in order to automate the supply chain and inventory management further. The rate of adoption to date disappoints the advocates of these technologies, but as the price of digital tags falls they could very well reduce the costs of managing distribution and increase revenues by helping companies to manage supply more effectively.

Companies still have substantial headroom to automate many repetitive tasks that aren’t yet mediated by computers—particularly in sectors and regions where IT marches at a slower pace—and to interlink “islands of automation” and so give managers and customers the ability to do new things. Automation is a good investment if it not only lowers costs but also helps users to get what they want more quickly and easily, though it may not be a good idea if it gives them unpleasant experiences. The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.

Further reading:
John Hagel III, Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow through Web Services, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
Claus Heinrich, RFID and Beyond: Growing Your Business with Real World Awareness, Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, 2005.
Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. It also gives independent software developers opportunities to buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don’t have to buy their own. Mobile virtual-network operators, another example of this trend, provide wireless services without investing in a network infrastructure. At the most basic level of unbundled production, 80 percent of all companies responding to a recent survey on Web trends say they are investing in Web services and related technologies. Although the applications vary, many are using these technologies to offer other companies—suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants—access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols.¹

Unbundling works in the physical world too. Today you can buy fractional time on a jet, in a high-end sports car, or even for designer handbags. Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses—factories, warehouses, truck fleets, office buildings, data centers, networks, and so on—raise their utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal costs. For companies and entrepreneurs seeking capacity (or variable additional capacity), unbundling makes it possible to gain access to assets quickly, to scale up businesses yet keep their balance sheets asset light, and to use attractive consumption and contracting models that are easier on their income statements.

Companies that make their assets available for internal and external use will need to manage conflicts if demand exceeds supply. A competitive advantage through scale may be hard to maintain when many players, large and small, have equal access to resources at low marginal costs.

Further reading:
“Jeff Bezos’ risky bet,” BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006.

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time. Intel integrates a “prediction market” with regular short-term forecasting processes to build more accurate and less volatile estimates of demand. The cement manufacturer Cemex optimizes loads and routes by combining complex analytics with a wireless tracking and communications network for its trucks.

The amount of information and a manager’s ability to use it have increased explosively not only for internal processes but also for the engagement of customers. The more a company knows about them, the better able it is to create offerings they want, to target them with messages that get a response, and to extract the value that an offering gives them. The holy grail of deep customer insight—more granular segmentation, low-cost experimentation, and mass customization—becomes increasingly accessible through technological innovations in data collection and processing and in manufacturing.

Examples are emerging across a wide range of industries. Amazon.com stands at the forefront of advanced customer segmentation. Its recommendation engine correlates the purchase histories of each individual customer with those of others who made similar purchases to come up with suggestions for things that he or she might buy. Although the jury is still out on the true value of recommendation engines, the techniques seem to be paying off: CleverSet, a pure-play recommendation-engine provider, claims that the 75 online retailers using the engine are averaging a 22 percent increase in revenue per visitor.² Meanwhile, toll road operators are beginning to segment drivers and charge them differential prices based on static conditions (such as time of day) and dynamic ones (traffic). Technology is also dramatically bringing down the costs of experimentation and giving creative leaders opportunities to think like scientists by constructing and analyzing alternatives. The financial-services concern Capital One conducts hundreds of experiments daily to determine the appropriate mix of products it should direct to specific customer profiles. Similarly, Harrah’s casinos mine customer data to target promotions and drive exemplary customer service.

Given the vast resources going into storing and processing information today, it’s hard to believe that we are only at an early stage in this trend. Yet we are. The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall.

Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more rather than less effective. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures. Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.

Further reading:
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
John Riedl and Joseph Konstan with Eric Vrooman, Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering, New York: Warner Books, 2002.
Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, New York: Times Books, 2007.

8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

Frequent contributors to what economists call market imperfections include information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data about new market opportunities, potential acquisitions, pricing differences among suppliers, and other business situations. These imperfections often allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher rents by aggregating and creating businesses around it. The Internet has brought greater transparency to many markets, from airline tickets to stocks, but many other sectors need similar illumination. Real estate is one of them. In a sector where agencies have thrived by keeping buyers and sellers partly in the dark, new sites have popped up to shine “a light up into the dark reaches of the supply curve,” as Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow (a portal for real-estate information), puts it. Barton, the former leader of the e-travel site Expedia, has been down this road before.

Moreover, the aggregation of data through the digitization of processes and activities may create by-products, or “exhaust data,” that companies can exploit for profit. A retailer with digital cameras to prevent shoplifting, for example, could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores and use these insights to improve its layout or the placement of promotional displays. It might also sell the data to its vendors so that they could use real observations of consumer behavior to reshape their merchandising approaches.

Another kind of information business plays a pure aggregation and visualization role, scouring the Web to assemble data on particular topics. Many business-to-consumer shopping sites and business-to-business product directories operate in this fashion. But that sword can cut both ways; today’s aggregators, for instance, may themselves be aggregated tomorrow. Companies relying on information-based market imperfections need to assess the impact of the new transparency levels that are continually opening up in today’s information economy.

Further reading:
Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction (Raffaele Mattioli Lectures), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

Conclusion

Creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies. These trends are best seen as emerging patterns that can be applied in a wide variety of businesses. Executives should reflect on which patterns may start to reshape their markets and industries next—and on whether they have opportunities to catalyze change and shape the outcome rather than merely react to it.

About the Authors

James Manyika is a director and Kara Sprague is a consultant in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Roger Roberts is a principal in the Silicon Valley office.

The authors wish to thank their McKinsey colleagues Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, Tony Huie, Brad Johnson, Markus Löffler, and Suman Prasad for their substantial contributions to this article.

One of my old fellow colleagues of the FFSI network from Brazil, who had completed her MBA at INSEAD two years ago, told me how impressed she was by the lectures she attended on Strategies conducted by the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy. From my internet search I came across an article on the subject last night. In the present juncture of seemingly economic recession, and financial crisis the thoughts of the authors to explore new market spaces become more relevant than ever.

Blue Ocean Strategy

W. CHAN KIM & RENEE MAUBORGNE

For over 20 years, the key question of strategy has been: How to outpace rivals, how to out-compete? Today we can hardly speak of strategy without referencing competition or using a war analogy. Because land is limited, the only way to advance one’s territory or market share is at the expense of another—a zero-sum game.

Under this theory of strategy, the world and industry conditions are fixed. The structure is taken as given (environmental determinism). This is in-box or within industry boundaries thinking. Here structure determines strategy that leads to performance.

If we look at history, whom do we admire most? Those who out-compete and beat others? Yes, we admire winners. But even more we admire those who create new paradigms in art, music, thought; new businesses that open up new market spaces, create new demand, and improve our lives. That is what expands the pie of economic, intellectual and creative wealth.

How can we create these new market spaces? In economic terms, this is a non-zero-sum game that shifts the focus of strategy from win-lose to win-win. New market spaces (what we call blue oceans) create a win for companies, societies, employees, and sometimes even for the competition. That’s the essence of blue ocean strategy.

Blue ocean strategy goes beyond competing to creating by opening a bigger pie for all. It is a reconstructionist approach to strategy rooted in New Growth Theory. Here strategy determines structure that leads to performance. Under this strategy, even an unattractive industry can be made attractive by the efforts of companies to reconstruct market boundaries.

Consider the New York Public Library (NYPL). From 2002 to 2004, NYPL funding was cut by 20 percent. The competition was intensifying as the internet, super-size bookstores, and other media were capturing a larger share of the shrinking market. Libraries were seen as dull and lackluster. The NYPL was operating in a unattractive industry with a shrinking budget and new tough competitors. In the old view of strategy, the best the NYPL could have hoped for was to go head-to-head against new rivals to maximize its share of a declining market.

Yet in less than 10 months, from 2004 to 2005, with just two staff, a miniscule budget, and scant marketing, Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs, made the NYPL one of the hottest venues in town. All new demand was created as attendance climbed by 400 percent. Nearly every public program event is sold out.

Holdengräber did not accept market boundaries that defined what libraries can and cannot do. Nor did he focus on beating the competition. Instead he sought to create new demand by reconstructing the market the library operated in to offer the public a leap in value. As Director of Public Programs, Holdengräber was in charge of the traditional public lecture program. Most of these programs were dull book readings or one-way monologues. They rarely attracted more than small clusters of senior citizens.

Holdengräber changed all of that. He infused theater, glamour and the feeling of a French intellectual soiree into the events, newly baptized as LIVE. Holdengräber sought to create carefully thought-out cocktails of artists, poets, politicians, rock stars, and writers to host a dialogue on hot or controversial topics such as obsessions, music downloading, terrorism. He took from theater the idea of infusing the events with a bit of show-like music, dancers and opera singers to stimulate all the senses. And then he made the events two-way discourses between those on stage and the audience, also pushing the events from 6 to 7 p.m. when everyone was free after work. The result is an eclectic splicing of daytime talk show, theater, and French drawing room soiree, and price of the library speaker series. In short, Holdengräber created a blue ocean of new market space. With his strategic actions, he reconstructed the market, creating win-win performance consequences as scores of people who had never entered the library rapidly converted into enthusiastic attendees.

Every organization can break free of the head-to-head zero-sum competition and open up blue oceans of new market space. Our research looks at 150 strategic moves that created blue oceans in 30 industries, spanning back to Ford’s Model T, which created the first blue ocean in the auto industry, up until the strategic moves of Apple’s iPod and iTunes and Cirque du Soleil.

We wondered, Is there a pattern to the creation of blue oceans? If so, we can systematically pursue blue oceans. We found six paths to remaking market boundaries in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way. None require special foresight about the future. All are based on looking at familiar data with new perspective.

These paths challenge the six assumptions that define how most organizations build their strategies—assumptions that keep them locked in the red ocean of bloody competition: define their industries similarly, look at their industries through the lens of the same strategic groups, focus on capturing more of existing customers, define the scope of their products and services similarly, accept the functional or emotional orientation of their industries, and focus on current competitive threats. The result is me-too strategies that lead to head-to-head competition.

To create new market space, you need to gain insight into all the factors you compete on that no longer add value (factors that can be eliminated or reduced for huge cost savings) and into factors you should create that your industry never before offered to unlock new demand and set yourself on a profitable growth trajectory.

After writing on Howard Gardner yesterday,I got so excited when I went back to the website of the Learning Revolution to read the Foreword and introduction of the new book: Unlimited.

I wished that our  Mauritian educationists would read about the happeings in the world of learning as described in this new book by Gordon Dryden & Janette Vos.

How do we get our responsible parties of learning to espouse the new ideas and to join the band wagon to make our nation ahead of the heap? Does any one of you my blog readers have any ideas to propose?

Here is my last night’s interesting and somewhat lenghty  reading:

The more the new technology soars,

the more the need for holistic balance

Even thirty years ago, most teachers were taught that intelligence was fixed and

could be measured from early childhood by standardized I.Q. tests.

Even today, in the country where I have spent most of my adult life, almost the

entire American schooling system is based around standardized tests of standardized

knowledge as if all children were the same. They are not.

Some of the world’s best neuroscientists have proved for over two decades that all

of us are smart in different ways. We each have a different learning style, a different

thinking style, and different ways of studying and working. So the school of the future

will be personalized for every individual learning style.

We also learn best in a happy, safe environment, with good diet and nutrition, in

caring, loving families, and in schools where lifeskills and holistic learning are even

more important than learning to master the new tools of high technology.

So capitalizing on the new world of instant information and interactive technology

is only one side of the path to a potentially unlimited future. Every good parent and

teacher knows the other side involves the whole person, in a caring home and a caring

community—with brain, mind and body acting together in balance.

At its simplest, you cannot learn well if you’re hungry or fearful. You cannot learn

well if your brain has been stunted from birth because you’re under-nourished. You

cannot benefit from a world of potential plenty if you live in a country with polluted

water, unsanitary sewerage, without adequate food, clothing and security; in world

where sometimes obscene wealth is surrounded by overwhelming poverty.

An over-riding message of this book is that all of us can also learn best when we

use the whole world as a classroom  especially when that world is a welcoming,

caring, sharing one. But even in the world’s most affluent countries in North America,

western Europe, Australia and New Zealand many are handicapped by poverty,

emotional stress, bad nutrition and poor family environments.

We also all live in a series of interlocking eco-systems, where pollution, environmental

degradation and climate change are crying out for new solutions. We live,

too, in a world where a $600-billion-a-year pharmaceutical drugs industry is mistaken

for a real health policy. Often where inadequate schooling is mistaken for real-life

education. Where inefficient bureaucracy is mistaken for social innovation.

As we two co-authors have travelled to many parts of the world, we have seen the

positive, holistic alternatives that can match the new digital wealth-producing revolution

with an equal balance of social, emotional, mental and cultural enrichment.

❏ Children of poor parents in developing countries, like India, have filled schools

whenever daily meal programs have been introduced.

❏ Entire school-age populations have prospered as in Finland when the government

provides high-quality teachers and teacher training programs.

❏ The soaring world population, in over-crowded poor countries, is matched by a

growing environmental crisis and equally successful sustainable technologies.

❏ Small nations like Singapore, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and

New Zealand have shown that size is not important for national success.

❏ The enormous cost of the war in Iraq proves that money is not the problem. Nobel

prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that war will end up costing at

least $3 trillion.1 So even a tiny fraction of that, invested in the right way, would more

than solve the world’s problems of poverty, malnutrition, poor health—and provide a

decent basic education for all.

❏ Ideally, too, we now know that well-prepared parents are the world’s best first

teachers. A happy, healthy home is the world’s best school. A healthy, caring community

is the world’s best playground. A secure, ecologically balanced world is the

planet’s best classroom—that unlimited global classroom we all share together.

History’s newest revolution

and the seven keys to unlock it

All of us, together, are surging through the most profound revolution in human history.

Its impact is personal, national, global and, in many ways, unlimited.

At its core are seven catalysts, now converging and fusing to change the way we

live, work, play, learn, teach, think and create at any age.

This new networked age makes it urgent to rethink entirely what we mean by education,

learning, teaching and schooling. For education is changing more than it has

since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago and compulsory classroom

schooling 300 years ago. Now the world is your classroom and learning is lifelong.

Already two billion students spend four-fifths of their waking hours outside school,

in an iPod, YouTube, Google, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Skype and Sim-

City world so different from yesterday’s deskbound classrooms.

Business Week magazine says lifelong learning will soon be the world’s greatest

growth industry, with $370 billion a year in sales as millions learn online. And

Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts that before long all the world’s information will

be instantly available on pocket computers like the Apple iPod. Then students will

be able to find answers quicker than professors can ask questions.1

The keys to unlock the future are simple but revolutionary. Once unlocked, that

revolution has the power to unleash the combined talents of millions:

1. It’s PERSONAL: where information and learning programs can be personalized and tailored to your own passions, talents, interests and needs. And where you

can share your own talents and skills with millions—for both fun and income.

2. It’s INTERACTIVE: with new digital platforms and templates to make it easy,

simple and fun to learn by doing, playing, creating, producing and interacting a new

world of creative experiences.

3. It’s GLOBAL: the ever-expanding world-wide Internet owned by no one, used

by everyone; where the combined knowledge of humankind is now available to virtually

all at the tap of a digital keyboard or a touch screen.

4. It’s INSTANT: for the fi rst time in history, the ability to learn anything “just in

time”, when you need it, as you need it, at your request, and in your own way.

5. It’s MAINLY FREE: or nearly so—one low-cost click-at-a-time. The World

Wide Web, browsers, search engines and digital platforms make it easy to access

much information free, and to download other information for a few cents. Even free

international phonecalls.

6. It’s EASILY SHARED: the new world of collaborative networks to share your

abilities with anyone, anywhere. To store free online and on community websites

your family photographs, videos, music and even your digital multimedia portfolios

to demonstrate what you know and what you can do.

7. It’s CO-CREATIVE: if we can dream it, we can now do it together with millions

around the world. Now we can merge our own talents into multi-talented global

teams, to produce new innovative answers to major global problems.

These seven keys have already unlocked new doors to transform industries, countries,

communities, commerce, communications and companies. They have the power

to reinvent every aspect of lifelong learning, teaching and schooling. But when these

“tipping points” link with other sweeping changes, the impact will be even greater:

❏ The neuroscience revolution: our new-found abilities to unlock the incredible

potential of the human brain and mind, and shatter many of the myths on which much

of “education” is based. That research shows that everyone can learn anything faster

and more efficiently. That learning starts in the womb and flowers through life.

❏ The genetic revolution: the knowledge that “all life is one”: that all living things

are made from the same genetic code where we’ll soon have access to our own.

❏ The demographic revolution: in which, of all people who have ever lived

longer than sixty-five years, two-thirds are alive today—while two billion, mainly in

the poor world, are under age twenty. But now the wisdom of age and experience can

link, in new ways, with the soaring hi-tech skills of children and grandchildren.

❏ Above all, the new Open Revolution: at long last the chance to find a genuine

new way to reinvent society. Not only a choice between free-enterprise capitalism and

state-controlled socialism. But a new unlimited choice of cooperative enterprise and

collaborative co-creativity.

For global education the need has never has been greater.

❏ As Philippe Legrain summarizes it in Open World: The truth about globalization:

“One in five of the world’s 6.6 billion people live on less than a dollar a day almost

half on less than two dollars a day. More than 850 million cannot read or write. Nearly

a billion do not have access to clean water, 2.4 billion to basic sanitation. Eleven million

children under five die each year from preventable diseases.”

But already the tools exist to share some of the world’s best and simplest learning

and health programs with billions of poor people: to provide them with most of the

unlimited opportunities that today only rich countries and people enjoy.

❏ Those wealthy countries are already spending billions on these new tools that

have the power to reinvent education. But most are “doing it wrong”.

Very simply, they are trying to patch the technology of the twenty-first century on

to a classroom system invented for a bygone age: a school system gradually conceived

after the invention of the printing press in Europe more than 500 years ago.

❏ Where kindergartens, schools, colleges, universities and organizations are “doing

it right”, the results are remarkable. This book abounds with them. They start

with individual brainpower and the seven keys to unlock the future that are already

transforming nearly every other aspect of society. Together they provide the catalyst

to reinvent education itself: personally, locally, nationally and globally.

1. It’s PERSONAL

For everyone, everywhere, any time, in your own way

Two years ago, Time magazine named its Person of the Year simply: YOU.

Its cover subtitle puts it succinctly: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age.

Welcome to your world.”2 That cover story simplifi es its main message: “This was the

year that the people took control of the media. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web

2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. It’s

a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making

them matter.”

Time calls it a massive social experiment: “an opportunity to build a new kind of

international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but

citizen to citizen, person to person.” In some ways it’s a “new digital democracy”:

❏ Blogs or Web-logs: More than 100 million of personally-written websites flooding

the Internet for anyone to share not counting 72 million in China alone.

❏ Mobile phones: soaring to 3.3 billion in use around the world in 2008, predicted

to rocket to at least four billion before the end of 2009.

❏ eBay.com: the world’s biggest online auction site where 200 million registered

users each day trade goods and services worth $100 million: a new global community

“flea market” where anyone can sell to anyone anywhere.

❏ MySpace.com: a new online community of over 100 million active users.

❏ Flickr.com: which hosts two billion photos in the world’s biggest album.

❏ Facebook.com also with more than 100 million registered users by mid-2008,

growing by 25,000 a day, and 65 billion “page views” a month as friends share their

experiences, videos and photographs.

❏ YouTube.com the video-sharing phenomena where visitors to the site can

choose from 83.4 million video-clips. YouTube is the forerunner to a completely new

form of international online television. Only a few years back such videos would have

been shot by professionals on expensive cameras and edited by other experts. Todaythey’re even shot by young children, edited on home computers and viewed on a new

breed of digital pocket-phone-computers the size of a pack of playing cards.

No longer is education a one-way presentation process, with students as passive

receivers. Now you can co-create your own lifelong learning plan and keep on expanding

your individual talent with new skills throughout life.

2. It’s INTERACTIVE

Easy-to-use templates make it simple at any age

In yesterday’s world, one-year-olds loved to see and hear their parents read colorful

nursery-rhyme books.

Today’s one-year-olds still do. With the help of their parents, they can now also

flop their tiny hands anywhere on to a computer keyboard, and see shapes, numbers

and colors and hear them in eight languages: on BabyWow software, invented by a

parent for his new baby.

Yesterday, four and five year-olds loved to color-in scrapbooks, with crayons and

finger-painting. They still do. They can also now create brilliant and colorful digitized

artwork on such programs as Kid Pix Deluxe.

Yesterday, children went to the movies. They still go. They can also use Microsoft

Movie Maker and Apple iMovie software to professionally edit videos they have shot

themselves or in teams.

In many New Zealand public schools, six-year-olds, from their fi rst day in grade

one, start using video cameras to explore their world and record it. They quickly learn

to edit video and compose music.

In yesterday’s world, seven-year-olds lucky enough to live near the sea loved to

swim and build magic sand castles. They still do. They can also now download free

software from the Web to make their own three-dimensional animations.

Great teachers have always involved their students in interactive learning. Now we

can each use twenty-first-century tools to create an entire new world of interactive

experiences: our own Disneylands if we wish.

3. It’s GLOBAL

The Web owned by no one, but used by almost everyone

Better still, we can go on learning and sharing new skills throughout life: we can

co-create the future together.

Says Canadian researcher and author Don Tapscott in The Digital Economy:

“We are at the dawn of a new Age of Networked Intelligence an age that is giving

birth to a new economy, a new politics and a new society.”

Says British scientist and author Matt Ridley, in his book, Genome: The autobiography

of a species: “I genuinely believe we are living through the greatest intellectual

moment in history. Bar none.”

Says Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International and author of Birth of the Chaordic

Age: “The undeniable fact is that we have created the greatest explosion of capacity

to receive, store, utilize and transform information in history. There is no way to turn

back. Whether we recognize it or not, whether we will it or not, whether we welcome

it or not, whether it is constructive or not, we are caught up together all of us and the

earth as well in the most sudden, the most profound, the most diverse and complex

change in the history of civilization. Perhaps in the history of earth itself.”3

Says Professor Michio Kaku, author of Visions: “Since the 1950s, the power of our

computers has advanced by a factor of roughly ten billion. By 2020, microprocessors

will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper, scattered by the millions into the

environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere.”4

Says Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web: “The vision I still have of the Web is

about anything being potentially connected with anything.”5

And from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, on its mission: “To organize the

world’s information and make it available to anyone.”

But the new co-creative learning revolution will be equally astounding.

❏ The Hewlett Foundation, inspired by the life of Silicon Valley pioneer Bill Hewlett,

has invested $68 million charting precisely how it will come about: led by some of our

best universities in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. ❏ The International Baccalaureate movement already provides a global curriculum

to 539,000 students, aged from three to nineteen, in 2,051 schools in 125 countries.7

❏ SUN Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy has set up Curriki as The Global

Education and Learning Network, to work towards a worldwide online curriculum for

K-12 schools.8

❏ John Seely Brown, former head of the Silicon Valley Palo Alto Research Center

that invented the personal-computer age, has spelled out how young students themselves

are already leading that revolution.9

And brilliant schools, like Singapore’s Overseas Family School, Britain’s Cramlington

Community High School, Mexico’s Thomas Jefferson Institute, and The Master’s

Academy in Canada, are pioneering new ways to globalize lessons.

4. lt’s INSTANT

Just in time, when you need it, as you need it

For most of the last century, the assembly lines of Ford and General Motors typified

the mass-production revolution.

Then Japan’s Toyota introduced just-in-time mass-production, with all the hundreds

of car-parts delivered each day as needed, where needed. Soon Japan and its methods

dominated the world’s car industry.

Then in the early 1990s a small band of computer-science students and graduates

started to use online digital and interactive technology to reinvent the entire world:

❏ Tim Berners-Lee invented the tools for the World Wide Web.

❏ Mark Andreessen and his fellow Illinois students linked with fi nancier Jim Clark

to produce Netscape, the world’s fi rst real browser—to instantly surf the Web.

❏ Then students Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google, with the incredible

ability to soon scan billions of Web sites and fi nd answers in under half a second. Now

with more than 300 million visitors every day.

❏ Atomic Learning,10 a company set up by ex-teachers, offers 35,000 instant, ondemand

personalized video tutorials to provide any subscriber with easy-to-followgraphic instructions to learn more than 100 computer programs: from editing video to

making three-dimensional animations.

But probably the greatest early impact has been with music: and the power to allow

fans anywhere in the world to download their favorite tracks, instantly and on demand,

from a variety of online libraries, generally for under $1 a track.

The most popular service is Apple’s iTunes, which by early 2008 offered a library

of more than six million tracks. That links directly to Apple’s other major twenty-fi rst

century innovation, the iPod. A brilliantly-designed personal music library, it’s also

only the size of a pack of playing cards, yet able to hold up to 15,000 personally-chosen

tracks on the most expensive iPod.

And if students can download their choice of music instantly on demand, why not

the same access to instant learning programs?

5. It’s MAINLY FREE

Or nearly free: often one low-cost click at a time

Imagine any sales manager twenty years ago deciding to give away millions of copies

of his company’s main product absolutely free. The result: probably instant dismissal

or referral to a psychiatrist. But that’s what Netscape did in 1994 when it launched its

fi rst Navigator browser. Within a few weeks forty million computer buffs around the

globe had downloaded it free. Soon Netscape was selling other advanced copies to

business. And when their company “went public” in 1995 it turned fi nancier Jim Clark

into an instant billionaire. It also made multimillionaires out of Marc Andreessen and

his fellow young Illinois college developers. Since then that’s been one of the keys to

the Web-based revolution: give away instant service free—and sell the extras.

But the new ingredient: sell those extras “one low-cost click at a time”—on some

sites as low as 5 cents a click—just like Google does with its sponsored advertising

links. Millions of people can now turn their own highly-specialized talents into saleable

products or services. They can give away millions of free summaries on Google,

and then sell the extras for a few cents or dollars on every click.

Now an entirely new marketing concept has soared into prominence. Chris Anderson, the Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, calls it “the long tail”.11 Up till recently,

he says, we lived in “the age of the blockbuster”. Only the world’s top-selling books

or long-playing records featured in most bookstores or radio-station play-lists.

Now, as Apple has proved, if only ten copies each of fi ve million songs are sold, on

average, at under $1 each, that would achieve sales of $50 million. Apple has made

big profi ts from that.

But Apple has made even bigger ones by selling more than 140 million iPods in six

years. In that time iTunes has sold over four billion songs, 50 million TV shows and

1.3 million movies. That’s the kind of impact that Google’s Schmidt is talking about

when he says “we should think of all the world’s information being available in the

equivalent of an iPod”.

And Harvard Business Professor Clayton M. Christensen—an expert on “disruptive

innovation”—predicts this revolution will go further. No later than 2014, he says, 25

percent of all high school courses will also be available online—later personalized to

each student’s preferred learning style. By 2019 that will be 50 per cent.12

6. It’s EASILY SHARED

The new world of collaborative networks

All seven “keys” are of vital importance for education. But none more so than the

new world of cooperative networks of teachers and students.

Wikipedia is the ideal example.13 Ten years ago it didn’t exist. Other encyclopedias,

such as Britannica and World Book, sold for $1,000 or more. Microsoft’s Encarta

soon surpassed them in popularity, given away free or sold cheaply on a CD-rom to

encourage sales of Windows. But Encarta was based on an inferior printed encyclopedia,

with only 4,500 articles.

Now Wikipedia is by far the world’s largest encyclopedia. It has around 2.5 million

English entries, with over ten million in all its 252 languages: instantly available, free,

on the Web. All are contributed free by more than 75,000 volunteers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales states his aim succinctly: to give “every single person

free access to the sum of all human knowledge”.14 Now apply that same principle tolearning and schooling. The world currently has around 59 million K-12 (kindergarten

to twelfth-grade) teachers, with about 1.5 billion students.

Silicon Valley researchers say around 2 percent of adults are innovators and another

13 percent “early adopters”. Simple arithmetic shows 15 per cent of 59 million equals

8,850,000 teachers. Imagine each of those contributing only one favorite teaching or

learning idea in a year, and sharing it with teachers around the world. Now imagine

one each a month!

Britain’s Promethean company already provides a model. It makes some of the

world’s best interactive digital whiteboards (at right), with built-in touch-screen software

to teach mathematics, science, geography and other subjects. Promethean also

coordinates collaborative online classrooms. In them, science and other teachers at

every level can share their best lesson plans online with teachers around the world.

7. It’s CO-CREATIVE

To link your unique talents with multi-talented teams

As we’ll explore in later chapters, everyone has a talent to be good and probably

great at something. The trick is to fi nd that something, and now to blend it together

with the talents of others—anywhere.

Most people—if provided with the opportunities—probably have a passion for

something. And when both passion and talent are unleashed, those opportunities are

virtually limitless. Great schools are already achieving this by enthusing students to

set up their own personalized learning plans. And to keep on upgrading them, and their

skills, throughout life”: to be self-directed, self-motivated lifelong learners.

Many brain researchers, such as Harvard’s Professor Howard Gardner, have argued

for more than twenty years that intelligence is not fi xed and that each of us is smart in

different ways. Many schools now include Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences”

into their daily program—so that students can build on their own strengths and learn

from the strengths of others.

But the new twenty-fi rst century world of digital multimedia means that students,

even from early elementary-school age, can blend their own talent into semi-professional multi-talented teams. Scripting, shooting, editing and providing music and props

for school videotape, for example, requires many different talents: technical, visual,

musical, graphic, linguistic and animation.

Wikipedia provides a brilliant one-dimensional model for cooperative sharing and

co-creation. But leading American digital games producer Marc Prensky has an even

better idea.15

Like the co-authors of this book, he wants the world’s students to reinvent education,

reinvent schooling, reinvent the way the world learns and teaches.

And he wants them to do it by cooperatively building digital learning games with

the same appeal that Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo and Microsoft interactive games

already have for tens of millions of children in every continent. Kids love them because

they’re interactive fun.

Now imagine tens of thousands of individual colleges, schools or millions of classrooms

each taking responsibility for becoming the expert on one “subject” or aspect

of each subject. The goal: the best learning software, produced by the students of the

world, and shared freely with all other students around the world—on every aspect of

every “subject”. Welcome to the real Free World. Linux, the open-source computer

operating system inspired by Finnish student Linus Torvalds, was co-created by thousands

of computer-science students around the world. You can now download it free

from the Web, like you can download low-cost or free software or music.

“Linux,” says Eric Raymond, “was the fi rst project to make a conscious, successful

effort to use the entire world as a talent pool.”16 A small group of students on the new

Web fi rst proved this by together co-designing a complete computer operating system.

Now one million are working together on other digital projects—and a new business

model: instead of the winner-takes-all—all can be winners.

In pockets around the planet, talented school teachers have also started the reinvention.

All great teachers involve their students in challenging, interactive projects.

Some of their interactive classroom innovations are brilliant, but serve only twenty

to forty students. We’ve called that The Learning Revolution 1.0.

Now the overwhelming need is to “scale up” their efforts—to make them available

to hundreds of millions—to use the whole world as this new talent pool. And this is

The Learning Revolution 2.0.

Just as genius students like Google’s Brin and Page can turn their combined talents

into a company valued at $170 billion—so too can the world’s greatest teachers and

other bright students share their talents with millions—some free and others as incomeearners.

❏ At Singapore’s Overseas Family School, with international students from

seventy-four countries, teachers and students have digitized most of their lesson plans,

for sharing with others. And they’ve also used their own excellent computer network

to provide individual learning programs for all 3,500 students.

❏ At Mexico’s K-12 Thomas Jefferson Institute, highly creative students from its

high schools and middle schools each produce one Broadway musical a year to professional

standards: from The Disney High School Musical to Cats and Wicked. And

the Institute has ongoing global relationships with MIT’s MediaLab, NASA, Apple,

Microsoft and top-tier schools and universities around the world. Their high school

students even take the Harvard Business School’s business courses.

❏ In New Zealand, the Government abolished its national Education Department

almost twenty years ago and replaced it with a much smaller policy-recommending

Ministry. Since then all schools, public and private, have been charter schools, run by

local boards. Innovation has soared.

At two new special-designation schools in Christchurch, students use the entire city

as a classroom. Each student has a personalized learning plan, worked out in partnership

with parents and learning advisers. Each plan starts with the student’s own passions,

talents, interests, vision and drive. The very names of the schools—Discovery One

(for primary students) and Unlimited (for high school)—echo the emphasis.

New Zealand’s new national curriculum guidelines are also being hailed as an international

model for K-12 education.17 The vision is for young people who are confi

dent, connected and enthusiastic lifelong learners, with goals to achieve excellence, innovation and diversity as well as twenty-fi rst century literacy and numeracy.

A completely new approach is also about to revolutionize university life. A group

of educational leaders have used a $68 million fund from the Hewlett Foundation to

show how the world can build a new online Global Cyberspace Learning Web. This

will be co-created by all, shared by all, expanded by all.

But we stress that this is not a book that recommends interactive technology and

the Internet as new all-embracing “magic bullets” to transform education. Only a fool

worships his tools. But over centuries dramatic new disruptive technologies—from

the wheel to the plow, sail-power to steam-engines, printed books to electric power,

automobiles to television—have ushered in great social changes.

Those changes transcend the technologies themselves. And this new revolution is

more about the social and personal changes than the technologies that spur them.

Link those new innovations with the incredible powers of the human brain—and

the new breakthroughs to unleash the unique power of the human mind—and the

scope of the new revolution is truly unlimited.

As Gary Hammel summarizes it in Leading The Revolution: “We are now standing

on the threshold of a new age—an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer

is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-fi rst century,

change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious. In a single generation, the cost of decoding

the human gene has dropped from millions to less than a hundred bucks. The cost of

storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing.

The Web is rapidly becoming a dense global matrix of connections between people,

their ideas and their resources.”18

In this new world, says Hamel, the future is not something that happens to you, but

something you create.

And now we can co-create that future together, wherever we live.

The Mauritian education systems seem to measure only 2 intelligence centers.This is not the case only for Mauritius, it is the sin of most non progessive nations.  What about the other intelligences? Is it time for a reform? Do we have the political guts to undertake such reforms for the betterment of our nations?

Howard Gardner, world renowned educationist has more to say based on the new discoveries on the human brain.

Your many different “intelligence centers”, what are they?

Ask Harvard psychologist Professor Howard Gardner, and he’ll tell you that visual ability is only one of your many “intelligences”. He’s spent years analyzing the human brain and its impact on education. And his conclusions are simple but highly important.
Gardner says we each have several different types of intelligence. Two of them are very highly valued in traditional education.
He calls the first one linguistic intelligence: our ability to read, write and communicate with words. Obviously this ability is very highly developed in authors, poets and orators.

The second is logical or mathematical intelligence: our ability to reason and calculate. This is most developed in scientists, mathematicians, lawyers, judges.
Traditionally, most so-called intelligence tests have focused on these two talents. And much schooling around the world concentrates on those two abilities. But Gardner says this has given us a warped and limited view of our learning potential. He lists the other main distinct intelligences as:
Musical intelligence: obviously highly developed in composers, conductors and top musicians, from Beethoven to Louis Armstrong;
Spatial or visual intelligence: the kind of ability used by architects, sculptors, painters, navigators and pilots – what the current authors would argue are, in fact, two separate forms of intelligence.
Kinesthetic intelligence or physical intelligence: very highly developed in athletes, dancers, gymnasts and perhaps surgeons;
Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to relate to others – the kind of ability that seems natural with salesmen, motivators, negotiators.
And intrapersonal intelligence or introspective intelligence: the ability of insight, to know oneself – the kind of ability that gives some people great intuition. The kind of ability that lets you tap into the tremendous bank of information stored in your subconscious mind.
But these are not merely arbitrary functions that Professor Gardner has invented for a Ph. D.dissertation. He says brain surgery and research have shown that some of these “intelligences” or abilities are located in distinct parts of your brain. Severely damage that part and you could lose that ability. That is why strokes can affect the ability to walk or talk, depending on which part of the brain is affected.
Professor Gardner now considers there is another intelligence: “naturalist”: the ability to work with and harmonize with nature. The two current authors consider this might better be grouped with several other types of learning styles, which we cover in the book: the Learning Revolution.*

* Professor Gardner’s model does not cover what we consider one of the most important “intelligences” of all: the ability to create totally new concepts by linking together information from different parts of the brain. Many modern thinkers, such as British Professor Charles Handy, say there are several other intelligences, such as plain common sense. But Professor Gardner’s research is a brilliant starting point for designing schools that cater to different abilities and learning styles.

I have an eye on the Jensen learning web which keeps me abreast in my interest on learning, accelerated learning techniques and recent discoveries on the Brain. This month’s issue of the newsletters deal with the danger of cell phone.

Extract from the newsletter

Like most of us, you probably used your cell phone over the holidays. What’s the latest on cell-phone usage and your brain? There are both rodent and human studies that illuminate new data. In order to mimic the real life situation, with exposure to the electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones, investigators used a rat model. They used 55 rats in one study. Aside from the experimental group, some were used as a control and some exposed to a sham (an “off” cell phone in their cage.) In Nittby’s studies, the effects on the experimental group (active cell phones) of repeated exposures over a long period were impaired memory for objects and their temporal order of presentation. Other rodent studies suggest the same data. But what if you took ALL the human studies and examined them?

As you might guess, this subject is controversial. HINT: Don’t ask the cell phone industry for any research. They will all deny any links – too much risk for liability. Barth’s research investigated 19 studies and analyzed them to find out if they had quality data for a meta study. Ten of them qualified and were included in the meta-analysis as they fulfilled several minimum requirements; for example, single-blind or double-blind experimental study design and documentation of means and standard deviation of the dependent variables. Here’s what they found: 1) Attention was affected, showing decreased reaction time. 2) Working memory is lower. 3) The number of errors may be higher under this cell frequency exposure.

OVERALL CONCLUSION: Results of the meta-analysis suggest that electromagnetic fields from cell phones may have an impact on human attention, working memory and health issues.

I would not tell you to use your cell phone less. That’s your decision. I will tell you a bit about our brain. It is highly dependent on very particular frequencies to operate properly. Specifically, 1) your memory is highly dependent on the thalamus which oscillates at 40 Hz, and your hippocampal oscillations for memory formation and retrieval, 2) the last time I checked, I found 502 quality, scientific references that linked up our memory with the quantity and type of frequencies that we are exposed to, and 3) memory loss may be the least of the problems with excess cell phone usage. Over 200 studies have found some links with cancer. Not good.

References
Nittby H, Grafström G, Tian DP, Malmgren L, Brun A, Persson BR, Salford LG, Eberhardt J. M (2008) Cognitive impairment in rats after long-term exposure to GSM-900 mobile phone radiation. Bioelectromagnetics. 2008 Apr;29(3):219-32.

Barth, A, Winker R, Ponocny-Seliger E, Mayrhofer W, Ponocny I, Sauter C, Vana N. (2008) A meta-analysis for neurobehavioral effects due to electromagnetic field exposure emitted by GSM mobile phones. Occup Environ Med.May;65(5):342-6.

Hardell, L, Carlberg, M, Söderqvist, F, Hansson, Mild K. (2008) Meta-analysis of long-term mobile phone use and the association with brain tumors. Int J Oncology May;32(5):1097-103.

PART TWO: Applications
Two suggestions. One is to reduce the sheer quantity of time spent on a cell phone. That’s a no-brainer. Or, you can do what I do: Once I have answered or dialed, I hold the phone away from my head a few inches. This still allows me to hear what’s being said and I can speak easily while reducing risk.

By the way, some of the kids at school may be adversely influencing their memory by over-usage with their cell phones. Kids today are using their cells as much as, or more than, a laptop or iPod. The effects may be on their memory in the short run. But it puts them at increased risk. Remember they have the “teenage” brain, so they’ll likely ignore the risk. They’ll have poor memory in class because they’d rather risk that than risk not being “connected.”

In the classroom, expect more kids with more memory loss. Here are five quick strategies for your class:

1. Constantly make something important to their brain (say, “Wow, this is so good that…” Or, “If you learn nothing else all day, listen closely and remember this…”)

2. Get students out of their seats for a quick energizer every 8-15 minutes (it bumps up cortisol, dopamine and norepinephrine, all of which help strengthen memory formation.)

3. After every single key idea, say this “Repeat after me…” (or, “Now we just learned there are four seasons. How many seasons are there?”)

4. Use acronyms.

5. Use priming ALL day long (“Earlier I said we have 4 seasons and the coldest one is W-I-N _ _ _?”) They spell out the rest of the word.

Details at www.jensenlearning.com

Some thoughts on Sustainability in the corporate world whilst I shall be absent for the next week.

DEFINITION CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY.

Corporate Sustainability refers to the business approach by companies to

consider not only economical needs in their strategies and practices, but also

environmental and social needs. It is the opportunity for businesses to improve

their profitability, competitiveness, and market share without compromising

resources for future generations.

Public criticism, enabled by powerful mass media, has made some level of care

for the environment and refraining from dubious accounting practices and from

operating “sweatshops” in developing countries part of the strategy of even the

most die-hard financially oriented firms.

Leading sustainability companies show high levels of competence in addressing

global and industry challenges in a variety of areas:

Strategy.

Integrating long-term economic, environmental and social

aspects in their business strategies while maintaining global

competitiveness and brand reputation.

Financial.

Meeting shareholders’ demands for sound financial returns,

long-term economic growth, open communication and transparent

financial accounting.

Customer & Product.

Fostering loyalty by investing in customer

relationship management and product and service innovation that

focuses on technologies and systems, which use financial, natural and

social resources in an efficient, effective and economic manner over the

long-term.

Governance and Stakeholder.

Setting the highest standards of

corporate governance and stakeholder engagement, including corporate

codes of conduct and public reporting.

Human Resources.

Managing human resources to maintain workforce

capabilities and employee satisfaction through best-in-class

organizational learning and knowledge management practices and

remuneration and benefit programs.

Corporate sustainability performance is an investable concept. This is crucial in

driving interest and investments in sustainability to the mutual benefit of

companies and investors. As this benefit circle strengthens, it will have a positive

effect on the societies and economies of both the developed and developing

world.

One of the critically important issues in sustainability is that of human

overpopulation combined with human lifestyle. A number of studies have

suggested that the current population of the Earth, already over six billion, is too

many people for our planet to support sustainably at current material

consumption levels. This challenge for sustainability is distributed unevenly. The

ecological pressure of a US resident is said to be 13 times that of a resident of

India and 52 times that of a Somalian resident

The Green Revolution

Hot, Flat, and Crowded culminates in a level-headed

analysis of the best answers to the hot-plusflat-

plus-crowded equation. Friedman’s

goal is to energize a green revolution, the

likes of which the world has never seen.

Since climate change, rising middle classes

and swelling populations are vital concerns,

Friedman’s response is more than a simple,

short-term solution. Instead of only fighting

the symptoms of planet wide problems, he

proposes a complete “Clean Energy

System” to eliminate the many sources of

our possible demise.

Friedman’s latest book also serves as a

wake-up call to leaders at all levels to

“actually generate the vision and authority

to pull that system together.” This requires

thinking past the next round of sound bites

and the next season of elections to develop a plan of

action for guiding the country to better economic and

environmental health. Friedman writes that this effort

also requires the leadership of a U.S. president who is

capable of rallying the country to change its wasteful

ways and igniting the innovation of a nation. That kind

of authority can be rare, Friedman points out, but it will

be required for a truly green revolution to make the

necessary changes to avoid disaster.

Presidential Power

While analyzing the role of the U.S. presidency in

leading the country through the massive changes needed

to keep the country competitive, Friedman points out

that Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War by expanding

the federal government. He adds that Franklin

Roosevelt also transformed a weak federal government,

turning it into the organization that conquered the Great

Depression and won World War II.

Likewise, Friedman writes that it is possible for another

strong president to lead the country through the

green revolution. Using every democratic means necessary,

Friedman explains, the president must have priorities

that include a new integrated national energy system

that replaces our currently inefficient grid. Regulated by

too many agencies rather than a single powerful guiding

entity, the current system, Friedman says, is a jumble of

mismatched parts that makes it hard to improve efficiency

and add alternative sources of energy to the mix.

Friedman writes that the United States needs an energy

policy whose primary focus is making clean power a

priority. It starts with innovating cleaner alternatives to

oil and generating cleaner power. It continues by building

a real system for creating greater efficiency and conservation.

In other words, Friedman proposes, the country

needs a “real” Department of Energy that works to

help the green revolution take root.

Turning problems into opportunities is the underlying

power of Hot, Flat, and Crowded. By considering all the

facts and issues involved in the big picture, and then formulating

the data into answers to the enormous difficulties

he describes, Friedman aims to shift the world’s perspective

away from conspicuous consumption and

toward conscious consumption. Meanwhile, he offers the

tools to make those adjustments permanent. Friedman

proposes immediate actions that can lead the country and

the world down a more sustainable path. He also confronts

our issues head on, turning them into opportunities

for valuable rewards. Through well-rounded reporting

and encouragement of positive change, he offers clarity

and ammunition for the uphill battle through the hot,

flat and crowded quagmire to a better place.

The Energy-Climate Era

At this pivotal point where the Energy-Climate Era

could go in an even more dangerous direction, we have

a chance to build sustainable solutions before our problems

grow too large to manage. Friedman’s latest book

offers timely hope to those overwhelmed by the clear

evidence of our difficult path ahead, which grows wilder

with challenges from all sides. The ride to prosperity

will be long and daunting, Friedman writes, but the

solutions to our problems are possible and abundant

with the proper attitudes and leadership.

Sustainable development is within our grasp, and

the green revolution is a helpful guide through which

we can review our actions and our work. By showing

readers how this revolution works, what it is trying

to accomplish and how each individual can make a

difference on a planetary scale, Hot, Flat, and Crowded

offers both concern and hope, along with the rich

ideas that can help hope become contagious. In it,

the opinions and ideas of many experts make the

imperative for action clearer with every chapter, so

readers can understand the importance of sustainable

solutions to entrenched habits and behaviors. According

to environmental law expert John Dernbach, the

decisions Americans make about sustainable

development “are decisions about who we are, what

we value, what kind of world we want to live in,

and how we want to be remembered.”

Thanks to Friedman’s vast experience and insight into

globalization and the resources involved in its evolution,

he is revered as a writer who works to keep humanity

from becoming an endangered species. His prescription

for redefining the most important issues of our day and

reigniting the passion of the country for innovating solutions

where they are needed most is massive yet realistic.

In the end, he points out, we need to rise to this enormous

challenge if we want to continue to live on a

planet that is hotter, flatter and more crowded than ever

before. By helping to clarify the focus of the United

States and the rest of the world on the most pressing

issues they face together, and on better strategies for

moving forward together, Thomas Friedman and his

book Hot, Flat, and Crowded deserve all the praise and

popularity they’ve been given by worldwide institutions,

media and admirers.

La Journée porte ouverte de l’APM et la conférence du Professeur Michel Maffesoli a été un vrai régal. Les notes de satisfaction des adhérents étaient supérieures à 4.75/5. Le thème de son exposé était : le changement des valeurs sociétales.

Je donnerai volontiers à ceux qui le souhaitent une copie de mes notes de son brillant exposé. Un sociologue de grande réputation, il nous à partager son analyse du changement des valeurs sociétales. Il aime bien dire que la post modernité, c’est son fond de commerce.

C’est quoi la sociologie ?

La sociologie est une science qui cherche à comprendre et à expliquer l’impact du social sur les représentations (façons de penser) et comportements (façons d’agir) humains. Ses objets de recherche sont très variés puisque les sociologues s’intéressent à la fois au travail, à la famille, aux médias, aux rapports de genre (hommes/femmes), etc.

La sociologie naît dès lors non seulement de la volonté de décrire la vie sociale mais également d’apporter des réponses aux troubles sociaux. « elles répondent toutes, peu ou prou, à la même question : comment mettre fin à l’évidente crise sociale que traverse l’Europe ? »

Comment la sociologie est utile pour un entrepreneur ?

L’entrepreneur à travers la sociologie comprendra les phénomènes de société pour mieux exploiter son cible. Déjà ,plus d’une fois dans le passé, j’ai eu l’occasion de participer à des conférences sur la prospective et lire sur les tendances ‘Megatrends’.

Cela explique le pourquoi d’un discours d’un sociologue aux adhérents de l’Association Progrès du Management.

Qu’aurais je retenu ?

ce qui serait à l’état émergent

Le passage d’une épistémée à une autre prend au moins 50 ans. Depuis les années 50 ou 60 il y a saturation des valeurs de travail, de rationalisme, d’ utilitarisme et dans la temporalité. Les indices recueillis par Michel Maffesoli grâce à ces centre d’études en France, au Brésil et au Japon permettent d’émettre des hypothèses sur ce qui est émergent.

Quatre mots clef :

-  création
-  corporéisme
-  esthétisation
Рpr̩sent

En tout cas, Maffesoli me fait encore tourner la tête. Ma réflexion continue….

This morning I had the visit of a toastmaster’s friend, Gerard. He told me how he was enthused by his attendance to the Port Louis Toastmasters session, the previous evening. He had the task of evaluating a great speech by his friend Darlene who spoke on her new found love: the Toastmasters club. He was taken aback by the high level of the speech that he lost his ability to evaluate.

In Toastmasters, the evaluation speech itself is a “think on your feet” exercise. As an evaluator, you have to make the evaluation speech immediately after. Thus the evaluator has very little time to prepare the address and to deliver in a flowing yet structured, meaningful, pertinent and interesting manner. The thinking  has to be fast and the fluency of the delivery polished. The speech has to have an introduction, a body and a conclusion whilst being executed within the allowed time alloted.

Here is a four point’s tip on building an evaluation speech which I borrowed from a seasoned speaker:

1.Think brevity

Be aware that your audience values you getting to the point. They value complex ideas

being explained simply. Everyone suffers from information overload. If you don’t get to

the point, you’re adding to the overload.

2.Think structure

Place some kind of framework into your communication so that your audience can see

you are organized and have thought about your answer. You have focused your answer

into something digestible, something an audience can absorb. It forces you into brevity

and clarity.

3.Think threes

Strong verbal messages require focus. They also require substance. One item is not

enough. Seventeen items is too many. Three items is enough for you, and your audience,

to retain. Three items forces you to focus on what is really important. It also focuses your

audience on only having listen to three. Remember your audience’s attention span.

4.Think movement

Demonstrate your mental ability to be logical, and to move your audience through that

logic.

Some ‘think on your feet’ techniques:

What if someone asks a question to which you do not know the answer?

Mr. Davies advises that if you really don’t know the answer, say so.

“Our research clearly shows that people expect and value honesty and directness. They

don’t like waffling … Just acknowledge that you don’t know, but promise to get back to

them — and then get back to them.”

How do you buy time if you just need a moment or two to gather your thoughts?

“Usually, people know the answer but get flummoxed, pressured and have a hard time

recalling what they know,” Mr. Davies said. “One strategy that will buy you time

involves instantly taking your questioner back in time, to review what happened.

“For example, you are cornered by your boss to discuss your group’s sales performance.

You can quickly frame a response by grouping all the details into what affected past

sales, your targets for present sales and your strategies for increasing future sales.”

Mr. Davies has people prepare for his workshops by bringing a list of the 10 questions

they most hate to answer. For bosses, these often include: Why haven’t you given me a

raise? For sales people, one of the most hated questions is: Why should I buy your

product when the competition sells it for less?

Anticipating questions that might be asked helps you respond to the tough ones when

they do arise, he said. As an opening Think on Your Feet® exercise, workshop

participants are invited to assume the role of a famous person, and field the types of

questions that person might be asked.

For instance, a person playing the late prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, might be asked to

justify his decision to drive an expensive German sports car.

A hint from Mr. Davies: Fuddle duddle is not an acceptable answer.

No easy task, to manage managers. And yet this is essential in any business organisation. Through my carrer I learned the tough way to manage thru managers. Here are some tips which I found that could be very helpful.

Leaders at the third level of accountability are the

backbone of a successful organization.They are the operational

general managers who make sure things happen.

Work at Level 3 moves beyond leading one situation at

a time, or diagnosing a single case, to balancing the needs

and outcomes for a number of different individuals and

sets of circumstances.

Here are the Seven Elements at the third level of

accountability.

1. Nature of work. The key aspect of work at this

level is the delivery of planned performance, while at the

same time continuing to get better performance from

the assets and resources year on year.The essence of

Level 3 accountability is managing a sequence or flow of

work tasks and events, which have to be managed as a

whole, not as a series of unconnected events.

2. Resource complexity. Managers at Level 3 are

not yet accountable for changing the fundamental disposition

of the resources at their disposal. Resources have

to be managed in the context of an integrated system,

unit or head office department.Working at Level 3 often

requires authoritative specialist knowledge.The Level 3

manager is accountable for the identification of potential

managers and their appointment to Level 2.

3. Problem-solving. For the Level 3 manager, problem-

solving involves identifying patterns in the actual

performance of existing products, technology platforms

and systems. Individuals at Level 3 manage a flow of

interrelated problems that need to be prioritized and

solved using the resources within the team.They are not

accountable for strategy and policy but should see the

implications and shortcomings of current practice and

the need to shape different approaches going forward.

4. Change. The essence of Level 3 change is continuous

improvement.Operational scientific change culminates

in Level 3 innovation. It is important to distinguish

between operational innovation, which occurs up to

Level 3, and strategic innovation, which occurs at Level 4

5. Internal collaboration. Managers at Level 3 normally

work across group disciplines, functions within a

business, and sometimes a number of countries, in order

to improve the performance of their unit or department

or to improve the delivery of a process, operational system,

study or project.Managerial leaders are accountable

for their effectiveness in collaborating with peers.

6. External interaction. External contacts atWork

Level 3 tend to be at a national level, in contrast to those

at Level 2, which tend to be local or regional within a

country.These interactions often involve negotiation of

agreements.The response to the external world outside

the organization is reactive. By contrast, at Level 4 the

manager needs to be proactive.

7.Task horizon. Managers at Level 3 are very much

involved in the delivery of the annual plan.A Level 3

manager adds value by looking across individual plans

and budgets and ensuring that their contribution is such

that the whole unit or department meets its time-related

targets.These managers are also expected to make a significant

contribution to the plans and activities of the

following year.

There comes a point when an operational unit is too

large to be run with only two layers of management.One

should be very careful about designing units in excess of

1,000 at Level 3, unless the work is very routine and only

needs minimal supervision or interference.