Harvesting

One of the weakest aspects of creativity is the 'harvesting' of ideas. I have sat in many creative sessions where a lot of good ideas have emerged. Yet in the report-back stage most of those ideas have not been noticed or picked up by those at the session. […]

In some of my writings I have suggested the role of concept manager. This is someone who has the responsibility for stimulating, collecting and shepherding ideas. This is the person who would set up idea-generating sessions. This is the person who would put problems under the noses of those expected to solve them. This is the person who would look after ideas in the same way as a finance manager looks after finance.

Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats, Chapter 35: Green Hat Thinking, What Happens to the Ideas? (p. 142.)

Sustainable Business Strategy

Professor Rebecca Henderson, delivering the final remarks for Sustainable Business Strategy

I just completed a 4-week class on Sustainable Business Strategy from Harvard Business School / HBS Online as part of a cohort of 398 people from 74 countries — by far the most diverse and international learning environment I’ve ever been a part of.

Case studies and other avenues of investigation included,

• Unilever (supply chains, multi-sector coalitions, the business case for human/environmental sustainability {"Business can't succeed in a world that's failing" - Paul Polman"})

• Walmart (human resources; "pre-competitive" collaboration; purpose)

• Norsk Gjenvinning (a Norwegian waste management company, "jumping the S-curve" to a new strategy and standard of practice — very badass)

• King Arthur Flour (employee-owned, B corps, stakeholder value); The business value of "ESG" (Environment, Society, Governance) reporting

• Universal Investors (super-scale investors, and their pragmatic need to address systemic environmental/social problems to ensure future success)

• Inclusive vs. Extractive Institutions ("extractive" being those that concentrate wealth/power in few/elites)

• Barrick Gold in Papua New Guinea: a case study on corporate responsibility and the UN @globalcompact (And I am ashamed/amazed to say that I knew almost nothing about the Global Compact before this course, despite 4 years of work w UN in almost exactly that same problem space — sheesh! Lifelong learning FTW!)

• Some inputs and perspectives from various members of the Harvard Business School / Kennedy School faculty, including, poignantly, Marshall Ganz

• And, hah, frequent guest appearances from The Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoner's Dilemma, who were ever present as an explanation for why cooperation is both necessary, and (sometimes) challenging.

in the online context and with such a large/diverse international cohort, I wished the cases and voices were less about US and European firms, laws, and institutions and more about the thinking and methods of actors in different contexts. Though understanding the potential leverage of companies like Unilever and Walmart is essential, I feel that we missed an opportunity to train ourselves to learn from the 6 billion people and millions of firms and initiatives that exist outside the Western Establishment Business and Academic Bubble (WEBAB?!).

LOL this is starting to sound like a book review, which is not my intention. I’m really just processing here…

I'm left with a much deeper appreciation for the business value — the absolute necessity — of "doing good", and for the profound importance of multi-stakeholder efforts (gov, biz, civil society, culture, "the people") for driving change.

Kudos to Rebecca Henderson, the professor, architect, and soul of the course. I didn’t expect to cry at the end of a business strategy class, but I did. Here are Rebecca Henderson’s final remarks.

This is in some ways a terrifying moment to be alive. But it is also profoundly exciting. In the great scheme of things, we're all dust in the wind, and no single one of us can change the world alone. But we can be absolutely sure that if we decide to do nothing, nothing will happen. People sometimes ask me why they should think about sustainability when the world of business is hard enough on its own. You will not be surprised to hear that I tell them that thinking about sustainability will make them a great deal of money. But when I've known them for a while, I also tell them that the answer is that giving one's life to the hard problems creates a sense of joy and meaning that money cannot buy and gives you great companions for the journey.

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail for other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. ”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World and Me, 2015

"Do new technologies require us to rethink the purpose of American education?"

“If the primary goal of school is to teach students to build products, the answer might be yes. But interviews my research team has conducted with educators and parents show that Americans maintain broad and complex aims for education. They want students to develop interpersonal skills and citizenship traits. They want schools to teach critical thinking and an array of academic skills. They want young people to be exposed to arts and music, to have opportunities for play and creativity, and to be supported socially and emotionally.”

— From Why a live, star-studded TV show on school reform is a problem, by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, Sept 8, 2017.

"The problems that do harm to public education…"

“The thinking that if ‘only we can find the right school design model then all kids will have a great education’ disregards the fundamental problems that do harm public education: devastating funding inequities that disadvantage the poorest of the country’s schools; curriculum deficits; issues facing teachers, including training, retention, lack of diversity, low pay and lack of authority in their own classrooms; and issues facing students, including poverty, trauma, poor health, unstable family life and learning disabilities.”

— From Why a live, star-studded TV show on school reform is a problem, by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, Sept 8, 2017.

Not a charity

“The U.S. public education system is not a charity. It is a civic institution, the most important, many argue, in the country, and it educates the vast majority of America’s children — the well-off ones and middle-class ones and those who are so poor that they turn up in class with flea collars around their ankles (as one superintendent told me). It is in some areas of the country a brilliant success and in other places a crushing failure, differences that reflect embedded inequality in the U.S. society and economy.”

— From Why a live, star-studded TV show on school reform is a problem, by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, Sept 8, 2017.

“I heard an interview with the renowned evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson in which he addressed why, as a senior professor—and one of the most famous biologists in the world—he continued to teach non-majors biology at Harvard. Wilson explained that non-majors biology is the most important science class that one could teach. He felt many of the future leaders of this nation would take the class, and that this was the last chance to convey to them an appreciation for biology and science.”

— Defending Darwin by James Krupa, February 2015
https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”

— Cathy N. Davidson, co-director, MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, quoted in Education Needs a Digital Upgrade, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/education-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade/?_r=0

Love letter to learning

“Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age-old search for human happiness and meaning.”

— Math professor Alexander Coward, in a letter to his students. Berkeley to fire ‘love letter to learning’ professor, The Guardian, October 17, 2015

The article reports that Coward is being fired for his unconventional approach to teaching, despite its enormous popularity. 

“I used to think it was about (their) egos, but in fact it’s about keeping control,” he said.

“…[our] learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmicall, epistemically changed - and changed precisely in the area of learning.”

— Davidson & Goldberg (2009), The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age, p. 19, as quoted in What Do We Keep and What Do We Throw Away by Dean Shareski Aug 22, 2011, Presentation for ABEL Summer Institute at York University in Toronto

Publish first, then curate

This post by Tim O’Reilly initially caught my eye for two reasons,

Tim is using Google+ as a micro blogging platform, somewhere in between Twitter and his O’Reilly Radar blog.

In the post he riffs on YouTube as an economy

Whoever it was who said that the internet model turns traditional media on its head, from curate then publish to publish first, then curate, surely got it right

There’s a new advertising business model here too. With hundreds of millions of views, these bands are now media companies. It seems to me that the potential of YouTube to be a game changer in the media marketplace, a powerful new channel and business model for artists is still not widely understood. I bet there are as many people making a living on YouTube as in the iTunes app store, yet there’s far less buzz about it.

I hadn’t heard that phrase about the change from “curate then publish” to “publish first, then curate” before, but it’s powerful.

(I find myself thinking specifically about the presentation by SchoolTube that Darren Milligan facilitated a few weeks ago—there seems to be a huge demand for B-roll, stock footage of everything and anything that can be re-used by students and teachers. During the SchoolTube presentation we discussed the nuances between our reflexive approach to content creation (curation) with a B-roll approach. One statement by SchoolTube president Carl Arizpe stands out in my mind, (paraphrase) “We have students and teachers clamoring for B-roll footage of the Washington Monument. They can’t find anything that’s rights-free or licensed for re-use.”)