Riprendo il titolo dell’intervento di oggi da un post di James Hoggan di qualche giorno fa. Puro e semplice, il blogger fa una lista delle associazioni che si sono dimostrate più attive nel combattere e ostacolare una discussione in materia di cambiamenti climatici.
American Enterprise Institute. L’associazione americana delle imprese si è ritrovata in una bufera mediatica nel 2007 per aver offerto a molti scienzati 10mila dollari più altri rimborsi per criticare pubblicamente l’International Panel on Climate Change e i suoi dossier sul global warming. Inoltre ha ricevuto nel tempo finanziamenti dalla ExxonMobil per 1 milione e mezzo di dollari. Più di 20 personalità dell’AEI hanno fatto parte dell’Amministrazione Bush.
Cato Insitute. Altro think tank americano che riceve fondi per milioni di dollari dalle Industrie Koch, il secondo gruppo negli Stati Uniti che si occupa di raffinare il petrolio. Uno dei suoi esponenti più in vista è Patrick Michael, climatologo che fino al 2001 ha criticato la colpevolizzazione dei gas CFC per la diminuzione dello strato di ozono nell’atmosfera, e che continua a dirsi scettico sulle conseguenze negative del riscaldamento globale.
Americans for prosperity. Altra associazione a libro paga delle Koch Industries, l’AFP gira per gli Stati Uniti con lo scopo di spaventare bambini e genitori sui costi in termini economici e di posti di lavoro di un’eventuale legislazione in materia ambientale.
Heartland Institute. Think tank conservatore che difende le multinazionali del tabacco e critica i report sui rischi del fumo passivo; riceve pagamenti dalle Koch Industries e da ExxonMobil. Organizza ogni anno una conferenza per “smontare i miti del cambiamento climatico”, propaganda un eventuale riscaldamento globale come un bene per la civiltà umana e propone una politica del “nessun rimpianto” in tema di sviluppo. E’ stata criticata per aver incluso inconsapevoli scienzati in un libello contro la teoria dei cambiamenti climatici.
Heritage Foundation. Riceve denaro dalle maggiori compagnie americane di carburanti e petrolio. Finanzia il Dr. Fred Singer, uno che negli anni ha negato i rischi del fumo, del buco dell’ozono, dell’amianto, del DDT e del global warming.
American Petroleum Institute. Abbiamo già parlato di questa associazione come finanziatrice assidua dei politici americani, tra cui il democratico Max Baucus (vedi Quanto Costa Mendire? ndr). Spende oltre 3 milioni e mezzo all’anno in attività di lobbying. Nel 2009 ha organizzato un evento in Texas travestendo da cittadini qualunque dipendenti delle industrie dell’energia e rifiutando l’ingresso a normali abitanti.
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Questo gruppo ha pagato oltre 40 milioni di dollari nel 2009 per spot TV e campagne in supporto dell’elettricità prodotta dal carbone.

Molte altre associazioni no-profit (si fa per dire), gruppi di pressione, lobbysti, si battono come sapete (e come abbiamo spesso evidenziato) per i loro interessi, che stanno iniziando a scricchiolare sotto i piedi. E’ un dato di fatto che, ormai, la maggior parte dei fondi destinati alla pubblicità dalle grandi multinazionali vanno a finire in questi think tank o, peggio, a Capitol Hill, perchè colossi come appunto la Exxon, la Chevron, le industrie Koch, cercano disperatamente di rimanere in vita rimescolando le carte e prolungando l’agonia di un mondo intossicato che aspetta le risposte; investire nella critica nei confronti del cambiamento climatico sta diventando finanche controproducente, in altre parole, ma coloro che detengono le posizioni di potere in queste compagnie non hanno d’altro canto dimostrato di avere l’elasticità mentale e l’intraprendenza manageriale per cambiare strada. Come dire, prendi tutto quello che puoi e poi scappa.
Da una recente indagine è emerso che ogni anno di mancata legislazione in tema di inquinamento porterà solo agli Stati Uniti un costo futuro superiore ai 500 miliardi di dollari. In più, quella green economy che appare inspiegabilmente inconcepibile per le elites americane, si sta rivelando il fiore all’occhiello dei cinesi, i quali saranno pure incoerenti, ma sanno bene come assecondare lo sviluppo senza soccombere alla crisi. Di recente un’azienda di Pechino ha firmato un accordo di esclusiva per la realizzazione di un nuovo, enorme progetto di produzione di energia eolica in Texas. Questo investimento creerà circa 2800 nuovi posti di lavoro, ma solo 400 saranno sul suolo a stelle e strisce. I restanti 2400 si concentreranno nella costruzione delle turbine in Cina.
Vi ricordate i proclami dell’ultima campagna elettorale? “Non possiamo vedere i nostri lavori spediti oltreoceano“, esclamavano i candidati. Ora come ora, dovrebbero essere contenti che qualcosa arrivi, da oltreoceano, invece di partire.

D.Piselli

No soy contrario a la reflexión. La reflexión precede a la acción. El problema es que estamos convirtiendo las instituciones en think-tank y nos falta action-tank.

The Strategist has really made a job of his rethink of that chap Lind’s 4GW idea and come up with a really robust and supportable model that he has called ‘cohorts of war‘. Not to steal any of Peter’s well-deserved thunder, but for purposes of enlightenment a cohort is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as:

• an ancient Roman military unit

• a band of warriors

• persons banded or grouped together, esp. in a common cause

Works for me…I’m not so sure about the links to the Rand papers on swarming that are referred to in some of the comments but will, of course, withhold judgement until I have had a chance to read them…

I do feel though that the Fifth Cohort does need a little more polishing as I think that the key binding  relationship is one of profession, guild almost; and that, depending on their structure and motivation, insurgent groups can be fitted comfortably into one of the other cohorts. Still, well done that man, and I hope to see many references back to this model in the next months and years…

All over the tech websites last week: Google previewing their Chrome OS and releasing it’s code to the open source community.

Planning, pre-viewing and releasing an OS is a big thing. Especially if everybody is looking at you as the provider of THE cloud OS.

It stroke me that some of the comments are so diverging. Some examples. Who is right and who is wrong ? With – as usual – some additional thoughts and spices by yours truly.

Negative

When the title says “Why Chrome OS will fail” you know what to expect.

However, it also inherits that platform’s (Linux) many warts, including spotty hardware compatibility.

It’s a move born of desperation. Google knows it can’t possibly establish a viable hardware ecosystem and still meet its self-imposed release deadline of "mid-2010”.

…no surprise that the primary interface to the Chrome OS is … Chrome, as in the Google browser. Unlike a traditional OS, there’s no desktop. The "applications" running under the Chrome OS are really just interactive Web pages,…

The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you’ll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won’t be able to do equally well with Windows, there are literally millions of things that you can do with Windows today that you’ll likely never be able to do with the Chrome OS.

It should come as no surprise that this is the article that is tweeted around Twitterspace with great and almost malicious pleasure by current Microsoft employees. Still loyal to their employer.

But think twice when you use the word loyalty in this context. See how fast the love can turn into competition when the company does not treat its ambassadors rightly (Don Dodges 180° love/hate turn around after being hired by Google)

See also James Gardner on the “Evidence of the (Microsoft) chip (in Microsoft employees)” and the introduction of a new term:

the Borgocrat

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.

The more a read those opinions of some of head-in-the-sand Microsoft opinion makers , the more they are irritating and even not credible.

What to think of a Microsoftie making fun of Google Gmail being down, when their Hotmail has been down and hacked so many times.

But it’s a more general irritation.

What to think of traditional network vendors making fun of some cloud outages, knowing that their legacy technology is 30 years old, and the cloud players are doing relatively well, if you would add an adoption ratio of number of users and the incredible short time to market for users to take up.

That sort of arguments are so passé,

so old game

Neutral

Starting with a safe “Personally, I think it’s too early to tell.” The more interesting part in this posting is the effect that “geeks” can have on mainstream.

Yes, the "geek" audience is without a doubt a niche market. So it’s easy for Microsoft or Apple to write off Chrome OS. But that’s a mistake. As John Gruber wrote in his excellent piece, "Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline":

People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

Microsoft’s losses to Apple aren’t based on "regular people" choosing the Mac. Rather, these "regular people" were encouraged to do so by the geeks in their lives who had made the switch to a Mac years ago. Consumer technology vendors can ignore the alpha geek niche at their peril.

Positive

Louis Gray has a long term view.

Google’s preview of the Chrome OS was more than a product release. It was a milestone in a vision of a Web-centric world, one in which we are increasingly living.

For the vast majority of my own activity, I am online, not using software. I intentionally use some applications, like Microsoft’s Office suite or Adobe Photoshop, quickly, and then close them just as quickly, as to not slow down my computer’s performance. Google’s Chrome OS is the latest development in a vision that says our activity will be online, our data will be stored in the cloud, and applications that have traditionally been desktop software will make their way online.

Under no uncertain terms, I agree with their vision. This is happening and it is happening fast.

Robert Scoble (an ex-Microsoft himself) has as usual a more documented insight on his blog.

Google is playing a different game. Google Chrome OS is NOT about killing Microsoft or Apple.

What is it about? Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

This reminds me of the famous video where Steve Ballmer cheers up the developer’s audience in the good old days. It looks however – like pointed out in the neutral article above – that Microsoft has lost its’ “clout” with the developers at large.

It’s even getting worse: last week at PDC, Ray Ozzie was saying that apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones. Sounds a bit arrogant to me when you know that iPhone Appstore has 100,000+ apps in store, and Android Marketplace building up fast.

Scobleizer continues:

I have not seen a single thing demonstrated on stage yet that won’t run on Google Chrome OS.

This is a winner, but on a new field

Escrevi aqui há algum tempo que uma das formas de melhorar o ensino em Portugal era libertar os jovens, logo no secundário, da ideia de que o seu trabalho fosse apenas de âmbito escolar, ou seja, fazer com que a escola secundária funcionasse como um proto-think tank no qual os alunos sentissem que o seu trabalho tem de facto um objectivo real e prático. Esta iniciativa vai de encontro a essa ideia, mas tenho pena que a sua abrangência não seja mais geral, nomeadamente abraçando áreas como projecto e gestão.

«Il confronto non deve spaventare, ma neanche la sintesi. Si deve fare un passo verso l’altro, per giovare al miglioramento della vita politica e portare a un arricchimento del paese. Il confronto è necessario anche quando è duro e forte, ma per raggiungere una sintesi e trarre la soluzione più utile e più rispondente al fine». Con queste parole, il sottosegretario alla presidenza del Consiglio, Gianni Letta, riferendosi tra le righe ai temi dell’attualità politica, ha inaugurato ieri la prima edizione del concorso “10 idee per il Paese”, un progetto promosso dall’università LUISS Guido Carli, dall’Associazione Laureati LUISS, in collaborazione con il gruppo di pensiero “Ventialle20”. Un modo per promuovere e sostenere la realizzazione delle dieci migliori idee riguardanti 5 aree tematiche, un appuntamento multipartisan per un’analisi congiunta sulla velocità dei cambiamenti, sugli spazi d’azione e sui tempi di reazione di partiti e istituzioni. Per avviare in un “BarCamp” una riflessione sul pensare e sul fare della politica italiana. Un think tank composto da esponenti del mondo accademico, dell’impresa, delle istituzioni, della politica, del volontariato, delle libere professioni e delle forze armate appartenenti alla stessa Università. Come per dire che l’unione fa la forza. Il premio? La raccolta, la diffusione e la sottomissione all’attenzione dell’organo esecutivo, di quelle dieci proposte che possano concorre a cambiare il paese, in meglio.

Una competizione aperta a tutti, universitari e non, ma nella quale spiccano i nomi di alcuni think tank italiani che hanno accettato di partecipare: Arel, Farefuturo, Folder, Formiche, Glocus, Italianieuropei, Italia Futura, Magna Carta, Mezzogiorno Europa, Nens, RENA, Sussidiarietà, Lospaziodellapolitica, TrecentoSessanta, Impresa e Lavoro, Politica e Istituzioni, Ambiente ed Energia, Media e Società 2.0 e Global Enterpreneurship Week.
Più di mille i partecipanti che, sulla scia della tradizione dell’università di Stanford di Palo Alto, ispirata dallo stile “tavola-rotonda”, hanno manifestato entusiasmo e grande partecipazione. «Siamo contenti, dice Fabrizio Sammarco, coordinatore dell’iniziativa, perché lo scopo del Bar è che diventi il luogo in cui tutti possano proporre un argomento e “salire in cattedra”, per favorire il libero pensiero, la diffusione di idee e la comprensione delle stesse». E infatti, «tutti hanno diritto a provarci, continua una giovane barcamper, non esiste una selezione rigida su chi può e chi non può, ma una selezione naturale delle idee migliori da trattare e portare avanti». Niente formalità o accrediti speciali, dunque. Solo una parola d’ordine, il leitmotiv, che ha attraversato trasversalmente tutte e nove le sessioni e discussioni tenutesi durante la giornata di ieri: Velocità = Spazio/tempo. Una formula per intervistare il presente, un’equazione che determina le dinamiche di imprese, istituzioni, ambiente e di qualsiasi tipo di espressione umana. Una variabile statica, per dirla con un ossimoro, necessaria secondo i giovani del Barcamp, «per rispondere alla sfida di un futuro sostenibile». Ed è da qui, seguendo questo filo conduttore che si sono snocciolati i nove temi che hanno animato i dibattiti di ieri. Dalla crisi finanziaria che ha ormai reso evidente l’inadeguatezza delle regole che dovevano garantire il buon funzionamento dei mercati, agli scenari politici iraniani, la posizione dei paesi occidentali nei confronti del regime, i diritti delle donne, il ruolo dei mass-media, la rivolta generazionale degli studenti. E ancora, dalla green economy, la convenienza economica e le esternalità negli investimenti nel settore delle energie rinnovabili, i tempi e gli esiti garantiti alla realizzazione delle infrastrutture strategiche italiane, il destino delle opere incompiute. Dal sistema di regole sulla trasparenza e sul funzionamento della finanza e dell’economia globale, alla partecipazione dei lavoratori agli utili dell’impresa, un tema vecchissimo di cui è in discussione una bozza di testo legislativo. “I tempi, si sono chiesti i giovani partecipanti, sono maturi?”.

Un serbatoio di idee, un modo per evidenziare la necessità di riaffermare anche le basi etiche della correttezza dell’azione economica, un occasione per dibattere, stimolare nuove riflessioni e soluzioni interrogandosi su leggi, competenze statali, limiti di spesa pubblici, strumenti alternativi di finanziamento, qualità della progettazione pubblica e competenze del privato. Un modo per cercare di semplificare le procedure. E a proposito di “semplificazioni”, è proprio Antonio Catricalà, presidente dell’Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, e invitato all’iniziativa, a lanciare un monito. È necessario, ha detto, «rendere la laurea immediatamente abilitante, sfruttando l’anno in più del corso universitario per fare la pratica e sostenere l’esame di Stato nella stessa seduta di laurea». Se così non fosse, ha continuato Catricalà, «molti ragazzi saranno costretti a diventare avvocati non dopo due, ma dopo cinque o sei anni dalla laurea».

Ma c’è di più. Ad animare il dibattito anche Luciano Violante in veste di professore universitario che in tema di politica e istituzioni ha ricordato quanto sia necessario, nella corsa alla laurea, che università e istituzioni facciano più attenzione anche ai risultati. «Le facoltà di giurisprudenza, ha continuato, dovrebbero dare più peso al trattamento delle scienze applicate, come la scienza dell’amministrazione».
Negli ultimi anni sembra che la politica abbia scoperto la dimensione “tempo”. E il passo imposto dalla globalizzazione dei mercati, la velocità delle comunicazioni e la portata delle crisi richiedono risposte semplici ed efficaci in tempi rapidi. «Il Governo, dice l’indaffaratissima Laura Ciufo speaker del Luiss Barcamp, cavalca un’urgenza permanente che pare delegittimare il ruolo e il peso del Parlamento. Nel ring del sistema istituzionale si confrontano decentramento e internazionalismo, grida “al mercato” e un rinnovato Stato “salvatore”. In questo quadro quali sono lo spazio ottimale e i tempi “efficienti” della decisione?».

GiuliaCerino

If you consider yourself as an innovator, I guess you all want to create some Edison effect. So that when you launch your innovative solution, you can refer to the old days as “how could we ever live like that ?”

The fundamental premise of this blog post is that organizations need a two-speed strategy for innovation.

• One for innovation in the core, which is more about creating efficiencies in the core.
• And one for innovation beyond the core, where you basically look for the next xxx Million EUR/USD new business stream (*).

*(Fill in the xxx based on the type of business you’re in). Think twice: by filling the xxx, you already frame your innovation to relative small innovations or real bold disruptive ideas.

Beyond the core you can NOT apply the same traditional core principles, decision criteria, mantra’s, etc.

Even more importantly, you need different governance and funding mechanism to succeed in innovation beyond the core. You also need a tail of your innovation process.

You need a governance that is not based on consensus (or even worse, on the principle of pleasing or obfuscating the no-Sayers), but on

the power of the believers

Team up with the believers.

You need a funding model where for each project – aka read new revenue stream of xxx Million EUR/USD – you have a FEW share/stakeholders, so that decisions are fast and don’t get watered down by yet another consensus process.

Because you want to make decisions on change of direction fast. You do not want to go through a lengthy consultation process with all sorts of stakeholders. In this sort of innovation beyond the core, often you take entrepreneurial decisions, that is taking decisions without knowing all the elements of the equation. In other words, their is some risk taking involved.

And when you take risk you can fail.

Fail wisely

And make corrections as you go.

For that you need fast assessment of the situation and fast decision taking to change course.

In this innovation beyond the core, you probably don’t ask customers what they expect from the next problem, as they are probably framed in the existing core products and probably think in extensions of existing familiar products. When Apple launched the iPOD, do you really think they asked their MacBook customer base what they expected of a portable music player. Do not think so.

They probably would have ended up

with a cassette-player in the cloud

It took the nerve and courage of a visionary with – euh, a vision – and then execute very well on that vision.

You need to define a radically new and very clear tail to you innovation process. That tail must be agile, with few to decide and fund, to move fast before your competitor gets there. If not you end up with a number of cool ideas that never get further than prototype. And you create a big illusion and disappointment with all those who spent often a lot of their free time to come up with ideas and work them out into prototypes and initial business cases. (not everybody has the Google luxury to dedicate 20% of your work-time to innovation). And you loose the “clout” of your innovation team/work. See more about clout at the end of this blog post.

If you still need to be convinced of this principle, please read on and see what a number of very smart people have to say on this.

I found inspiration for this blog post in two great recent articles on Innovation by Adam Hartung in Forbes and one other on his great blog. Reader subscription mandatory if you do something in innovation in real business. Adam is author of Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition.

First article was in Forbes in October about the myth of efficiency.

Most organizations embrace the creation of new ideas and the fun exercises that surround "ideation." Then they hope they can somehow develop the momentum to roll out those ideas. As if that were what organizations do.

We all know that organizations are not designed to create and implement new ideas. To the contrary, they usually exist mainly to manage legacy businesses, to defend and extend them.

Organization leadership focuses on order and control. Thus a recent spurt of articles across the business press bemoans the problem of business "inertia," as the management expert Gary Hamel calls it.

When you take a hard look at efficiency, you can see that it’s never a good source of higher returns.

As appealing as cost cutting sounds, it can’t improve returns except within the shortest time frame. Why? First, most cost cutting is easily matched by competitors, thus offering little or no competitive advantage. Second, most cost cutting is simply distributed to customers through lower prices, in a fight to maintain revenue and stay ahead of fast-moving competitors. Price wars break out as a business spirals into lower margins and declining growth.

We know that the return on innovation is very high

As I mentioned earlier, it has been shown in many industries that investment in new products and services creates substantially higher returns. Why? Because real innovations are harder for competitors to match and keep up with, especially the more radical or disruptive they are. Also, genuine innovation prompts more customers to buy, increasing sales. Innovation grows a business. And since it leaves competitors behind, it generates higher margins.

Second article also in Forbes a couple of days ago. About Innovation beyond the core.

Few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and "open innovation" programs,

they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products,

new pricing plans and basic updates

the same old things just a little cheaper, faster or better

Businesses ask their "strategic customers" where to innovate and get little advice. Those customers are usually strategic only in that they are large, not because they have any particular market insight. They too just want more, better and cheaper, which are hardly recommendations for true innovation.

The criteria are developed by reviewing "core technologies," "core markets" and "core capabilities."

"Leveraging the core"

becomes a refrain

All of which just increases the likelihood that what comes out will be remarkably non-innovative, like reducing the dirt-removing strength in Tide, slapping the word Basic on it, lowering the price and calling the result an innovation.

This leverages the "core brand" while extending its reach to more low-price customers, but how much can it possibly increase company revenues?

Even if you get that far, and have some form of Innovation evangelists in your company (i hate the word Innovation “Manager” as innovation has to come from everywhere inside and outside your company) that is in no way a guarantee for success and often a source for cynicism.

As ideas are developed, they get pushed through the wringer. Managers try to add value by applying a critical eye to them. With little more than their own past experience to guide them,

they cut out ideas they fear

won’t work technologically,

won’t be accepted by distributors,

might cannibalize existing product sales,

could require entering unknown markets

or otherwise are disruptive.

The number of ideas quickly shrinks.

Why is failure the norm? Defending and extending the business is what we’ve trained our business leaders and managers to be good at. They know how to remain close to "core" by staying "focused." They work on improving "operational excellence" and seek the "low cost position" while striving for "customer intimacy" with the biggest customers (encouraged by Michael Tracy and Fred Wiersema, the authors of The Discipline of Market Leaders).

Third article on his own blog just before the week-end. Referring to another great article by Andrew McAfee, in essence about the management illusion of (brand) control in this Web 2.0 world.

Executives who feel like

they have "control" of their business

are under an illusion in 2009. 

And that has been demonstrated time and time again as this recession has driven home a plethora of market shifts.  There are many things managers can control.  But many of the most important things to success are completely out of management’s hands. 

Thus, the ones who succeed aren’t trying to control their brand, or business. 

Instead they are building organizations that have great market sensing and are quick to react. 

Just compare GM to Google and you’ll see the gap between what worked in 1965, and what works 45 years later.

Fourth and last article is from James Gardner.

James Gardner is a Director in Corporate Information Technology at the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK, where he is accountable for innovation, architecture and strategy. Before that he was Head of Innovation and Investment & CIO Technology at Lloyds TSB. For quite some time he is writing about innovation in Banker’s Vision. His latest post is about innovation backlash and innovation clout.

Consider this scenario. You use the tools of innovation to create a pile of new thinking that results in new prototypes or experiments getting built. Everyone is excited, and loves the new approach. New things start happening, so everyone declares the exercise a success.

But the situation is illustrative of something that you always see when you send an innovation team into the wild: the new ideas getting created threaten someone’s interests, no matter how well the innovation team influences those around it.

You get a backlash that is as inevitable as it is hard to manage. In fact, I’m not certain it is possible to manage it.

If you’re about changing the status quo and you don’t ruffle some feathers, it is surely inescapable that you’re not really changing anything at all.

My conclusion is that you have to invest your innovators with sufficient political clout that they can – in their own right –

protect themselves

from the backlash when it happens. If the clout is invested via proximity to a powerful senior figure, then so much the better.

There is a downside to giving innovators clout, of course. The downside is they then have the ability to disrupt strategy and “get distracting”. My own view, though, is that a strategy that doesn’t know how to deal with the new stuff without falling apart isn’t very much use anyway. It’ll only be current in the short term.

Try this: give your innovators their head and protect them from harm.

You’ll be surprised as the results you get.

This sounds very much like the Red Monkey story from Jef Staes, already mentioned elsewhere on my blog.

Summary: Innovating in the core or beyond the core is fundamentally different.

PS: of course, this blog post was written during my free personal time.

Esta tarde se inauguró la 47 Conferencia Anual de Ejecutivos – CADE 2009, evento empresarial más importante del Perú, organizado cada año por IPAE. Este año, el lema de la conferencia es “Nuestro Futuro, Nuestra Oportunidad”.

Como Centro de Estudios Estratégicos de IPAE, nos complace anunciar el lanzamiento de 5 publicaciones nuevas:

- 03 documentos preparatorios de CADE 2009, cuya supervisión fue encargada al Centro de Estudios Estratégicos de IPAE de parte del Comité Organizador del evento:

1. El reto del cambio empresarial: del entorno del pasado al entorno del futuro. Autor: Claudio Herzka, investigador asociado del CEE de IPAE.
2. Crecimiento inclusivo: una mirada retrospectiva hacia la próxima década. Autor: Eduardo Morón, PhD en Economìa y profesor de la Universidad del Pacìfico.
3. La educación y el talento necesario para desarrollarnos. Autor: Hugo Díaz Díaz, vicepresidente del Consejo Nacional de Educaciòn y vicepresidente del Instituto de Investigaciòn para el Desarrollo y la Defensa Nacional (INIDEN).

- Cuaderno El futuro ahora, una publicación que difunde estudios del CEE de IPAE enfocados en temas vitales para el desarrollo nacional en los próximos años. 

1. Aprovechando mejor el agua en la agricultura: el caso de los cultivos de agroexportación. Autores: Julio Paz y Patricia Herrera (CEE IPAE)

Pronto ofreceremos estas publicaciones -vía online- para todos nuestros lectores. Gracias por su interés.

We are excited to announce the launch of a new pillar of leadership learning opportunities: the ELF Think Tank.  The Think Tank will launch with an information and feedback session on Wednesday, November 25, 2009.

The Think Tank will involve a subgroup of ELF members that will focus on finding a solution to a specific healthcare issue, with the guidance of an industry leader.  The output of the Think Tank may include a publication in an industry journal or presentation of your ideas to a healthcare system leader.  We’ll be providing you with more information about the Think Tank idea, but also asking for your input.

ELF would like to find out from you:
●       What topics are you interested in?
●       How often should the Think Tank meet?
●       What types of outputs would you like to see?

Join ELF to learn more about the Think Tank and provide your suggestions.

WHAT:  ELF Think Tank Information & Feedback Session
DATE: Wednesday, November 25, 2009
TIME: 5:30 -7:00pm
LOCATION: 150 King Street West, Suite 1300, Canada Health Infoway Offices, Canada Room

To RSVP to this event, please complete the registration form.

Participation is FREE for ELF members.

For more information about the event, please refer to the attached meeting details and please help us spread the word by passing this invitation on to anyone who might be interested.

We look forward to seeing you!

SAN FRANCISCO — The Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank based in San Francisco, released a new report debunking the common myths about energy in America. Top Ten Energy Myths, by Thomas Tanton, senior fellow in Energy Studies, confronts ten popular myths about America’s energy sources, uses, and risks. Continued…

…I don’t think The Strategist is a fan either…he has run two articles already, with the promise of a third tomorrow, also critical on this scam:

Roots – the origin of “generations of war”

On the bullshit of “generations of war”

So it’s not just me, although maybe it is a Kiwi thing to pass comment on the Emperor’s new wardrobe?

Anyway, have a read of Peter’s posts and the follow-on comments and please contribute to the discussion regardless of where you sit on this charlatanism. For those who are unsure what the 4GW model is, this is direct from The Strategist:

• 1st generation (1GW): the massing of musket-equipped troops on the battlefield, in line and column formations – essentially the way people fought at Austerlitz and Waterloo during the Napoleonic wars.

• 2nd generation (2GW): the linear concentration of firepower (artillery, machine guns etc) against fixed defences and mass troop formations – essentially the way people fought at the Somme and Passchendaele during the First World War.

• 3rd generation (3GW): the use of manoeuvre to break through weak points and collapse enemy defences from behind – exemplified by the German invasion of France and Belgium in May/June 1940.

I agree with Peter’s comments and personally far prefer the Toffler’s Wave model (no relation to JB’s Wave model!) which covers societies as opposed to forms of war. From memory, the waves are:

• First Wave. Tribal, not much more than every man/group for themselves. Sound like any current theatres of war you may know?

• Second Wave. Society organised into what we might now recognise as states.

• Third Wave. The full harnessing of society to support national aims and objectives, industrialisation.

• Fourth Wave. Nichism (no relation to dead German philosophers!). Society transforms into groups that adapt and evolve according to need and opportunity.

If that isn’t the Toffler Wave model or close to it, then it must be my model – please remember you saw it here first….

Unlike the Toffler Waves, which love ‘em or hate ‘em, are still the result of some pretty heavy duty intellectual effort, the Lind 4GW (I keep typing it as ‘$GW’ – is my subconscious trying to tell me something?) is based upon logic that would get tossed out of a Fifth Form History class (I enjoyed 5th Form History – it was so much more interesting than later classes even though I appreciate the exposure to pre-20C history as a foundation for later life). I suspect that the primary motivator for it was ‘publish or perish’.

I’ll wait for Peter’s third 4GW post tomorrow before commenting any further on Mr Lind’s little scam…I am sorry if I sound just a little wound up about this 4GW thing but Lind’s attempt to twist what happened at Ft Hood to support his weak hypothesis is sordid and cheap – oh, yes, and jack too…

You can put what I know about advertising (digital or otherwise) on the head of a pin.

But I was invited to this “think tank” by these nice people a few weeks ago. So in return I’m linking to their video.

Digital Advertising for a Digital Britain: A Think Tank brought to you by VideoEgg from VideoEgg on Vimeo.

“The web is transforming society”

“Web Squared: how the web transforms the world”

“Web Wide World” transforming “World Wide Web”

Several very interesting publications and postings over the last couple of weeks, all confirming that something very profound is happening with our core systems, our core values, and how the collective intelligence of the web is gradually but surely transforming our value kit for the nearby and long term future.

First, i would like to point to 2 very rich and profound postings by Nova Spivack.

On Nov 4, Nova posted The Web Wide World — The Web Spreads Into the Physical World.

A world in which every physical object, everything we do, and eventually perhaps our every thought and action is recorded, augmented, and possibly shared. What will the world be like when it’s all connected? When all our bodies and brains are connected together — when even our physical spaces, furniture, products, tools, and even our natural environments, are all online? Beyond just a Global Brain,

we are really building a Global Body

Even more profound and more elaborated is his posting What after the Real Time Web ? This supposes that you already have an idea what Real Time Web is all about. It’s a very long posting, but worth every minute/word of it. Some highlights/bullets with some personal comments:

About Web Attention Deficit Disorder: You can experience this every day if you are a Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader user. It’s about having tools to filter out the noice and focus on the essence

About Web Intention Deficit Disorder. Great “bridge” from attention to intention. I was thinking in terms of moving from “Crowd-Sourcing” towards “Crowd-Targeting”

About Messaging. Messaging as we know it for 20 years is going to change 180°. In these days it is somewhat insane that we still send messages from A to B, whereas with today’s technology it’s more about having something stored centrally and collaboratively participate to this "information object in the cloud”. Google Wave is a powerful trendsetter.

About Semantics. What can i say. It should be clear by now for any semantic standards setting organization like SWIFT, like GS1, like… that their knowledge to deal with semantics in “messages” can now have a ten-fold impact in a “semantic web” world, where we now can automatically semantically tag any form of information, whether that information is already structured, or not (like in Word, PDF, images, digital information footprints, etc)

About Attenuation. About helping someone focus their finite attention more efficiently on the things they care about most. This makes me think of Generation-M (see elsewhere on this blog). The generation that cares about things that Matter.

About The WebOS.  I like Nova’s statement that “the winning WebOS is probably not going to come from Google, Microsoft or Amazon — rather it will probably come from someone neutral, with the best interests of developers as the primary goal.”

About Decentralization. “By this time the Web will be far too vast and complex and rapidly changing for any centralized system to index and search it”. It becomes increasingly clear that “central control” or “central policing” does not work in this Web Wide World. Definitely not if you don’t add value in the middle.

The intelligence is moving

to the edges

About Socialization. There is no escape. No hiding possible anymore. The future is for those who can share. That will be rewarded in new “currencies”. See elsewhere on this blog about the Whuffie Bank.

About Augmentation. Just today i was reading another post about augmented reality eye-lenses. And about Google Latitude now offering historical tracking on your whereabouts. Nova is mainly talking about real-time augmentation. Adding the historical tracker to all of this is pretty exciting.

About Collective Intelligence. Just quoting here: “This collective mind is not just comprised of humans, but also of software and computers and information, all interlinked into one unimaginably complex system: A system that senses the universe and itself, that thinks, feels, and does things, on a planetary scale.”

About Social Evolution. “Existing and established social, political and economic structures are going to either evolve or be overturned and replaced.” This has been my thesis since the beginning of my blogging. Stronger, it’s the raison d’être for my blog. If all this happens, what is the 2020-2030 impact on our core systems, on our core corporate and personal values. How will our companies, countries, world systems going to be organized and how can we prepare for the day when “Top-down beaurocratic control systems are simply not going to be able to keep up or function effectively in this new world of distributed, omnidirectional collective intelligence.”

About Physical Evolution. In essence, Nova describes the age of the Singularity, when our human brains will  be complemented by the collective and give leeway to a different type of human being.

The environment we will live in will be a constantly changing sea of collective thought in which nothing and nobody will be isolated. We will be more interdependent than ever before. Interdependence leads to symbiosis, and eventually to the loss of generality and increasing specialization.

This must sound as music in the ears to my friend and coach André Pelgrims, who is fighting the sort of societal and corporate change management that is often not more than a big illusion, because the company has been focusing on aligning (not event fusing) of departmental silos, and was not able to descend to the level of person-to-person connection and enlightenment.

These are just some of the changes that are likely to occur as a result of the things we’re working on today. The Web and the emerging Real-Time Web are just a prelude of things to come.

The last element i’d like to ask your attention for is the existence and activities of the Web Science Trust.

The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.

Have a look at some of the big names behind the Web Science Trust: Tim Berners-Lee, etc. Also very good to see that some European (UK) universities are starting to take the lead.

Most interesting is to look at the Research Roadmap. Just look at the research perspectives, and it gives you an idea of the deep profound impact of the Web Wide World:

• Computational perspective
• Mathematical perspective
• Social Science perspective
• Economic perspective
• Legal perspective

And the integrative research themes:

• Collective Intelligence
• Openness of the Web
• Dynamics of the Web
• Security, Privacy and Trust
• Inference

I took the effort to download one of the students research reports. Oh boy, how interesting how these young people study, research, reflect, analyze. I’d love to be back at university

Here is one sentence about the WebSci’09: Society On-Line Conference:

Thanks to the support of the Web Science exchange bursary, I had also the opportunity to participate in the WebSci’09: Society On-Line Conference, which was held in Athens, Greece from 18th to 20th March 2009. The conference was actually a very special one, as it was the first conference I have ever been to where I had the chance to exchange ideas with not only computer scientists but and legal studies.

I believe it is key that

we start building companies

made of the “hybrids”

Not only computer-scientists, but people with cross-fertilizing expertise. Like “experts of other areas including social science, humanities and legal studies” and bio-engineering and nanotechnology.

All the above is very close to the suggested scope of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Great article in NYT. You can find full article here.

The article is so inspiring. Anything is possible when you let yourself inspire by your dreams.

The next break came when Dr. Friedman was talking about the LightSail to a group of potential donors. A man — “a very modest dear person,” in Ms. Druyan’s words — asked about the cost of the missions and then committed to paying for two of them, and perhaps a third, if all went well.

After the talk, the man, who does not wish his identity to be known, according to the society, came up and asked for the society’s bank routing number. Within days the money was in its bank account.

My dream is to get our Think Tank on Long Term Future kicked-off in 2010. In the next 2 weeks, i will be speaking on this Think Tank to a group of potential interested captains of industry.

My purpose is “To Inspire Others to Dream”.

When I was thinking about Advance, I decided that I wanted to automate a lot of my data collection. I made this decision for a variety of reasons, some theoretical (if I keep the data collection low-key, it won’t interfere with player behavior) and some practical (more time spent on R&D, less on entering and coding data). Most important, I wanted to be able to distribute my game online and reach a broad population, but still be able to collect sophisticated and subtle data.

Turns out this is actually hard. Who knew?

I’m not surprised that automated online data collection has its own set of challenges, but I’m a bit surprised by what some of those challenges have been. I keep running into fairly simple things I want to do that aren’t well-supported by existing tools. Counterbalancing presentation of tasks. Randomizing subject assignment to research condition. Conditional pre- and post-test support. Complex tasks combined with surveys. Some tools have some of these features, but I haven’t found any that have all of them.

Enter Headlamp Research, which is designing tools for people to do research online. They haven’t released their toolset yet, but I just took their “What do we need to be doing?” survey and was really impressed. If nothing else, they’re asking all the right questions.

They’re not relevant for the work I’m doing on Advance, because I’m rolling my own tools into the game itself – but by the time I’m ready to begin a new study, it seems like they’ll have some really powerful tools available, plus a user population already in place. Self-selection effects could be problematic (after all, you’re only testing the kinds of people who sign up to do research online!) but I find their approach really inspiring.

Es gibt derzeit ja wieder ein großes Gemurmel über die Wissenschaften. Wie sollen sie aussehen und vor allem, wie soll sie weitergereicht, gelehrt werden. Leider wird dieses große Gemurmel von einer großen Öffentlichkeit für einen Ruf nach Geld missverstanden (ich schätze, das kommt davon, wenn man als Kind zuviel stille Post gespielt hat).

Aber ein Geldruf ist es ja gar nicht – oder zumindest ist dieser Geldruf ein untergeordneter. Ich für meinen Teil mache mir schon länger Gedanken über einen Satz meines Professors Mag. Dr. Glauninger, wir, die Studenten seien Teil des wissenschaftlichen Betriebes, wären tatsächlich seine Kollegen. Vielleicht sehe ich das etwas radikal, aber für mich bedeutet das, wir StudentInnen sollten tatsächlich auch forschen. Und tatsächlich kann ich mir nicht vorstellen, wie sich bei dem derzeitigen System sich ewig wiederholender Pro(to)seminare ein oder eine WissenschaftlerIn bilden soll.

Erst vor ein paar Tagen ist mir eine Möglichkeit eingefallen, StudentInnen unter dem alten Stichwort learning by doing wissenschaftliche Praxis lehren kann. Das gute daran: es erfüllt auch gleichzeitig die Forderung der derzeitigen StudentInnenproteste nach einer Uni von unten:

Die Idee dreht sich um einen virtuellen Think Tank, in dem Studierende leicht ins (wissenschaftliche) Gespräch kommen können, gemeinsam an Projekten arbeiten können. Die technische Umsetzung könnte etwa bestehen aus einer Kombination von cyn.in oder Buddypress (Asynchrone Kommunikation) und einem Webmeeting System (Real-Time Collaboration) wie dimdim, Adobe Connect oder openmeeting (auch Skype könnte ohne weiteres eingebunden werden). Die Software bietet natürlich nur ein Framework, das von sich aus zu nichts – geschweige denn zu einem produktiven Diskurs – führt. Daher ist neben der Auswahl der richtigen Tools die Moderation der entscheidende Faktor für den Erfolg eines solchen Systems. Man kann hier also von einer Art betreutem Forschen sprechen. Es heißt dann in Ahnlehnung an den Grundatz der Akademien: »Lehre durch Forschung ist frei«.

Links, die noch interessant sein könnten:

• #unseruni Inhalte (besonders Interessant, weil das kaum bis gar nicht kommuniziert wird)
• #unsereuni Forderungskatalog (@wiki)
• #unsereuni BlogParade

Hezbo-alah’s Think Tank

دکتر احمدی نژاد با سرمایه اولیه هیجده و نیم ملیارد دلار، از نخستین اتاق فکر حزب اله پرده برداری کردند. ایشان امیدوارند که این سرمایه نوش جان حزب اله باشد. در نخستین کار بزرگ این اتاق، آرش حجازی قاتل ندا آقاسلطان از کار در آمد. منتظر کارهای بزرگتری از این اتاق هستیم.

Dr Ahmadi Nejad inaugurated Hezbo-alah’s first Think Tank with an initial capital of 18.5 billion US dollars. The first big work made in this room، was the idea that the killer of Neda Agha Sultan، would be none other than the witness himself, Arash Hejazi. We expect bigger works from this room in the future

Par Karl Müller

Réflexions sur l’histoire et l’éthique de la politique internationale.

by Andrew Lachance

Mark Whitehouse writes for the Wall Street Journal,

“The pain of the financial crisis has economists striving to understand precisely why it happened and how to prevent a repeat. For that task, John Geanakoplos of Yale University takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

The play’s focus is collateral, with the money lender Shylock demanding a particularly onerous form of recompense if his loan wasn’t repaid: a pound of flesh. Mr. Geanakoplos, too, finds danger lurking in the assets that back loans. For him, the risk is that investors who can borrow too freely against those assets drive their prices far too high, setting up a bust that reverberates through the economy.”

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Esta fue nuestra colaboración publicada hoy en la sección especial “EL FUTURO AHORA” (página 25) del Diario Gestión, donde se abordó el tema “Las tecnologías emergentes”. Tuvimos como invitado en la sección “Análisis” a Christoph Ettl, investigador de la Sociedad Max Planck de Alemania, una organizanización de investigación en ciencia y tecnología reconocida a nivel mundial.

El informe selecciona dos tecnologías que podrían llegar al Perú con rapidez, de las diez tecnologías emergentes del 2009 -que han sido recientemente destacadas por la revista Technology Review del MIT- , las cuales prometen generar un gran impacto en la sociedad.

Para leer el informe completo, haga click sobre la imagen. ¿Qué opina sobre este tema?

For the next sales meeting that you’re bored to tears in, we’ve got a little game for you to play. It’s never fun sitting through meetings on a cold, dark winter’s day, so we thought we’d bring some much needed light into it all.

Come through and get the game!

The more we think about sales, the more we get frustrated by how complicated some people seem determined to take it. You see, there’s so much concern about product differentiation, unique selling points and market optimisation that quite often sales types forget they’re selling a real product. To real people.

So why oh why do marketing professionals make a virtue of complicating things? Well we think it’s just because they’re a bit silly. Because, after all, simple sells. Come through and see what we mean…

Ah relationships. Can’t live with them; can’t live without them.

It may come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that in Baby’s never-ending search for learning the truth about sales, we’ve learnt that selling is much like a good relationship.

Interested how, or reckon we’re talking rubbish? Come over to the Think Tank to read on, and then why not let us know?