Monthly Archive for December, 2008

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Leadership begins at the Co-Curricular

Published on 10 December, 2008 in High Performance. Closed Tags: , , .

Nobody really knows how to teach leadership. Like entrepreneurship, intelligence, morality and other ill-defined constructs that resemble fanciful delusions when authors indulge in verbose and convoluted idealism, if you can’t define it, you won’t be able to figure out how to teach it. But you can still notice what works.

Apparently, the British body, the Institute of Leadership and Management did some research amongst business owners and managers and found out a few interesting trends:

  • School leaders make social leaders
    4/10 were school prefects, 20% captained a sporting team and 9% were school captains.
  • Scouts make great leaders
    A third of men and 42% of women had been Scouts or Guides.
  • Leaders play sport
    Almost 70% played sport for their school team.
  • Music attracts leaders
    16% were in the choir and 10% in the orchestra.

While it’s nice to know that business leaders were usually school leaders and active in extra-curricular activities, a third of business leaders surveyed regard school leadership positions as the most important indicator of a good future leader.

While education is nice, academic qualifications aren’t the most important thing.

A third said that academic performance was the most overrated indicator of a good leader.

Evidently, teamwork, ambition, goal setting and the other attributes of leadership are acquired through what you do while you’re going through school rather than what you do in school… It’s a bit of a worry with co-curricular involvement – especially scouting – dropping so dramatically.

While organising teams in World of Warcraft probably develops similar skills in the virtual world, to me I’m still glad that I was able to figure out how to get myself (and my patrol) lost in the bush, learnt to deal with a coxen who couldn’t steer an eight straight, and was forced to act like a role model as a school prefect.

Daniel Smith

Beautiful Basics

Published on 8 December, 2008 in Innovation, Personal Growth and Science and Technology. Closed Tags: , , .

I spent a year or so picking up an MBA a few years back. It was great fun and I learnt heaps, but there was a lot of wasted time. At one point, it occurred to me that it would be great if you could get a “key learnings” information dump – a collection of the most useful concepts, models and information… key learnings from an MBA or MFA or PhD or whatever.

After all, it’s the learning that we need, not the sheet of paper!

As I thought about the ‘key learnings’ concept more generally, I heard yesterday that a Creation Science Museum had been established in the USA. While I have great respect for religious beliefs, I really have a hard time accepting that blindly accepting an arbitrary and unnecessarily complex explanation for the world is really ‘holy’.  It was reassuring to come across The Canon, a book that expresses basic science that we should all know. (Dworkin might go too far for my liking, I think he’s misled rather than deluded.)

If we’re going to compete in the real world, we need to know something about it!

There’s a lot of information that intelligent and informed members of the modern world need. Our schools are trying to disseminate some of that information, but with the acceleration in knowledge creation, we need to keep learning… fast! I guess it’s another reason to visit The Genius Project’s Zone.

Daniel Smith

Dilemmas of innovation culture and capabilities

Published on 5 December, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , .

Innovation is cool. Everything that we see around us were once a figment of some freak’s imagination… a figment that, over time, became a spark, which lit a fire which drove an engine that made things change. To me, that process of innovation is fascinating!

One of the most challenging parts of innovation – and one of the things that makes it so fascinating – is the complexity. It’s not like we can wake up some morning and decide to have a Nobel Prize winning breakthrough innovation – the disruptive innovations that really make a difference usually come from unexpected places and not as a result of ‘hard work’.

It was interesting to see that 3M – the guys that came up with the Post-It note amongst a heap of other stuff – are running through that dilemma. A few years ago, they brought in a CEO who made them really efficient – using GE’s famous Six Sigma program – but who arguably drained out the culture and capabilities that yielded the innovation that made 3M the poster-child creative companies.

Read more about it here.

Daniel Smith

The messiness of innovation

Published on 3 December, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Changing things is great, though it’s important to keep making progress. And when you’re trying to do something amazing all the time, you have to make sure that you have spare time… otherwise, you’ll end up being late for everything a lot of the time. Back in the 1930s, Felix Pollaczek said this: “high capacity utilization and high variability in task-completion times can combine to create severe delays.”

So if you are committed to getting things done, keep focused on tasks whose duration you can maintain good control; if you are looking to do something amazing, don’t work too hard.

Then again, you could take a leaf out of Tim Ferris‘ book and just work for four hours a week… if you can eliminate time wasting habits, put your cashflow onto autopilot by outsourcing everything that you can, and keeping mobile by moving from place to place in a series of mini-retirements (ie work hard, play hard). I like his style…

I do love how there are so many ways to express the same thing. “Behonce’s Action Method” strikes me as being just a fragment of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, though it’s still a nice way of expressing the sentiment. I like to think that I come up with the odd novel thought from time to time… though maybe I ought be satisfied with just coming up with my way of expressing something. Yet I really do love their Action Pads and how they’ve created a product from their service experience!

Daniel Smith

The real iPhone

Published on 1 December, 2008 in Innovation and Science and Technology. Closed Tags: , , .

By releasing the iPhone, Apple seems to be trying to undertake a minor transformation in the way that we use smartphones. To me, they’ve essentially packaged together little more than the state-of-the-art equipment set in a pretty (and probably user-friendly) box. This is a good thing in principle – though it’s really not that much of a revolution.

My Motorola A1000 isn’t a great system. It’s small enough, is 3G, and has space for a TransFlash (now microSD) memory card for a gigabyte or two of memory. It uses the clunky Symbian operating system. And it’s not quite as sexy-looking as the iPhone. But it’s mostly the same. The W950 has 4Gb of ram (same as the iPhone) if you’re really after a walkman with phone functionality. The large touch-screen is probably a little better than my A1000 (or the A920 that I had before), but it’s still just a big touchscreen with the same resolution (320×480) as the Tungsten T3 that I bought years ago. Sure, it has WiFi and Bluetooth… but there’s nothing revolutionary there.

Maybe the design teams at Dopod might just need to tweak a few things, and we’ll have a great challenger on style, and I’m sure at a fraction of the price.

But to give Apple their due, they’ve done something that I really admire. They’ve focused. They haven’t produced a whole swag of versions, just two (only different in memory quantity). And while they haven’t done anything too revolutionary, they’re taken everything that’s available and (from first glance) put it together in a single, simple, satisifying parcel. Great work to the fast follower!

Daniel Smith

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