The other day, I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr David Skellern - CEO of NICTA (National Information & Communications Technology Australia).
Since 2005 David has been working on the redevelopment of NICTA's DNA.
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Even though they were a wildly diverse group, the stories they told had common threads. Radical transparency, disruptive innovation and policy alignment were reccurring themes at the Turning the Tide conference last week near San Francisco, a forum that strives to connect human health and environmental health issues while exploring bold steps to affect societal change.
The speakers were accomplished leaders from five fields: Integrative medicine, business, sustainable communities, environmental conservation and the media, and the conference provided an expansive view of how those sectors influence one another. Healthcare Driving disruptive innovation in healthcare is Andrew Weil, a pioneer in integrative medicine among Western-trained physicians and founding director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. Weil has trained over 700 practicing physicians through a fellowship program, and his philosophy places emphasis on the body's self-healing capacity, mental and spiritual health and its relation to the physical, the restoration of the patient-doctor healing relationship and a broad array of therapeutic options. Weil is developing and implementing integrative medicine programs for "family practice" medical residencies with the intent of having the programs eventually included in all residencies. Ultimately, his goal is to have integrative medicine taught as part of the medical school curriculum, changing the current emphasis from "disease-management" to a wellness and prevention model. Weil, along with other featured physicians including Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, echoed this need to revamp the health care system. The panelists explored how public policy has unwittingly helped to spur the increase of cheap and unhealthy food reliant on the fat-sugar-salt trifecta by subsidizing the corn and soybeans, used to make high fructose corn syrup and refined soy bean oils that are key culprits in the obesity and food-related health epidemics. Solutions emphasized by the panelists included the need for governmental policies that support and incentivize the growth and production of healthy food, not make it less competitive.But there are far more than policy-related hurdles to healthy food and lifestyles. The physicians at Turning the Tide described how medical schools do not teach nutrition in a substantive way; how most hospitals do not actively promote healthy lifestyles -- 47 percent of U.S. hospitals have fast food outlets on their premises! -- insurance companies don't reimburse doctors for wellness consultations, but do for disease treatments; and even how a significant percentage of hospital revenue is derived from technology-centered procedures for cardiovascular disease, so that changing treatment patterns means reconfiguring the business model.
The brightest spot on the horizon is the fact that people who have access corporate wellness programs have lower medical costs. Because most large corporations are self-insured, they find plenty of incentives to encourage healthier lifestyles among their employees. Food and Radical Transparency The physicians discussed the theme of radical transparency in food labeling and the possibility of a food rating system to shape food choices. But it was another speaker, former advertising executive Alex Bogusky, who spoke of how start-up company GoodGuide is the embodiment of this concept. GoodGuide is led by a team of Ph.D's from MIT and the University of California and other professionals who had worked at data-driven companies like Google and Amazon. The site rates packaged food items, household cleaners, personal care products and toys on a 10-point scale for their impact on personal health, the environment and society. The depth, breadth and accessibility of the data are unprecedented; it is offered free online and on mobile devices, enabling shoppers to make sustainable purchasing decisions from the supermarket aisles. The GoodGuide example shows how radical transparency can affect not only food choices but the business sector at large through a feedback loop of informed consumers steering companies toward healthful products and strategies by their purchases. But because this data-rich model may not appeal to everyone, disruptive innovation and public policy need to evolve in tandem. Green Buildings The CEO of Serious Materials, Kevin Surace, reminded the audience that building operations and material manufacturing are responsible for 52 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. He also highlighted the little-discussed fact that 80 percent of all building materials come from China, where production costs are cheaper due to the lower environmental, health and human rights standards.Surace offered the recent episode of toxic drywall from China that found its way into Florida homes as a perfect example of the sector's systemic problems and the need for policy to promote or require sustainable manufacturing in the U.S.
Surace believes the U.S. building industry is ripe for change in part because the current, government-backed Energy Star labels do not require high enough efficiency standards -- much higher levels of efficiency are possible with current technologies, Surace told the crowd. Serious Materials won the bid to replace the 6,500 existing dual-pane windows in the Empire State Building with super-insulating ones by reprocessing the glass onsite; this will result in a three-year payback, even though Surace was repeatedly told it was impossible. Another example of Serious Materials' disruptive innovation is its 2009 purchase of a unionized manufacturing company from which the owners walked away; Surace uses the facility to produce energy-efficient windows, and his efforts at creating green jobs in a tough economy have been acknowledged by President Obama. Greening the Commons
Speakers at Turning the Tide also represented environmental conservation of the oceans, rivers, and other shared open spaces (also called "the commons"), detailing how they physically engaged with what they intended to protect. For two of the speakers, radical transparency took the shape of documentary photographs or films of their efforts. Bryant Austin made it his life's work to produce high-resolution, life-size photographs of whales that are currently being hunted in huge numbers, mostly by Japan and Norway. His photographs (a small example is posted at right; for many more visit StudioCosmos.com) are the most detailed of any taken to date and required him swimming just five feet from the whales. Martin Strel brings attention to ecological crises by swimming the world's dirtiest rivers in their entirety. His last feat was swimming the full length of the Amazon River to bring awareness to deforestation and pollution; the documentary entitled "Big River Man" records his journey. He has also swum the Yangze, Mississippi and Danube Rivers. Alice Waters, co-founder of Chez Panisse and vice president of Slow Food International, has created sustainable communities around healthy food. A tireless advocate of locally-grown organic produce, neighborhood gardens and healthful eating habits, she believes that children should receive "edible education" from K to 12, as the Berkeley school system has adopted. Waters hopes public policy will support "edible education" programs nationwide to help address the high rate of lifestyle-induced disease among children. The Yale Sustainability Food Project started out as a way to provide organic, locally grown produce to her daughter's dining facility at Yale University. The endeavor quickly grew and it now manages an organic farm which provides food to dining programs across the Yale campus and supports other research and educational efforts. Human health and environmental health are inextricably intertwined and so the solutions to the critical issues need to be connected as well. Promoting radical transparency, disruptive innovation and public policy alignment across sectors are steps in that direction. Kathy O. Brozek is a management consultant and writer working with organizations that have a social mission, including firms focused on socially responsible investing. Previously, she held both finance and marketing positions in the financial services industry. Photo CC-licensed by Flickr user (matt).
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As public and private organisations around the world seek to limit their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental impacts, information technology (IT) stands to make a significant contribution. Addressing the direct environmental by-products of IT use is one way that green IT solutions can help organizations reduce these emissions and address sustainability concerns. But an even bigger opportunity lies in helping other industries in their response to climate change. IT solutions can eliminate or otherwise redirect business activities that generate emissions.
The need for increased efficiency and automation is spurring demand for IT equipment and services. As IT procurement officials and other IT practitioners seek to fill this demand, employing green IT strategies will help move their organizations that much farther down the path to realizing their objectives for environmental responsibility and sustainability.
Download the full paper here
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Here is an eye opener for executives on management and engagement of staff - particularly younger generations
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And my study of theatre took me to unexpected places. I went from the mainstream deep into the avante garde of the early 20th Century – spending time immersed in the dark, imaginative worlds of Frank Wedekind, Antonin Artaud and Heiner Muller. I emerged, later, in the powerfully vibrant theatres of Howard Barker, Penny Arcade and Robert Wilson – where words, identity and action burned the scripts, bounced off the walls and scarred or transformed not just the audiences, but the performers too.
I learned over the years the difference between intuition and imagination, between intelligence and understanding, and that was is written is not always what is performed. The gap between text and performance excited me. Why, for example, is one performer’s version better or worse than another’s? No matter the song, it can only be a matter of words, right?
But there is an intangible sense that comes with performance. It’s about purpose and intent, and the need to step beyond what we say. We need to inhabit the very limits of who we are – physically and emotionally. In the theatre, Etienne Decroux – a physical theatre practitioner – created a grammar for the bodily articulation of movement. He discovered that to appear REAL to an audience, performers had to appear 25 percent larger than they are. Yes, they needed to be larger than life.
In social media we see this everyday. A predominantly text based form, social media in various guises requires that we write ourselves into existence. It requires us to write as a performance. And those participants who appear REAL are larger than the words that they use, their ideas magnified through the lens of Twitter, Facebook or blogs. Look at any one of the individuals you are drawn to in social media and ask yourself how much of this person do you know? How much is real and how much is performance? Are they 25% larger than life?
In the social media world of micro-celebrity, there is much we can learn from “real” celebrities – from performers who have mastered the art of celebrity as performance.
Over the coming weeks I will be sharing my thoughts on various performers and what we can learn from them as social media participants – and what it means for brands and businesses wanting beginning or already engaged in their social media performance.
Original Source:Servant of Chaos
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When you really think about it, collaboration is at the very heart of every business on the planet. It’s very rare that you find someone that is isolated from the rest of the company. Most people are a part of a team that needs to work together to achieve the best possible results; that team is a part of many teams that all need to work together to help grow an enterprise. We collaborate in pretty much everything we do at work, it’s not always efficient and it’s not always effective, but what if it were?
Frost & Sullivan along with Verizon Business and Microsoft conducted research around the impact of collaboration within the enterprise. The results of the study showed that collaboration is a key driver of company performance (the study was conducted in 2006). A global collaboration index model was developed which looked at variable factors that affect collaboration as well as several variables that affect company performance.
A culture of openness contributed 36% to collaboration quality whereas the impact of a structure of decentralization or use of collaborative technology in strategy implementation each contributed 16% to collaboration quality. Again the largest factor for collaboration quality had nothing to do with technology but with people an culture. Strategic planning and collaboration technology for strategic planning (not implementation) each contributed 6% and 5%, respectively.
The highlight of the research project was that 36% of a company’s performance was due to its collaboration index, 16& was due to strategic orientation and 7% was due to market and technological turbulence influence. Here is how collaboration affected the various aspects of business performance:
From the key numbers from the chart, collaboration impacts:
I found the report to be very interesting and definitely deserves a considerable amount of attention in the Enterprise 2.0 space. I haven’t found a report as comprehensive as this one yet (have you?). This report was released in 2006 and it would be very interesting to see how these numbers have changed over the past four years. If you ask me, this report needs to be placed in front of every key decision maker at every enterprise company. This report is a great starting point to help build the case for Enterprise 2.0 and is greatly supported by the list of over 50 Enterprise 2.0 case studies that I have found online. The question after all of this becomes, now what?
We have an analytical report supported by over 50 case studies and examples of Enterprise 2.0 implementation but this doesn’t change the fact that many collaboration challenges still exist. It’s interesting to note that the report doesn’t once mention the term ‘Enterprise 2.0′ (perhaps not coined yet) but the concept and idea behind collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 is very much in sync.
At the time this report was created, many of the popular enterprise software vendors such as Blue Kiwi, Jive, Social Text, and Spigit were either yet formed or just getting started, yet collaboration wasin full swing. Further evidence support the notion that collaboration is centered around people and not around technology. Technology can facilitate more efficient forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing but its effectiveness is an issue of deep and widespread integration and adoption. Collaboration needs to be addressed from and individual and an enterprise benefit standpoint. The enterprise benefits have been discussed extensively and include things such as reduced costs, improved innovation and ideation, and improved company performance (see chart above). However, there are also individual benefits of effective collaboration which Frost & Sullivan have clearly identified:
The challenge that I believe we are seeing today in Enterprise 2.0 is a very strong focus and push around tools instead of strategy. Collaboration is nothing new and goes back to caveman days where teams had to work together to hunt animals. Cavemen didn’t have an enterprise social software platform to discuss ideas around where and how to hunt, yet they still managed to do a fantastic job of hunting. Why then today are we so focused on platforms and tools when the real issue is around culture and people? I’ll talk more about some of the potential hurdles (as well as other topics) in the near future, but for now read and digest the report so we can discuss it.
What do you think of the report? Is there anything especially interesting that jumps out at you? Did I miss or overlook something?
I highly recommend that you read the full report on the impact of collaboration as there are several other key points of interest that are worth reading.
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Firstly, jump through approximately the first minute of this video - it's the ad part...
After that you will find some interesting facts - decide what suits you, and the future of executive research - for you - either as an executive, or a recruiter...
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If you like this vodcast, view the next one on how business performance is measured using NeuroFeedback
