Sponsoring a child is another nice way of connecting people with people. The following points have convinced us to take part in the activities of Plan International:
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva connects enterpreneurs who would like to fund investments with lenders like you and me. Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this. Kiva makes not an extensive use of social networks features up to now.
Tim O’Reilly brings it to the point in his great presentation for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe: The current crisis is not an investment bubble, but a reality bubble. So, his first robust strategy is “Work on stuff that matters”, i.e. work on the important challenges while making use of one of the deep trends, e.g. harnessing collective intelligence. His second robust strategy is “Create more value than you capture”. His presentation contains a lot of good examples for the application of both strategies and is by far the most interesting contribution of this conference that took place in Berlin last week.
KMWorld 2008 is already one month old. About half of the presentations can be found on the conference website. Here a small excerpt of the presentations:
One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.
A common viewpoint of the participants of a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School that has been outlined in the article “Creativity and the Role of the Leader” of the Harvard Business Review.
One good point of this article is about “managing the commercialization handoff”, where the participants emphasized on the importance to connect idea originators with commercializers, “rather than trying to teach inventors to spot market opportunities”.
The discussion on the article (e.g. “Can you lead creativity?“) pointed me to the news that John Maeda is now head of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). John’s great inauguration speech is part of his new blog. I appreciate John’s attempt to make us better understand the “Laws of Simplicity” (Nice video on TED).
Luc Galoppin and Siegfried Caems offer an excellent book on managing organizational change. The book focusses on SAP® Implementations, but the good thing is that the overall and detailed methodology, the templates, the structure along organization/communication/learning/performance-management streams also applies for the implementation of other large scale business process initiatives. A must-read for each knowledge or program manager.
It’s great that Luc also writes a blog on Organizational Change Management with the right mix of insights and visualizations.
The main German Knowledge Management conference KnowTech took place yesterday and today. I didn’t plan to attend due to the fact that two KM colleagues from SAP had planned to travel to Frankfurt anyway. The strange thing is that only very few of the 500 participants (+ 25% in comparison to last year) have blogged feedback from the conference:
And believe it or not, that’s it (according to Google Blog Search and Technorati.com)… So, I didn’t miss a lot, did I?
James Nachtwey won the TED Prize in 2007. He has created a “viral” awareness campaign on extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis. TB, a disease that still kills more than 1.5 million people a year. Reversing the epidemic would cost about 7 billions USD a year.
Please share, sign, and support the initiative launched on October 3rd.
As Chris Anderson stated it’s all about “[...] a race between the ability of a deadly, mutated bacteria to spread, and our ability to spread awareness first. [...]“
The value of today’s bailout plan in the US equals to the US military spending of 2008: 700 billions USD. A very, very small part of it has been apparently spent to design a new knowledge management strategy and its principles.
Graham Durant-Law (I’ve discovered his blog thanks to the Pumacy “study” on KM blogs) pointed me to the twelve new principles of Knowledge Management (PDF). The interesting thing is less the principles (I would agree to whole of them as they are pretty “KM common sense”) but the story that the CIO-Unit of the US Army uses to illustrate the adoption of the twelve principles: it’s less a “hero story” than a “wounded soldier and his family in angst story”.
