Picture by Imissthevelvetunderground (creative commons license)
Microsoft has decided to shut down Encarta. The comments on the NY Times blog post are worth to be read.
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Sustainability Why Not?
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker for the first time in 2008, offers a new collaborative website on “sustainability” innovation. The site combines appealing visualization, marketing for its own innovations, and last but not least a contest to elicit even more ideas for safety, water, land, air, community, and energy topics. Well done, however, the site is just collecting the ideas with only limited interaction opportunities. It goes along with the current US marketing campaign. A background on the campaign is given e.g. in this blog post.
Thanks to Jens Hoffmann for pointing me to the “Lean Thinking” group at Xing where I came across the link in a recent post.
Hidden Crisis Communication
Monday, October 6th, 2008James 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. [...]“
Why I don’t understand as much as I think I do
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008I’m back from some nice, relaxing, amazing, sometimes puzzling August summer days that I’ve experienced with my kids, wife, friends, or SAP colleagues in Hamburg, Berlin, Beijing, and Rome.
The harsh reality of the German education system hit me yesterday: my younger daughter’s grade 1 teacher has introduced herself to all the parents and the first impression was just disappointing.
Have I looked too much for evidence to reinforce my own model of learning in the 21st century? Jonathan Drori presents his views on “Why We Don’t Understand As Much As We Think We Do” in a 10-minute video. I totally agree with one of his conclusions: Poor teaching does more harm than good! This is why I won’t accept below average teaching for my kids and their friends.
Update (15.09.): my daughter is very satisfied with her first teacher: “She’s very nice, dad! She has even offered us apple pie today.” Actually, I don’t understand as much as I think I do.
Communities of Practice – Video
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Mark Schenk called my attention to a well-done video by Rio Tinto in a recent Anecdote blog entry. The video shows one lighthouse benefit of communities of practice. Rio Tinto is member of the SAP Industry Value Network for Mining.
I looked for other “communities of practice” videos just by curiosity: Dave Vance, former President of Caterpillar University, presents his view on communities of practice at Caterpillar. “KMInstitute” published “KM and Communities of Practices at IBM (January 2006)” with a lecture-like presentation by Richard Warrick one week ago. Well, no wonder, that I also came across this page with lecture-like videos with Etienne Wenger. Conclusion: Rio Tinto offered a very appealing video on communities of practice. Do you know of even better examples?
Conference 2.0 – FastForward08
Sunday, February 24th, 2008Thanks to Bill Ives’ blog I came across the FastForward08 blog. As not only Paula Thornton outlined this conference has offered a lot of conference 2.0-like interactions.
I just had a view at John Hagel‘s keynote speech. He spoke about the growing pressure for enterprises to move from push programs (treating people as ‘passive consumers’) to pull plattforms (treating people as ‘networked creators’) to address the increasing power of talent and customers.
One of the key for this shift would be to use a new set of performance measures:
1. Return on Attention (e.g. “On the total attention I allocate what’s the productivity I receive?”)
2. Return on Information (e.g. “How much information about myself and how much effort did it require to gain how much value” or “How can we shorten the time between the information collection and value delivery”)
3. Return on Skills (e.g. “Am I able to retain and attract the most powerful contributors to my plattform?”)
So, according to Hagel the future of a company will be determined by the power of its plattform and the returns on attention, information and skills the platform generates for the customers and talents who are part of it.
If I would be an US-citizen…
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
… would I vote for Hillary? This is at least the recommendation after answering quickly to the eleven questions of the candidate-match-game of US Today. It reminds me of similar website offerings for the Swiss parliamentary elections in 2007 (smartvote.ch) and the German Bundestag elections in 2005 (Wahl-o-mat).
Thanks to the Wikinomics blog for this link.
Big Think: Still Beta
Monday, January 28th, 2008Big Think is obviously an US-dominated expert networking website, at least in the current “beta” version. Please, make it a “Big Think” place not mainly for US-Americans.
The format is not that convincing: the videos are all in the same “spotlessly clean” format. Outlining an idea in a few minutes is good for an “elevator speech”, but not that interesting for debating ideas.
The context of a video is also totally lacking: no links to related information sources and people.
A search for “climate change” delivers 0 hits. So, there are no ideas of “today’s leading thinkers” regarding this topic, mmmh? A search for the category “environment” delivers confused comments from “everybody should use a reel lawn mower” to “Reduce that World Human Population”. There are currently no “social” control mechanism implemented to tag such entries, like e.g. “not useful” or “not well written”.
IT and Ecosystem – a new metaphor
Saturday, December 16th, 2006I studied Environmental Sciences some 15 years ago. I was educated in interdisciplinary sciences (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, economy, psychology, communication) and in the management of complex systems. It was at that time that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reacted to environmental catastrophes like Chernobyl or Schweizerhalle by establishing the interdisciplinary study of Environmental Sciences. The study itself was an innovation in the academic landscape and the students were co-designers of the study course.
In the last couple of years a trend seems to have developed towards the use of metaphors related to the environment. I want to introduce just four of these that I’ve encountered during the last few weeks.
Couleur 3, Mali and Us
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006Couleur 3 always reminds me of my younger days in Switzerland. Those were the days when a third state-run radio programme was the innovation in media. I still listen to this radio station nowadays, especially for the live broadcasts of the Swiss national football team‘s matches. From the 11th to the 17th of December Couleur 3 will be broadcasting from Bamako in Mali. Mali always reminds me of the most eventful consulting assignments during my first professional career as an International Environmental Management Consultant. This year we started a “godparent” programme (Plan Mali) with a family in the Boulouli region in order to try and become a bit more closely connected to the wonderful people of Mali.
