Tag Archives: company of experts

Learning Styles Don’t Exist

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk

Professor Daniel Willingham describes research showing that learning styles are a myth

Video Gallery

212o – The Extra DegreeAt 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils. And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.One extra degree = Exponential results
A Letter to MandelaShikaya is a non-profit civil society organisation that recognises the crucial role that teachers can play in deepening and strengthening South Africa’s democracy. As such, Shikaya supports the personal and professional development of teachers to create a South Africa in which young people in schools are inspired and supported to become responsible citizens and future leaders in our democracy, valuing diversity, human rights and peace.This short feature is part of an interactive multimedia programme, Up2Us, which is being created for South African schools. Up2Us will give young people the opportunity to explore their identity, issues of prejudice and what it means to be an active democratic citizen so that they are more likely to feel inspired and motivated to take action in society.
A Vision of Students Todaya short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
Changing Education ParadigmsThis animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award.
CNA Qatar Strategic Planning ProcessA brief overview of Phase 1 of the CNAQ Strategic Planning process using Appreciative Inquiry.
CNAQ Strategic Planning – Phase 1Second video produced by CNA Qatar – using Appreciative Inquiry to help develop their institution’s 5 year strategic plan.
Coping with Change at WorkChange is a necessary part of business and that can cause stress among employees. Caty Everett, vice president at Alliance Leadership, explains how being transparent and engaging team members in the process can reduce anxiety.
Did you know??Globalization & The Information Age.
Embrace Life: A New Online Ad with a TwistA new campaign called Embrace Life is tackling an old-age issue in a very different way.
How to Start a New Job: Dodging LandminesThose first few days on a new job can be stressful. Roberta “Bobbie” LaPorte, a career and leadership coach, discusses how to make a great first impression and hit the ground running
Learning Styles Don’t ExistProfessor Daniel Willingham describes research showing that learning styles are a myth
Managing During Difficult TimesCaty Everett, vice president of Alliance Leadership, explains how to maintain your credibility and executive presence during turbulent times.
Smile & MoveIt’s all about attitude & action. Mattering to the world all with a smile.
The Opportunity of AdversityThe thesaurus might equate “disabled” with synonyms like “useless” and “mutilated,” but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she hows how adversity — in her case, being born without shinbones — actually opens the door for human potential.
Tomorrow’s Cities“Tomorrow’s Cities”, a succinct and inspiring film (15 minutes long), presents a compelling and easy to understand account of the major developmental challenges facing our cities in South Africa and more broadly cities of the global south. Framed within these challenges, the film unfolds a vision, through the voice of a school child and exciting use of animation, and proposes practical solutions towards achieving breathable, sustainable, equitable and low carbon urban futures.The film is intended as a learning tool to raise discussion and awareness and ultimately inspire action toward the development of sustainable and equitable, low carbon cities.

Did You Know??

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY&feature=PlayList&p=50459483A23AA7A8&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=49

About the Video:

Newly Revised Edition Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod; Globalization & The Information Age. It was even adapted by Sony BMG at an executive meeting they held in Rome this year. Credits are also given to Scott McLeod, Jeff Brenman,

Why We Need an Optomistic America

Last week, an author called Barbara Ehrenreich spoke at the Royal Society of Arts, an organisation that I chair, about her latest book, Smile or Die: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America .

I profoundly disagree with her theory. As Michael Skapinker wrote in the FT yesterday , optimism built America, and without it the country will never recapture its glory. Aldous Huxley said about the place: “The thing that most impresses me about this country is its hopefulness.”

Yet there appears to be a disturbing and broader case of doubt in the US. In December, Time magazine carried a front cover with the headline: “The Decade From Hell”. And meanwhile, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that the past 10 years had been “The Big Zero”, because average wages, stock and houses prices in the US had stagnated.

Even the American far right has doom-mongers. I appeared on the Glenn Beck show on Fox News last year. I found it difficult to take his apocalyptic views seriously, yet he has a huge following. Everywhere it seems there is a feeling of pessimism that recalls the dark period in the 1970s following the Vietnam war.

I’m afraid the US remains mesmerized by the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, even nine years later. The recent overreaction to a bomb on an aircraft on Christmas day is proof of an inability to put such threats into perspective. The Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts are part of this disastrous pattern. Those ill-advised wars have fed the sense of gloom.

Meanwhile, arch-defeatists such as Al Gore have created a vast “global warming” propaganda machine to frighten us all into submission about climate and energy. And the financial crisis, with its after-effects of unemployment, bankruptcies and debt, appears to have compounded the national feeling of misery – or at least that’s how it appears to a foreigner who has always been an unremitting admirer of the US.

The west needs a confident America – indeed, capitalism demands an America that is bullish about the 21st century. More than anywhere ever, industrial inventions and technological advances originated there. The US needs to recapture its hope and vision, its enthusiasm and vigour.

It should not look to Europe for examples. The Old World has a tendency to be cynical. The loss of empires, the end of deference, the rest of the world catching up, an inevitable diminution of economic and political might – these trends have inclined too many Europeans to fear the worst and be nervous about the future. This attitude to life is not good for the soul, and it makes progress seem like a concept from the past.

Because progress is precisely what the US – and even Britain – has been making in the past 10, 20 or 50 years. Be it in health, real standards of living – you name it – in more or less every aspect of work or leisure, there has been improvement in a pretty relentless fashion, thanks to free enterprise, science and democracy.

Unfortunately, many of these advances are incremental and do not create headlines. I suspect that the media and politicians believe they get more mileage from worrying us. And plenty of left-of-centre academics and commentators prefer the spectre of decline and fall to the idea of rising prosperity. It gives them something to complain about, in their masochistic, gloating way.

So, for example, California, which has always been at the cutting edge, needs to get a grip, shrug off the blues, ignore the depressives – and help lead the recovery. Despondency cures nothing. America has space, it has ingenuity, it has freedom, it has scale. By most measures it remains the best place on earth to start a business. A spirit of adventure, of limitless possibilities, of manifest destiny, lies at the heart of the American psyche. The rise of China must not dim the American zest for growth. And in spite of Barack Obama’s “audacity of hope”, I do not believe big government is the cure.

How would intellectuals such as Ehrenreich have us behave? Life provides its share of cruel and inescapable truths, but despair or denial are surely not the answer. Give me a belief in the power of opportunity any time.

Works Cited

Johnson, Luke. “Why We Need an Optimistic America.” Financial Times 20 Jan. 2010, sec. Business Life: 10. Print.

How to Raise Your Game in 2010

Been a loooong year,” sang John Lennon, as the music faded away on the last track of his 1975 album Rock’n’Roll. This December we know what he meant.

It has been a year of high anxiety. Good news has usually been followed by bad, making it hard (and unwise) to believe that the worst was over. For those who had never experienced it, bumping along the bottom has become a meaningful concept.

But let’s not slump into excessive end-of-year doom. Looking ahead, here are three ideas to help business leaders have a happier time in 2010.

Management with analytics
The New York Police Department was “kind of a classic case of a big organisation not knowing what it knows,” says NYPD chief Ray Kelly in a recent video produced by IBM, NYPD’s technology partner.

Having realised there was a problem, Commissioner Kelly took action. Four years ago, NYPD established its Real Time Crime Center, a 24-hour, seven-day data warehouse that provides information and support to detectives who are investigating violent crime. Information is delivered to them at the crime scene. Clear-up rates and speed of operation have both improved significantly.

This is what managing with “analytics” can do for you. Successful companies – Google, Amazon, Tesco, Netflix – have got terrifically smart at extracting the right amount of relevant data from their businesses, and making it work for them: finding unexpected, unseen patterns in customer behaviour, and exploiting them.

In 2010, it will be time to get serious about managing proliferating data more intelligently. But don’t spend all your time poring over the stuff, because idea number two is going to require putting the spreadsheets down and getting out of the office …

Management by walking around
OK, so MBWA is hardly new. Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard pioneered it decades ago. But in the “faster, faster” 21st century, when the pressure is on managers to take decisions more quickly, investing time in talking to colleagues can slip a long way down the list of priorities. Big mistake. (In the global era, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has observed, we should think in terms of “management by flying around”).

When I asked the chief executive of the global recruitment business Manpower, Jeffrey Joerres, about his management style recently, he spoke eloquently about the need to get out of the office and meet people face to face. Being a leader involves a lot more than just sending e-mails and “gazing at charts”, he said. “We are a company of do-ers, and if you have this big chasm between executives and [staff], you have no idea what the challenges are.”

Increasingly, the gurus tell us, strategy is execution. In other words, it’s how you do things that matters.

Management with a moral purpose
Business leaders have a lot of work to do to convince a sceptical public that their organisations can be a force for good. Maybe non-financial companies are suffering unfairly as a result of what some banks in particular have done. But that does not remove the need for moral renewal at the heart of business.

Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, gets it. In a speech at the US military academy West Point two weeks ago, he argued forcefully that business leaders have lost their way. “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership, and maybe leadership in general,” he said. “Tough- mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits … rewards became perverted,” he added.

Large sections of Mr Immelt’s speech could have been written by Ken and Will Hopper, authors of one the most important business books of the past decade, The Puritan Gift. Indeed, in it they salute the GE boss as their kind of leader.

The Hoppers’ book emphasises “the importance of a good managerial culture in determining the nature and direction of any society”, as Will Hopper puts it. Good managers master their craft, while also possessing what Mr Immelt calls “domain knowledge” – that is, they know what they are doing in their specific discipline. If only bankers had been better at banking, how much happier we would all be.

It has been a long year. With hard work, and after drawing on these ideas, next year could be better.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Resources:

Stern, Stefan. “How to Raise Your Game in 2010.” Ft.com. Financial Times, 21 Dec. 2009. Web. 2 Jan. 2010.