Creating Your Future in The Digital World Workshops

Why the digital community matters to you and your business! Sydney October 2 Melbourne October 5 Brisbane, October 9 Canberra October 17

The collaborative world of Web 2.0 is rapidly scaling corporate walls and democratising how business works. It is transforming organisations and employee's role in it. Boundaries are being flattened - between managers and employees and between companies and their partners and customers.

It has moved beyond well-known consumer services such as MySpace into the commercial world. Innovative digital technologies are enabling customers, employees, managers and business partners to communicate and share information in new ways. It is moving publishing into participation - and consumption into collaboration. Markets are now conversations between consumers who trust their peers rather than their employers or any marketing or advertising campaign.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar captured this new philosophy of business when he said "Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected.. . And you'll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways. That's certainly true of the lessons I've learned in the process of building eBay. Because in the deepest sense, eBay wasn't a hobby. And it wasn't a business. It was - and is - a community: An organic, evolving, self-organizing web of individual relationships, formed around shared interests.."

In this new digital community, the roles and skills of leaders are being transformed. Leaders now need to understand how to use a range of digital media to interact more creatively and effectively. They also need to understand the opportunities digital communities are creating for businesses to tap into the actions, contacts and talents of people worldwide.

Two internationally renowned Australians in the field of digital innovation and organisational creativity, Peter Williams, CEO, Deloitte Digital and Ralph Kerle, CEO, the Creative Leadership Forum have joined forces to launch a series of workshops nationally entitled "Creating Your Future in the Digital World" to explore through case study presentations and hands-on technical experience, the new types of skills and organisational leadership, executives will need to lead their organisations in the dramatically changing business environment.

Web 2.0 is driven by three facets - design, open source and communication. They are the basis of the business platform around which consumers participate and hold their conversation. A leader will now need to have a basic understanding of these facets, be able to have a dialogue and know how to behave and to create in these new forms of social media in order to be relevant. I cannot see where those skills are being discussed, let alone taught right now" says Peter Williams, CEO, Deloitte Digital.

Ralph Kerle, CEO, the Creative Leadership Forum says "Research we recently conducted revealed that the most sort after management skills development, both organisational and individually, was in the area of creativity. Literacy in the form of writing, narrative, storytelling techniques and visualisation skills were clear leaders. Management appears to be starting to recognise the need to develop new skills in these areas. "

The Creating Your Future in a Digital World workshops, running in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney between October 2nd and 17th initially, are designed as peer to peer conversations facilitated by case studies and hands on technical experience. They will examine the current state of the digital world and how it operates, explore how we are experiencing it and the effects it is having on our own futures, both professionally and personally. The workshop will demonstrate tools and ways of operating creatively in the digital community. The workshop will culminate in participants working with their peers to create their own digital platforms for the future!

Brad King, the Web Editor for the MIT Technology Review summed it up when he wrote recently.."Our world is in the midst of a transformation into digital life, where answers are never more than a Google search away and nearly everyone in the world is a simple click away. This always-on, always-everywhere connectivity has the power to change how we receive information, how we interact with our neighbors (and changes the definition of neighbor), and how we involve ourselves in the politics of our world"

For further information - The Creating Your Future in A Digital World Full Workshop Details and Brochure