Understand Innovation in 5 Minutes

View more presentations from Gordon Graham.

Superb PowerPoint presentation on Innovation. One of the most concise I have come across.

The 7 Principles of Improvisational Theater as a Complex Adaptive System

I am in an improvisational theater performing group. We improvise full-length plays with nothing planned in advance. No structure. No outline. No character or plot development. Nothing, except for two locations we get from the audience at the beginning of the play. The play is then titled, "The Space Station and the Bathroom," or whatever locations we get from the audience. Two of us then run on stage and start interacting, and thus the play begins. When the play goes well, the audience says, "That HAD to be scripted. At least some part of it had to be scripted. It looked too easy." It was easy. When the performance does not go so well, the audience says, "That looked hard." It was hard. I became fascinated by what makes it work. What creates peak level creativity in our group? What allows a complex, coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a simple location? What is the "magic formula" that allows a fully formed, organized play - with believable characters and plot - to emerge before the audience’s (and our own) eyes? And what gets in the way? Why does it work seamlessly sometimes and not so well other times? I became a serious student of improv theory - reading the seminal books in the field and observing the patterns in my group and other groups.

Click to read more ...

Web 2.0 Literacy Tools Master List

Here is a comprehensive list of the latest web2.0 literacy tools compiled by Naomi Harm, an Innovative Educator 2.0  It offers links to everything web 2.0 - bookmarking, capture and snag-it, free digital photo sites, free digital editing and conversation files, flash and share presentations, interactive whiteboards, free music and sound editing, sharing sites, timeline creators, url shortens and much more. Could keep a web2.0 nerd active for many hours and could solve your urgent web2.0 need for a presentation very quickly.

A 30 Second MBA - A reality or is it just gimmicky branding?

The teminally hip, Fast Company have come up with a site entitled the 30second MBA. They have assembled a small faculty of on-line experts, combined Twitter and it looks like a Ning platform to create an on-line classroom operating in real time with a weekly syllabus. Week 13 topic is How Do I Prepare For A Presentation? The only concern I have is they haven't included the world's best presentation guru, Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen.

This is a neat way of learning and time will tell whether it is just more information rather than more data pollution information being offered as knowledge. It certainly offers practical advice and after all isn't that what business is all about - practice!!

Try and let us know what you think!.

Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking, Nick Morgan

Why is most public speaking so awful? You know what I’m talking about because you’ve been there, sitting in a meeting room with 50 other hapless colleagues—or 375 other disheartened conference-goers—and listened with increasing desperation as the speaker droned on, reading from Power Point slides so detailed that you couldn’t make out the words, talking about a subject so filled with jargon and clichés that the topic got less and less clear as time went on... and on... and on. It’s a near-death experience. Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner?

Click to read more ...