The History of the Sign

David Fushtey, of the Governance Counsel, Vancouver provided us with this compelling short film as a prelude to his invigorating presentation on the philosophy of governance at the recently completed Transformational Leadership for the Age of Innovation Forum, the Creative Leadership Forum ran in collaboration with Linda Naiman of Creativity at Work. Fushtey believes governance is as important as sustainability and totally under estimated when we begin to think about innovation in all forms of organisations. What do governance manuals mean when those who design and write them with the best of intentions are not in a position to implement or manage the governance? What does trust mean in collaboration? What does loyalty mean when we look at the current fallout in world financial markets? What does fiducary duty mean when there are no regulations in a free market? He used this wonderful Argentinian short film to stimulate our thinking and dialogue around these issues.

The New Trend of Thinking Inside The Box

As part of the official opening to-day of the Fourth Art of Management and Organization Conference, Banff, Canada, whose theme Living, Learning And Leading Like Leonardo (da Vinci in this case), the Executive Director of the Banff Centre, Nick Nissley made reference to Frans Johansson’s book the Medici Effect in which he explores how individuals, teams and organizations can create an explosion of remarkable ideas at the intersection of different fields, cultures and industries. In the book, Johasson develops a method for mapping where domains overlap inside organizations and it is at this intersection that he suggests great creativity can occur if properly facilitated.

Nissley spoke about how current practice around strategy and ideation development revolves around the organization hiring an outside consultant/facilitator and taking their team away for a retreat in order to comeback with fresh thinking. He used “thinking outside the box” as the metaphor to describe this phenomenon.

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Visual and Creative Thinking

In my continual search for new and interesting ways of presenting on creative leadership, I regularly go to Slideshare to look for inspiration.  Slideshare offers the world's largest collection of on-line PowerPoint presentations and is simply a great example of how PowerPoint can be used effectively to synthesize a complex topic. This presentation is by PopLabs

Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: kelseyruger sketching)

Some Thoughts On The Use of Knowledge in Society

With the economic downturn usually reported meaninglessly by the media, I was most appreciative of a well written article in the Australian Newspaper entitled “Legacy of Free-Market Thinker Pinpoints Government Failure” by Geoff Hogbin, a senior fellow at the Australian Centre for Independent Studies

In the article Hogbin takes a stance against Kevin Rudd’s proposition that the economic theories of free-marketers such as those expressed by Friedrich Van Hayek have gone the way of Leonard Brezhnev’s totalitarian theories.

The basis of Hogbin’s argument is that workers at the coalface of the market will always know more about the progress, risks, competition, evolution and opportunities their services or products offer than any government policy or incentive could attempt to influence or promote. Hogbin points out that every time the consumer spends a dollar they are voting for those outcomes the worker has produced and this is the ideal incentive to encourage the worker to keep on innovativing and experimenting.

I want to thank Hogbin for drawing my attention to Friedrich Van Hayek’s article The Use of Knowledge in Society written in 1945. For those interested in trying to understand what’s going on in the world economy at the moment this is a must read!!

Corporate StoryTellers - The Rise of the Employee Author or How To Gain Real Insights about Companies.

A fascinating email turned up in my In-Box the other day asking me to explore JobVent. On first inspection, I thought this was some form of joke and I wondered how a site of this nature could exist without being threatened with legal action. However on further inspection, this site is a wonderful expression of Web 2.0 democracy and the power of corporate story telling. The fascination lies in the ordinariness of an employee's stories about work practices and how those work practices influenced them and their every day lives. Employees convey their impressions authentically. There is no spin here. No positioning, no editing, what you read is the unspoken being revealed. Contributors voluntarily offer opinions about the companies they have worked for, their employer and fellow workers and are asked to rate their organization via a simple poll based on pay, respect, benefits, job security, work/life balance, career potential/growth, location, co-worker competence and work environment. Here is a comment by a former employee of Perform Air Internation

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