Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
Rod Beckstrom, author of The Starfish & the Spider articulates the nature of decentralization and the elimination of traditional leadership in successful organizations from that of control to that of facilitating everyone to participate. Organizations that attempt to maintain control through leadership will increasingly find that effort ineffective. Adopt the Starfish modality.
Gregory Mantell's interview of Alvin Toffler relating to he and his wife's latest book Revolutionary Wealth addresses a series of notions including the intangible nature of knowledge and its reprecussions to wealth and his prediction of a series of "Institutional Katrinas", where businesses, governments and educational systems will catastrohpically fail in delivering on promises. Watch the interview.
As few others could, Gary begins his Web 2.0 talk with; "There are way too many people in this room right now doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that. There is no reason in 2008 to do sh&* you hate. None. Promise me you won't. Because you can lose just as much money being happy as hell." From transparency to "Freemium" Gary covers the landscape of brands and business in an interesting, effective and sometimes raunchy style all his own. Spend the 15 minutes and enjoy this original character.
For those of you in academia who think the revolution effecting everyone else won't be coming to greet you anytime soon, think again. Mark Taylor's recent Op-Ed in the Times sets forth the dirty secret of higher education. As with many industries, it is an unsustainable model that will soon meet its demise.
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Mark goes on:
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors. The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
Read the Op-Ed piece and thanks Mark also visit how the university works for interesting debate on the topic.
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