James Drogan

Under the leadership of Bernard Schwartz, Herb Brinberg, and Mikhail Gershovich, the Institute put together another highly provocative and valuable symposium on communications and communication-intensive education.  Look here for information about the April 30 meeting.  I've been an attendee and sometime facilitator at these annual conferences since 2002, continually drawn to them by interesting people discussing interesting issues.  I always find myself coming away from the symposia with insights and ideas that, with work (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), improve the quality of what I set out to do in my daily life.

The highlights for me this year were morning keynote by Clay Shirky, the always highly anticipated and valuable roundtable discussions, and the afternoon keynote (especially the remarks by Mona Siu-Kan Lau of UBS).  Regrettably, I missed the afternoon workshops which, in the past, have also proved of value.

I suspect a substantial amount of the material presented at the symposium will begin to be made available on the Baruch College Digital Media Library in the near future.

This is one of the anticipated events on my yearly calendar.  While this is an invitation only event, invitations may be requested.  I suggest that if communications is a large, important part of what you do, contact the Institute and make a request.

In a November 2003 presentation (How to Use Computers and the Internet in Daily Transactions) I wondered whether "Always on, always connected, always transacting" was a good thing.  Today's New York Times brings a article from The Public Editor, The Danger of Always Being On, which provides several examples in support of answering my 2003 inquiry in the negative.

However, as Clark Hoyt suggests, the danger is not solely attributable to an exponential increase in communications momentum, but also to the suspension of judgement in the face of pressures of time and competition, to thinking with keyboard in hand, and to an aggressive attitude regarding transparency.  Modern communications has, to some extent, pushed us towards speed, quantity, and being first-off-the-mark to the detriment of thoughtfulness and quality.

The old adage that, "Haste makes waste" comes to mind. 

I have previously been critical, constructively, I hope, of David Gelernter.  There is, however, not doubt in my mind that Prof. Gelernter is a constructive provocateur.  It is in this context I call your attention to recent piece by Prof. Gelernter in Edge, Time To Start Taking the Internet Seriously.  This ought to open your mind to the potentials and pitfalls of the Internet.  There is, in this item, a desciption of the Cloud, that, it seems to me, bespeaks of almost a god-like quality being attributed to an inantimate (really?) collection of objects.

As I read this I jotted the note: "Does the Cloud = Omnius?" 

On occasion my students and I have discussion regarding leadership.  My contention has long been that we perhaps overemphasize leadership at the expense of followership.  This morning, from TED via Bob Sutton comes  The Power of the First Follower.  Be sure to click through on Bob's piece and watch the three minute TED clip with Derek Sivers.

Does this ring true with your experience?  It does mine.

I like things that cause me to look at myself and the world in new ways.  Infographic of the Day: Does Being Old Really Make You a Republican? from FastCompany is the provocative item that crossed my desk this morning.

The system of the world has people at its heart.  Not just the people that OK Cupid used to conduct this analysis, but the 6.8 billion (more-or-less) on the planet, all endowed with different cultural characteristics and aligned with different cultural groups (Javidan, M., & House, R. (2001). Cultural Acumen for the Global Manager: Lessons from Project GLOBE. Organizational Dynamics, 29(4), 289-305).  This makes for complexity, changing opaqueness, rapid and unpredictable change, that challenges us in increasingly new and different ways.   

"They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off."

Guy Kawasaki in The New York Times, March 21, 2010.

Longer Lines at Starbucks a Sign of Better Days? is posted on Fast Company Now.  In the mass of data and charts thrown at us by the media and the pundits we sometimes forget our own powers of observation and analysis.  See, for example, the mention of the woman who lives near the Columbia River.

This is reprinted by kind permission from John Mauldin's Weekly E-Letter.

One of my MIS students has drawn our attention to a brilliant TED talk from the folks at the MIT Media Lab.  It is exciting in its own right, but the concepts, principles, and technology demonstrated here need to undergo the test of application.  The Seventh Law: The future needs to be reachable in a reasonable way.

This is for all my logistics and supply chain students.  The product of complexity is simplicity.