Although SA does not have a significant E-Commerce presence just yet. I do see that changing very rapidly in the near future.  You have the recent announcement of the PayPal FNB venture, the increased usage of Vodacom’s MiMoney platform, increased usage by internet users of sites like gumtree and the ever increasing internet usage via mobile (through MobiSites).  These are just a few things that will improve the capacity for SA internet users to leverage e – Commerce.  Then there is those early adopters that are presently reaping the commercial rewards of leveraging technology to drive new ways of doing business, take a look at these sites which are all local based entrepreneurs:

http://www.springleap.com/

http://www.cherryflava.com/

https://www.2oceansvibe.com/

http://www.onesmallseed.net/

So Ladies an Gents, the next time you are tweeting or using facebook or just browsing, think about the commercial potential of those sites.

Cheers

Tesh

Think I need to get me an ancestral visa for India…..could be valuable in the future

PS: There are later versions of this video, I seem to love this soundtrack tho.

Cheers

Tesh

The question posed ” How is Apple  strategically leveraging  the NETT Generation and in the process  promoting the brand Apple continuously?  This article is most interesting and if anything gets you pondering…

” In business circles, one of the most miraculous success stories of the previous century is the story of Starbucks. The company earned its legendary status not by invention of a new product, but by the rare transformation of human culture.

People have been drinking coffee for centuries. Before Starbucks came along, people made coffee at home, or drank generic coffee at coffee shops, diners, donut joints or wherever. It came in a giant can, and cost pennies, rather than dollars, for a bottomless cup. Coffee was always there, whether you were at home, work or running around town. Everyone had firmly rooted habits associated with drinking coffee that should have discouraged Starbucks.

Starbucks somehow convinced us all to pay $4 for coffee, and to ignore the coffee at hand and drive out of our way, stand in line, then wait again for them to make it. They got us to add all kinds of weird stuff to our coffee, from whipped cream to ice to chocolate. Starbucks transformed a generic commodity into a brand-name experience that people seek out. But the miraculous bit is that they changed American (and later, global) culture.

Coffee is still coffee. They didn’t change the product as much as they changed the customer.

Consumer electronics companies face a similar challenge. It’s hard enough to invent a better way to do things. But the most difficult challenge is getting consumers to accept the change.

Since the dawn of the PC revolution, for example, a huge number of “better” ideas for doing things have come along, and have been crushed by consumer apathy. Keyboards are a particularly hazardous market. Nearly everyone agrees that QWERTY keyboards don’t make sense, and that there must be a better way. Hundreds or possibly thousands of small startups have emerged over the decades to solve the problem of the clunky QWERTY keyboard. Yet all have failed. Why? Because we’re all mastered existing keyboards, and we’re not going to change.

Visionary companies like Apple have better ideas for how we do just about everything relating to computers and media. They know they can invent and build the products. The big problem is convincing us to use them.

I’ve written in this space before about how Google is systematically nudging us to accept less privacy. Now I’m going to tell you how Apple is transforming you and me and softening our resistance to the gadget future they envision for us all.

1. Virtual keyboards

People hate the idea of giving up their physical keyboards for on-screen keyboards. But I believe Apple wants to move us all to on-screen keyboards not only for phones, but mobile devices and even “desktop” computers. If Apple were to introduce an all-screen desktop PC today, it would be rejected wholesale by the public. But in a few years, we’ll all be standing in line to buy them. How will they do it?

Apple led the first wave of all-screen cell phones with the introduction of its iPhone two and a half years ago. Everybody grumbled about the cramped, on-screen keyboard, but most of us expected in those early days that someone would ship a wireless physical keyboard peripheral for the iPhone. We’re still waiting. Where is it?

You can buy iPhone accessories of every description, from iPhone-compatible fireplaces to gaming rigs to telephoto lenses. What you can’t buy is a fold-out Bluetooth keyboard, which is a common add-on for other phones.

You may have heard about the iType full-size keyboard, which is billed as the first-ever full-size keyboard for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) when it ships later this year. What you may not have heard is that you can’t use it directly in iPhone applications. You have to use the iType application to do your typing, then you can copy and paste the text into another application, or push a button to send it to e-mail. It can’t be used to type URLs, fill out online forms, type directly in e-mail, type documents directly in native applications, add items to your calendar or any other task that involves simply using the keyboard with your iPhone.

Don’t blame ION, the company that makes the keyboard, and which is trying to satisfy demand for a physical iPhone keyboard. Instead, blame Apple. The company has gone out of its way to block physical keyboards from hitting the market.

Apple could build and ship its own physical iPhone keyboard, and they’d probably make a bundle on it. But they’re thinking long-term.

My belief is that Apple blocks iPhone keyboards as part of its user-transformation project. They’re forcing those of us who want to use an iPhone to accept the on-screen keyboard. Later this year, when the rumored Apple touch tablet is likely to ship, everyone will be so happy with a larger version of the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. Had they shipped the tablet first, we no doubt would have complained about that keyboard. But since they’ve lowered our expectations with the iPhone keyboard, we’ll love the tablet’s.

I think the initial tablet will feature a 10-inch touch screen. The keyboard will probably span the screen. Then they’ll ship a 13-inch tablet. Then a 15-inch. By the time they ship a 27-inch desktop touch tablet (used at an angle like a drafting board), we’ll be just giddy with excitement about how wonderful the on-screen keyboard is.

2. Mobile cable box and DVR

Right now, those of us who get cable TV and use TiVo or other DVR devices, are used to all that gear being lashed physically to our TVs and walls. Sure, those big, clunky, ugly boxes look like Radio Shack DIY projects, but we don’t know anything better.

In the future, we’ll use our cell phones and touch tablets to browse, find, record or schedule for recording all our TV and movies — and often watch them on these mobile devices, as well as on our giant, flat-screen TVs. But when we’re not watching them on the mobile devices, we’ll use those gadgets to control and store the media.

Apple led the mob that practically killed off the audio CD by getting us all into the habit of shopping for music in iTunes, rather than at Tower Records. Their tablets will lead a similar attack on renting movies at Blockbuster. Instead, we’ll download movies from Netflix and iTunes via our tablets. I believe they’ll also drive the Huluization of television, which is where TV is something that exists in a searchable online database, and shows will be something you “subscribe” to.

One by one, we’ll all wake up and wonder why we’re still paying the cable company.

3. Apps on demand

Sure, we’ve long ago accepted the idea of buying software online and downloading it. But the iPhone, and later the tablet will change our thinking on software even further. Rather than thinking of a software application as some massive, do-everything product, we’ll increasingly view software as apps, widgets or small features that are cheap and instantly available all the time.

We’re already experiencing this with the iPhone. It’s getting to the point where its easier to download an app than find one already installed on your own phone.

Apple’s iPhone, and later tablet, will acclimate us all to this model, and we’ll come to prefer it for desktop computing as well.

Five years from now, your PC will be an all-touch, no-keyboard giant tablet that replaces your cable box and DVR and facilitates the downloading and installation of software one small feature at a time.

Apple is already working on the technology. And — don’t look now — but Apple is working on you, too.” – Mike Elgan

Couple this with “no holes barred product development, pristine creativity characterised by minimalistic yet sophisticated design and a culture that promotes spontaneous collaboration (i.e. new marketing) and the world is your oyster….Feel good ad  just to help the mission:

Cheers

Tesh

In the context of this video and education, this article is an interesting read.  The NET Generation are dubbed to be the most productive generation yet. A generalised reform to educational systems, political systems or business systems to harness this productivity, in light of different learning styles, is not the answer.  Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers – introduced me to the principle of “cultivated learning” and my opinion is that Sir Ken Robinson’s  talk eludes to this very notion (specifically amongst kids).  Cultivated learning that is focused on early detection of talent, cognitive differences or simply potential should be the corner stone of all the systems mentioned above.

“THEY are variously known as the Net Generation, Millennials, Generation Y or Digital Natives. But whatever you call this group of young people—roughly, those born between 1980 and 2000—there is a widespread consensus among educators, marketers and policymakers that digital technologies have given rise to a new generation of students, consumers, and citizens who see the world in a different way. Growing up with the internet, it is argued, has transformed their approach to education, work and politics.

“Unlike those of us a shade older, this new generation didn’t have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around,” declare John Palfrey and Urs Gasser of the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School in their 2008 book, “Born Digital”, one of many recent tomes about digital natives. The authors argue that young people like to use new, digital ways to express themselves: shooting a YouTube video where their parents would have written an essay, for instance.

Anecdotes like this are used to back calls for education systems to be transformed in order to cater to these computer-savvy students, who differ fundamentally from earlier generations of students: professors should move their class discussions to Facebook, for example, where digital natives feel more comfortable. “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach,” argues Marc Prensky in his book “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, published in 2001. Management gurus, meanwhile, have weighed in to explain how employers should cope with this new generation’s preference for collaborative working rather than traditional command-and-control, and their need for constant feedback about themselves.

But does it really make sense to generalise about a whole generation in this way? Not everyone thinks it does. “This is essentially a wrong-headed argument that assumes that our kids have some special path to the witchcraft of ‘digital awareness’ and that they understand something that we, teachers, don’t—and we have to catch up with them,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at University of Virginia.

Michael Wesch, who pioneered the use of new media in his cultural anthropology classes at Kansas State University, is also sceptical, saying that many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools that they use regularly, especially when it comes to the tools’ social and political potential. Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives, in other words. The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population.

Writing in the British Journal of Education Technology in 2008, a group of academics led by Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong set out to debunk the whole idea of digital natives, arguing that there may be “as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations”. They caution that the idea of a new generation that learns in a different way might actually be counterproductive in education, because such sweeping generalisations “fail to recognise cognitive differences in young people of different ages, and variation within age groups”. The young do not really have different kinds of brains that require new approaches to school and work, in short.

What about politics, and the idea that, thanks to the internet, digital natives will grow up to be more responsible citizens, using their technological expertise to campaign on social issues and exercise closer scrutiny over their governments? Examples abound, from Barack Obama’s online campaign to activism on Twitter. A three-year study by the MacArthur Foundation found that spending time online is “essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age”. But discussions about “digital citizens” run into the same problems as those about digital natives: there may simply be too much economic, geographic, and demographic disparity within this group to make meaningful generalisations.

After all, not everyone born between 1980 and 2000 has access to digital technology: many in the developing world do not. It is true that the internet can provide an outlet for political expression for people living under repressive regimes. But those regimes are also likely to monitor the internet closely. And in some cases there is, in effect, a new social contract: do what you like online, as long as you steer clear of politics. Government-controlled internet-access providers in Belarus, for example, provide servers full of pirated material to keep their customers happy.

Activism or slacktivism?

There is also a feeling of superficiality about much online youth activism. Any teenager can choose to join a Facebook group supporting the opposition in Iran or the liberation of Tibet, but such engagement is likely to be shallow. A recent study by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, found that internet users aged 18-24 were the least likely of all age groups to e-mail a public official or make an online political donation. But when it came to using the web to share political news or join political causes on social networks, they were far ahead of everyone else. Rather than genuinely being more politically engaged, they may simply wish to broadcast their activism to their peers. As with the idea that digital natives learn and work in new ways, there may be less going on here than meets the eye.” – From The Economist.

Cheers

Tesh

But that’s only the beginning. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that there’s a very real possibility that the next breakthrough in advertising itself is its convergence with e-commerce. Buying an app from the Android Market, I realized how those of us with smartphones have become accustomed to seamless purchases on our phone. That is, we search for an app, and then we buy it, directly from our search vendor.

Isn’t that after all the goal of advertising? To cause a transaction. So why not do away with the intermediate step of sending someone to a website for more information? Especially with the limited screen real estate on the phone, there isn’t really room for the contextual text advertising that made Google its billions. Interstitial or popup ads are intrusive and unwelcome. But how much search activity on the phone is tied to commerce already? Find a restaurant nearby and make a reservation? Why not pay as well? Point Google Goggles at a bottle of wine you enjoyed at that restaurant, and have a few bottles more show up on your doorstep?

This line of thought led me to the conclusion that Google, Apple, Microsoft, will soon be announcing e-commerce programs akin to Adsense, in which retailers will register with “app stores” to allow physical goods and services to be bought as easily as apps. We can also expect announcements of partnerships between phone providers and Amazon or Wal-Mart or other big retailers who can fulfill e-commerce requests from the phone. I have no inside information to support this contention, just the logic of the marketplace.

Interestingly enough, it was only a few days after I had this thought that I met with the folks at Siri, which bills itself as “Your virtual personal assistant.” Siri does pretty much what I was imagining for Google or Apple: it searches, and then does something. In our conversation, one of the founders referred to it as a “do engine” rather than a search engine. Right now, Siri mainly interfaces with services that provide APIs for reservations, like OpenTable or TicketMaster. It isn’t a general purpose e-commerce engine. But that is clearly in the future, if not from Siri, then from some other startup, and then, inevitably, from the big guys.

E-commerce is the killer app of the phone world. Anyone whose business is now based on advertising had better be prepared to link payment and fulfillment directly to search, making buying anything in the world into a one-click purchase. Real time payment from the phone is in your future.” – Tim O’ Reilly

I suppose that although this may not be a reality in South Africa just yet, we are rapidly approaching critical mass of users accessing the internet via cellphone.  The next step would be to look for “productivity tools” or Apps that fit in with a consumers life.

How will this change traditional business models? I wonder….

Cheers

Tesh

So how do we captilise on the new world?

Context:

” What is going on today is much broader, much more profound a phenomenon.  It is not simply about how governments, businesses and people communicate, not just about how orginisations interact but it is about the emergence of completely new social, political and business – models. It is about things that impact some of the deepest, most ingrained aspects of society right down to the nature of the social contract. ” – David Rothkopf

The information revolution as this change is commonly referred to as, is the follow-on from the industrial revolution.  The dynamic i.e. how we respond and behave in the context of this change, is best summarised for me by the below manifesto authored by Seth Godin:

“Years ago, when you were about four  years old, the system set out to persuade you of something that isn’t true.

Not just persuade, but drill, practice, reinforce and, yes, brainwash.

The mission: to teach you that you’re average; That compliant work is the best way to a reliable  living; That creating average stuff for average people, again and again, is a safe and easy way  to get what you want.
Step out of line and the system would nudge (or push) you back to the center. Show signs  of real creativity, originality or even genius, and well-meaning parents, teachers and authority  figures would eagerly line up to get you back in line.

Our culture needed compliant workers, people who would contribute without complaint,  and we set out to create as many of them as we could.  And so generations of students turned into generations of cogs—factory workers in search
of a sinecure. We were brainwashed into fitting in, and then discovered that the economy wanted people who stood out instead.

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?

I think each one of us needs to start with that.

Over time, the benefit of working for the man and following a manual as a compliant cog is going  to go down, while, paradoxically, the difficulty in getting a decent job will go up.

We just lived through a few generations of huge companies that got bigger, giant bureaucracies  that got bigger and white-collar jobs that got farther and farther away from actually making  something that a customer might buy.

And then, pretty suddenly, that faded. Unemployment goes up, downsizing happens, layers of fat disappear and the idea that you could get a good job, indoors, paid well, doing not much except watching the dog that bites the pilot if he messes with the autopilot… well, those jobs are gone.

Is that it? Are you done? Is this the end of the road, the best it’s going to get, the beginning  of the end?
Same job, but more work, less pay.
Same industry, but less growth, no challenges.
Same path, fewer options.

It’s entirely possible that you’ve trudged as far as you can go on this road, and that the slog is  just going to be more of the same.

Possible.

But I don’t believe it.

Why?

Because there’s more leverage, more degrees of freedom and more opportunity today than ever before—if you’re up for the choice.

The new industrial revolution (the one we’re living through, the one that’s changing everything) has opened doors for anyone (or certainly anyone with enough resources and education to be able to read this document). If you’ve got the time, the intellect and the access to get your hands on an idea that spread as this manifesto did, then you have the ability to reinvent yourself, regardless of what you do, who you do it with, or what the people around you expect.

The pillars we grew up with (things like General Motors, TV, the postal service, retirement, top  down media and commodities) are disappearing and are being replaced with entirely new  ways of interacting, making a living and making a difference. Not just for organizations, but  for individuals—people like you.

If you’ve got the time, the intellect and the access to get your hands on an idea … then you have the ability to reinvent yourself.

Look around you. Who are the successful people in our world today? It’s not the Jack Welch, captain- of-industry type, nor is it the pension-earning, go-to-work-every-day-for-fifty-years factory man.

A fundamental shift has happened, right under our feet. The system—the much vaunted system,  the system that nurtured our parents and even our grandparents—has turned sour.

It’s like this: we were brainwashed. Brainwashed into believing a set of rules that aren’t true (any more). And because the brainwashing has been so complete, the shifts in our world and new  opportunities they open up are easy to see as ways to shore up yesterday’s faltering system. Please, don’t fall for that. Don’t use the tools of today to support your effort to do yesterday’s job better. This is an opportunity to completely reinvent your role in the system.

Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 -32x +12? Why were you taught this? Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content? Simple: you were being trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to seeking out innovation and surprise.
The evidence is clear. The function of public education was (and is) to turn out compliant workers. Not educated voters, not passionate ideamakers. No, we spend all this money on school taxes to be sure that there will be enough people to do all the work that the factories once needed done.

Exceptional teachers, the ones who make a difference, are not only rare, but they’re almost always in trouble for bending the rules and not optimizing for the standardized tests. I love math. I love the idea of working with numbers, of inventing cool ideas that click. But memorizing factors of 32? It’s clearly an effort to teach you to be taught, to instruct you in compliance,
to follow the curriculum.

The brainwashing continues to this day. You’ve been brainwashed to believe that you’re stuck with what you’ve got, that you need to punch a clock, follow a manual and do what you’re told. I wonder who dreamed that up? It’s certainly in the interest of the dominant forces of our society to create an oversupply of eager and compliant workers. But now, as the power shifts, so does your opportunity.

Are you serious about transformation? I’m not talking about polishing yourself, improving yourself, making things a bit better. I’m talking about the reset button, a reinvention that changes the game. That means an overhaul in what you believe and how you do your job. If you’re up for that, then right here, right now, you can start.

Do work that matters.
Four words available to anyone. They’re here if you want them. The economy just gave you lever-age—the leverage to make a difference, the leverage to spread your ideas and the leverage to  have impact. More people have more leverage (more chances and more power) to change the world than at any other time in history. What are you going to do about it? When?

The economy just gave you leverage—the leverage to make a difference, the leverage to spread your ideas and the leverage to have an impact.

Here are seven levers available for anyone (like you) in search of reinvention:
1. Connect
2. Be generous
3. Make art
4. Acknowledge the lizard
5. Ship
6. Fail
7. Learn

CONNECT
Social media is either a time-wasting, wool-gathering, yak-shaving waste of effort or, perhaps,  just maybe, it’s a crack in the wall between you and the rest of the world. It’s a choice… up to you. If you’re keeping score of how many followers you have, how many comments you get or how  big your online footprint is, then you’re measuring the wrong thing and probably distracting
yourself from what matters.

On the other hand, digital media can offer you a chance to make real connections, to earn permission and gain insights from people you’d never have a chance to interact with any other way. We were isolated, now we’re connected. The typical individual didn’t have the time, the money or the connections to be heard just a few years ago. Today, the door is wide open… but only  the people who can touch us will step over the threshold. If you can reach and (far more importantly) touch or change people, you will gain in influence, authority and power.

Shepard Fairey made a poster of Barack Obama. The Internet helped it spread. The poster connected one supporter to another and became an icon, a freely shared ID badge (and ultimately a parody). And in the center of the spread was the artist. It doesn’t matter that Fairey didn’t make a penny selling the image. What matters is that he connected, and that connection gave his art leverage.

He’ll never need to look for work or revenue again. It will find him. We grew up isolated. The future is connected. We grew up unable to have substantial interactions with anyone except a small circle of family and co-workers. Now, we earn the right to interact  with just about anyone. I think this changes everything… if we let it.

BE GENEROUS
The new economy often involves trading in things that don’t cost money. There’s no incremental  cost in writing an essay, composing a song or making an introduction. Since it doesn’t cost money to play, we have the ability to give before we get.

The generosity economy rewards people who create and participate in circles of gifts. Not the direct I-gave-you-this-you-give-me-that giving and get of a traditional economy, but instead the tribal economy of individuals supporting one another.

Tribes of talented individuals who are connected, mutually trustful and supported by one another  are in a position to create a movement, to deliver items of value, to move ideas forward faster than any individual ever could.

Derek Sivers built CDBaby.com from a bedroom startup into a multimillion-dollar seller of independent music. Under his watch, he was selling more music from more artists than anyone before in history. The secret? He spent virtually all of his time supporting the artists. The software he developed, the posts he wrote, the systems he instituted—they were gifts, generous contributions from Derek to the artists he worked with. In return, the artists built a thriving community, one that
couldn’t help but turn a profit.

MAKE ART
Art is an original gift, a connection that changes the recipient, a human ability to make a difference. Art isn’t a painting or even a poem, it’s something that any of us can do. If you interact with others, you have the platform to create something new—something that changes everything. I call that art.

Art is the opposite of trigonometry. Art doesn’t follow instructions or a manual or a boss’s orders. Instead, art is the very human act of creating the uncreated, of connecting with another person at a human level. What we’ve seen is that more and more markets will reward art handsomely, and hand out the compliant work to the lowest bidder.
Kathy Sierra does art when she teaches us about user interfaces, and Mary Ann Davis does art when she pushes the edges of what pottery can become. Art feels risky because it is. The risk the artist takes is that you might not like it, might not be touched, might actually laugh at the effort. And it’s taking these risks that lead us to get rewarded.

ACKNOWLEDGE THE LIZARD
The lizard brain—that prehistoric brainstem that all of us must contend with—doesn’t like being laughed at. It’s the part of our brain that worries about safety and dishes out anger. Being laughed at is the lizard brain’s worst nightmare. And so it shuts down our art.
Steven Pressfield calls this shutdown, “the resistance.” The resistance is the little voice in your head that keeps your head down and encourages you to follow instructions. The resistance lives in fear, and doesn’t hesitate to shut us down at the first sign of possible derision or the first hint of conceivable ostracization. The resistance is the voice that was complicit in the brainwashing, because the resistance is easy to arouse. When your teacher threatens you with (insert social punishment here) if you don’t do your work in school, you do the work. The resistance wins.

What artists over time have figured out is that the resistance is the sole barrier between today and their art. That the act of genius required to produce original and important work is crippled by the resistance, and ignoring the voice of skepticism is critical in doing the work.

And so, we acknowledge it. We stand up and we hear the voice of the lizard brain and we recognize that it’s there and then we walk to the podium and do the work. We acknowledge  the lizard so we can ignore it.

SHIP

Scarcity creates value. People pay extra for things that are hard to get, while things that have  a surplus go cheap. That’s basic economics.
So, what’s scarce?

The ability to ship.

If you can get something out the door while your competitors cringe in fear, you win. If you’re  the team member that makes things happen, you become indispensable. If you and your organization are the ones (the only ones) that can get things done, close the sale, ship the product and make a difference, you’re the linchpins—the ones we can’t live without.

Shipping is difficult because of the lizard brain. The resistance doesn’t want you to ship, because if you ship, you might fail. If you ship, we might laugh at you. If you ship, you may be held accountable for the decisions you made.

The key to the reinvention of who you are, then, is to become someone who ships. The goal is to have the rare skill of actually getting things done, making them happen and creating outcomes that people seek out.

Michael Dell ships. So do Larry Ellison and Anne Mulcahy. Quieting the lizard, acknowledging it and then ignoring it—it’s the only way.

FAIL
A key part of shipping is the ability to fail. The reinvention of the marketplace demands that one have the ability to fail, often and with grace—and in public!

The old economy was based on factories and institutions, things that took a long time to build. No one at Buick or the Metropolitan Opera was interested in failure. It took too long to create these institutions for them to relish the idea of growth through failure.

Today, though, the only way for organizations to grow is to ship risky things, to create change,  to make art, to change people. And yet, shipping risks failure. And so we demand you fail.

I hope you’re up for that.

For generations, artists tried to feign nonchalance. There’s even a word for it: Sprezzatura.  It’s an Italian word, defined as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

We need a new word now, one that means the opposite. It’s the obvious and supreme effort that goes into creating art, challenging the lizard and fighting the resistance.

LEARN
The seventh pillar is the key to the other six. School used to exist to learn a trade. You apprenticed, and then you worked the rest of your life in the same job, in the same town, in the same factory, doing the same work.

Ha.

Dream on. Only lighthouse operators have that “luxury” today, and when was the last time you  met a lighthouse operator?
To bring the school-as-event mindset to work today is to court certain failure. School isn’t over. School is now. School is blogs and experiments and experiences and the constant failure of  shipping and learning. You already took a first step. You read something that challenged you to think differently.  The path to reinvention, though, is just that—a path. The opportunity of our time is to discard  what you think you know and instead learn what you need to learn. Every single day.”

So spread the word cause although you may be fortunate to be able to view this, there are many who do not have the ability to access this information which only expands the inequality gap.

Cheers

Tesh

Well almost…..

The first thing about navigating within a monolith is understanding that the infrastructure that has been created is as a result of evolution and in very simple terms one that is defined using capitalism as the base foundation. Recently I have heard the term command and conquer, however I prefer to look at this evolution as business models that have a significant amount of fat built into them.  I refer you hear to a definition of a business model which I am fond of “The boundary spanning companies’ transactions is referred to as its business model.”  The transactions being  that which add value (tangible) to a business, traditionally to the bottom line however we all know that this has now become a drunken soldier i.e. the triple bottom line.

Am I rambling I ask myself?
Lets see, how many of you are frustrated with processes that are there for governance however know that if you were to delete step 6 and possibly even step 9, 10 & 16 (because they are just not adding value any longer: fat ) your lives would be easier and you would possibly deliver more value than that defined by that original gangster (the process I mean).  To that my friends I will say this…..”a new broom often sweeps clean.”  What do I mean by this…understanding that original process has been the brainchild of particular individual is possibly the first thing to acknowledge, the second is that if it is part of the manual which tells you how to do stuff I am pretty certain that it is well-respected by the key decision makers. In this case I would caution against sweeping unless you are certain that are no sinus sufferers in the room.   What you want to do here is earn you housekeeping badge and do it in small increments or find an entrepreneurial venture that you can sink your teeth into that allows you creative autonomy to setup processes that you would swear by.

For now tho lets assume that you want the weight of the company you work for on your CV (not a bad decision at all).  To earning your stripes then….point of departure

Have as many conversations with key decision makers as possible, you want to

1. Define the core (products and/or services) of the business

2. Determine where in the life cycle the businesses “products” and/or “services” are

3.  Understand the strategies for each of these products/service (are they targeted to grow or have they tipped into steady decline) – a possible trick here is to look at the collective business strategy

4. Determine the key “changes” that are required to keep the company delivering against shareholder expectations

5. Identify individuals designated to lead the changes

6. Evaluate the competencies (not limited to function/specialist) that these individuals have

Now you want to ask yourself, which areas of change do the competencies that you have speak to the most and simply put Bob’s your uncle.  This gives you an opportunity to earn the respect and trust of someone who is tasked with sweeping.   So button down the courage and go and request that you be a part of this change as an active contributor.

Now you off to being a good scout i.e. the more badges you earn the better of you are.

Cheers

Tesh

A modern company must accept change as its basic premise:

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow. At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the “hows” and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question, and disagree. We let them determine their own futures. We let them come and go as they wanted, work at home if they wished, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses. We let them change their minds and ours, prove us wrong when we are wrong, make us humbler. Such a system relishes change, which is the only antidote to the corporate brainwashing that has consigned giant businesses with brilliant pasts to uncertain futures.

Growth is often just about greed:

A few years ago, I struggled with an opportunity to acquire a company with five plants and 2,000 employees. “Why do we want to grow more?” I asked myself. Are we going to be better for it?”…

It’s all about persistence, isn’t it? But where does persistence end and obsession begin? How high is too high? How big is too big? Of course, some growth is necessary for any business to keep up with competitors and provide new opportunities for its people. But so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better…

Semco has learned that to want to grow big just to be big is a catch…Much about growth is really about ego and greed, not business strategy.

How rules snowball:

In their quest for law, order, stability, and predictability, corporations make rules for every conceivable contingency. Policy manuals are created with the idea that, if a company puts everything in writing, management will be more rational and objective. Standardizing methods and conduct will guide new employees and insure that the entire company has a single, cohesive image. And so it became accepted that large organizations could not function without hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of rules.

Sounds sensible, right? And it works fine for an army or a prison system. But not, I believe, for a business. And certainly not for a business that wants people to think, innovate, and act as human beings whenever possible. All those rules cause employees to forget that a company needs to be creative and adaptive to survive. Rules slow it down…

With few exceptions, rules and regulations only serve to:

1. Divert attention from the company’s objective.
2. Provide a false sense of security for the executives.
3. Create work for bean counters.
4. Teach men to stone dinosaurs and start fire with sticks.

The desire for rules and the need for innovation are, I believe, incompatible…Rules freeze companies inside a glacier; innovation lets them ride sleighs over it…A turtle may live for hundreds of years because it is well protected by its shell, but it only moves forward when it sticks out its head.

What’s wrong with bosses:

That’s what’s wrong with bosses. So many of them are better prepared to find error and to criticize than to add to the effort. To be the boss is what counts to most bosses. They confuse authority with authoritarianism. They don’t trust their subordinates.

Why bureaucracies get built:

Bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they suspect they aren’t. All these bosses have to keep themselves occupied, and so they constantly complicate everything…I wanted our people to have more contact with one another. I wanted less clutter. I wanted fewer levels. I wanted more flexibility. I wanted a new shape for our organization.