Steve Denning at Forbes.com wrote an article about Valve, a high-tech company with a unique organizational chart: there are no managers. Everyone is free to choose what project to work on. They are green-lighted to risk and fail. They are expected to be creative and use that creativity. It is messy, chaotic, and very successful. [...]
First, thanks to all who have started to follow my blog. I will try to mine important sources that are helpful and might be outside your radar screen. If you find these posts useful, please pass along the blog link to members of your PLC, PLN, Critical Friends Group, or department. Hopefully some of the [...]
Education is in need of evolutionary game-changes, and there are two important aspects to that simple statement. First, we need evolution, not revolution. Our foundations and traditions are strong, so we don’t need to blow up the walls. What we think of as revolution due to fear of the unknown and of change itself will [...]
Last week I read a series of interviews with author Gary Hamel on his new book What Matters Now, conducted and posted by Steve Denning on his blog on Forbes.com. Hamel is an expert on change management and innovation and I thought a number of the points he made in the interviews are highly relevant [...]
Is the soul of our educational system more attuned to innovation or tradition? What about your school or business? It is easy to say “both” or “in balance”, but I am not sure the balance point is where you need or want to be. Over dinner at the JRPO spring academic meeting last week some [...]
This morning on NPR there was a short story about a new start-up company out of Stanford that has piloted offering FREE university-level courses with full assessment of student performance, for free. University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and University of Michigan are also participating. The new company is called Coursera and venture capitalists have put in [...]
After leading two successful summer workshops on my Falconer seminar for West Point cadets, the faculty mentor and president of our Francis Parker School Upper School ASB (student government) asked me to tailor a set of classes for the ASB leadership team. They could only give me about 8 hours over a couple of months, [...]
I have been following the Management Innovation eXchange site and recommend it to those who want to bring great ideas from the world of innovation thinking into our system of education. For a number of reasons, primarily related to both inertia and fear, education has been slow to adopt a world of proven innovation practices; [...]
In an interview with Steve Denning, innovation author Gary Hamel talks about the role of passion in separating successful companies from also-rans in a fast-moving business cycle. K-12 education is in the middle of such a cycle, driven by both dramatic changes in connective technologies and global economies that have significantly strained traditional educational goals. [...]
I had the good fortune to have breakfast a week or so ago with a young Parker alum who works for Kahn Academy. By now, you all know the basics about Kahn, an incredible story of great young people doing the right thing with determination and imagination. So just a few tidbits following that breakfast: [...]