The #MOOC Thing

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

I’m simply bemused. Not only are MOOCs crouching in the wings, threatening to destroy the mass-university system we have spent a century building as the capstone of our education systems. But key leaders within that system are embarking on behavior as hazardous as it comes. While entirely failing to see what lies in their future (the laying waste of all they know) they are engaged in speeding the process. It is not exactly the deer transfixed in the headlights. It is the deer rushing toward the car.

Let’s be clear. There is absolutely nothing that the massed ranks of higher educators can do to prevent what is afoot. But what they should be doing is thinking and acting strategically to engage the entire re-making of the universe of post-secondary education. Instead they are dallying, toying with it, offering sample MOOC-type courses. As if the global flood could be forestalled by the digging of ponds.

Here’s some very interesting data from one university that has been experimenting, neatly summarized by someone who has been carefully tracking the discussion.

And by the way: I am by no means uncritical of the likely impacts of MOOCs on higher ed, though they will lead to huge benefits for those who would otherwise get none of it – among other things. But the economics of AI-delivered education are unstoppable and global. The combination of ridiculous inflation in the cost of U.S. colleges, and the move of the UK to a fee-based system, will ensure their swift triumph in the Anglo-American world.

While I am at it – as I have asked before – when does USAID or some similar agency (or the Gates Foundation?) launch a full free undergraduate degree program – initially for Africa and other parts of the world? Of course, the moment it does the market for over-priced U.S. degrees will collapse.

Um, innovation is afoot . . . .And guess what, it’s disruptive. Hugely so.

Donald Clark Plan B: Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises.

So we’ve proved that women are better leaders

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

Leadership Forum Sept 2012 (Photo credit: mylearning)

Here we go again. Evidence just keeps coming in that the disregard within our corporations for the talents of women is counter-productive. And by that I do not mean to women as a group, or some notion of equality, though they both equally suffer in this process. I mean to the bottom line. And while boards are elected and executives hired with broad fiduciary responsibilities, says nothing more central than recruiting talent to bring in the moolah.

I have argued before that it has been a strategic mistake to urge corporate appointments for women as a matter of equity. That’s why I am uneasy about quotas. Because to press this as an equity issue is to frame it wrong. The equity agenda implies, even though it does not state, that there are costs which the organization needs to absorb in order to play fair. The failure to appoint women in appropriate (not equitable) numbers to senior executive posts in major corporations and to the boardrooms, far from saving resources for the organization, is plainly weakening for the company by denying it the best hires. In an earlier post I suggested this was the equivalent of discounting applications from persons living west of the Mississippi, or those with brown eyes.

My own view is that before long women will come to dominate executive leadership roles in corporate and government and nonprofit sectors alike. And the evidence is beginning to come in . So this study in Harvard Business Review demonstrates that women are superior leaders and managers in almost every category. And remember, this is in the current situation, where as we all know there are special pressures on them to perform; and where in most organizations they have little or no role in shaping the corporate culture. My take is that once this has begun to happen (and I’m not speaking simply hear of creches, job sharing, work from home, and such, but of more fundamental culture shifts), we shall have reached a tipping point. Not that we shall quite have attained to “the end of men,” but in the higher echelons there is no question in my mind that we shall see within 20 or 25 years the emerging mirror image of the 1950s.

Be scared, be very scared, male persons whose sense of worth and whose effectiveness in career terms is dependent on the current set of cultural assumptions which in effect use a quota system to perpetuate the dominance of male appointments. Be scared partly because the economics of the situation are against you. And, as we know, economics is a vicious adversary. It takes no prisoners. Just as MOOCs and Gcars will devastate great areas of the employment landscape, even as they provide us much cheaper education and safer cars, so the skill sets of smart hard-working men will increasing need to be retooled if they are to remain in any way competitive in an environment of rapid change and (candidly) female dominance.

Read the numbers in this study, and consider that these women leaders are outperforming their male colleagues in a cultural context designed absolutely to advantage those colleagues.

https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/07/the-two-most-stunning-facts-about-american-business/

Are Women Better Leaders than Men? – Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman – Harvard Business Review.

Of Time and Management – and Women (futureofbiz.org)

Of social skeptics, Business 2.0, and Blaise Pascal

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

Blaise Pascal argued that if reason cannot be trusted, it is a better “wager” to believe in God than not to do so. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Within the business community views of the usefulness and potential importance of social media are all over the place. At one extreme are enthusiasts who speak readily of Business 2.0 and Entrepreneurship 2.0, and claim a deep integration between building value in the 21st century and the phenomenon of social connectedness. At the other there is skepticism and – if I understand this right – unease at the extent to which evidence of the impact of social is anecdotal and, essentially, theoretical. But, as so often, to speak of the “spectrum” of opinion doesn’t catch it. So let’s frame the discussion in a triangle.

Here are the three corner positions, or vertices as triangle fans call them.

1. Gangbusters value-building through social.

2. Fringe significance.

3. Here’s the third vertex: don’t know, don’t care, feel threatened, hire kids to handle these things.

What interests and continues to concern me is the extent to which the third option remains dominant, indeed is more dominant the larger the company. As assorted surveys have shown, it is in the largest of our corporations that senior executives are least personally engaged in social. To explain this in essentially generational terms is unfair (not least to those of us who are of that generation and by no means so purblind); but there is no question that the explanation is cultural rather than analytical. That is why it is an issue of such great concern that so many leading business figures, and their organizations, have entirely failed at the most senior levels to engage in the possibilities of these now near-universal applications of novel communication technologies.

When I read these reports, I have in mind Pascal’s Wager. In one of history’s most famous memes, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician threw down the gauntlet to those who claimed not to believe in God. If God does not exist there is no penalty for believing in him. And if he does exist, and is the kind of being who takes an interest in whether or not he has been believed in by humans (as the Judeo-Christian God plainly does), you will have, as it were, hell to pay if you fail to believe. Ergo: the rational person will believe. (Let’s not go into the question whether such a deity will look kindly upon persons deciding to believe in him as the result of a wager.)

But the point is important, in the context of fundamental shifts in social and cultural patterns which plainly have significant implications for every business (B2B as well as B2C) that go far beyond Web 1.0 catalog-ordering applications (though they should not be despised; the company named Amazon has done rather well off them). The difficulty in part lies in the fact that it is not easy to establish metrics for the effectiveness – beyond a further channel for ads and customer service –of engaging in something so wholly new as social presence. “Social” has been around for some years, and a further curiosity of the situation is the contrast between lingering uncertainty and disengagement at this point, and the very rapid pace of Moore’s-Law driven change at the level of technology. On the other hand, this contrast draws interesting attention to the fuzzy interface between digital and analog, and in particular advances in digital technology and what we may choose to call either the UX or the human dimension.

Back to point: the vertex of the triangle heavily filled with Fortune 500s even in 2013 is an oddity. It is also, potentially, on the assumption that there is some serious value to be gained from social technologies, an enormous area of opportunity; oil reserves that have yet to be explored, let alone valued, let alone exploited.

There are other ways into this debate. But I’d say to business leaders, first, don’t confuse your confusion with analysis (know your vertex!);l and, second, spend a little time thinking about Pascal. No-one is asking you to bet the farm (or build a 747). Just to consider whether a rational position might not be somewhere along the line between the two rational vertices. And, to my mind, to consider it well worth a serious bet that it lies at least near enough to the business 2.0 enthusiasts there may be serious moolah to be had.

Of Time and Management – and Women

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

Sheryl Sandberg at the World Economic Forum (Wikipedia)

As the “Can we have it all?” discussion moves on to “Lean in,” Yahoo recalls its homeworkers, Europe stresses over board quotas, and – just today – Mary Louise Kelly, NPR’s former Pentagon correspondent (and fellow alum of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) tells why she chose to lean out . . .; my question is, what’s the question?

That is to say, when an issue proves intractable, it is generally the case that the question’s wrong, or if not wrong that it’s not the best one to be asking. Re-frame the question and the logs unjam. (Note to self: my new website re-framing.com needs to be activated.)

As to the issue of women’s gaining top roles in management and government, I am a medium-term optimist. Indeed, I am not sure if optimism is the word. I anticipate a tectonic shift, in which women come to dominate the ranks of senior managers and leaders in something of a mirror image of the patriarchy of the 1950s. Seems to me that huge shifts in our society and the innovative nature of our businesses will rapidly bring to the fore managers and leaders with high capacities to engage change and to bridge ideas and people. While there are men who excel at both (and, no doubt, women who do not), it’s obvious that of the current crop of males and females one of these human halves wins hands down. I am not here today to account or philosophize. Merely to note.

That having been said, how to get there – and catalyze the process? In a helpful WSJ column, start-up CEO Jody Greenstone Miller seeks to re-frame the discussion. It is not, she claims, that women lack the drive to “lean in” – it is that they do not like the assumptions of the 24-hour executive culture in which “60-plus hours a week” is the norm into which they are being asked to lean. How organizations break down tasks, how they assess their people, how they rate quality over against quantity – these are not (my phrase) laws of nature; they are assumptions of corporate leaders and the cultures they help shape.

In fact, one of the many ironies of the digital revolution to date has been the degree to which communications capacities have been vastly improved and, at the same time, led to the very opposite of better control over time, distance, and availability. The deep naivety that leads so many grown persons to grasp their smartphones and interrupt family dinners, dates, business social occasions, driving – and no doubt showers and yardwork – as if this is somehow a superior way of living and working is risible. (See this embarrassingly candid tirade against Piers Morgan by his wife: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/life-in-a-goldfish-bowl–im-tired-of-my-husbands-tweet-nothings-20130130-2dl3t.html)

Point is: These technologies are enabling much more sophisticated work patterns, just as innovation requires them and the social changes that are finally offering women other than token roles in executive leadership demand them. While most of them would deny it absolutely, the phalanx of traditionalists who dominate the corporate world remain the legatees of an approach to leadership and management which we might broadly characterize as Fordist and which (while it was brilliant and indeed innovative in its day) is an increasingly deadly drag on efficiency and effectiveness in the emerging industries and society of C21.

I have written before of the competitive advantage being squandered by company after company as they ignore women applicants (and social media) with drunken abandon. I’ve argued it has been a tactical blunder to frame this question as one of equity (rather than advantage), which is one reason I am no enthusiast for quota solutions (though some other interventions such as requiring more board turnover work to everyone’s advantage). https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/07/the-two-most-stunning-facts-about-american-business/

Point here is: Time and communications management, together with the project-focused approach that fits innovative companies and products and other natural shifts, are slowly moving us in a direction better suited to women, innovation, and also (once they start to get it) men.

Jody Greenstone Miller:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578342641640982224.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

Mary Louise Kelly: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/11/when-the-sheryl-sandberg-approach-fails.html

Why is @rupertmurdoch on Twitter? The C-Suite Mystery

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Murdoch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social, Strategy, and the Mystery of the C-Suite.

My first job – before college – was in a finance company. Customers sent in longhand letters saying they were moving house. In the basement was the high-security “computer room,” with men (sic) in white coats and banks of tape machines that lived on such info. The analog/digital go-between: me. Deciphering the letters, agonizing over how to fit the addresses into 16 squares and four lines on the input form, calling banks (illegally) to track down missing account numbers, and later sticking labels spat out by “The Computer” on the several separate sets of manual files the company still maintained. IT has come a long way since 1970. But if only 4% of CIOs blog, 10% tweet, and –wait for it – fully 74% report through the CFO, it still has a long way to go.

In light of these remarkably low levels of participation by the CIO, it may be less surprising that very occupants of the CEO’s office are personally engaged in social media. The evidence is clear that the culture of the C-Suite is one of nearly unanimous detachment from public social media. The facts are astonishing. Only 16 out of the F500 CEOs have Twitter accounts; and of those 16, hardly any use Twitter regularly. (When I last checked, one of the 16 was Warren Buffet. He had tweeted once.)

One who does, of course, is @rupertmurdoch. But we shall come to him.

What is stunning is the vast gulf between the personal engagement in “social” by the key C-Suite decision-makers, and the mounting evidence – clear, now even to non-techies, non-geeks, and late adopters – that “social” is a key to value. Vast value.

But first, let me head off a comment that 484 CEOs are making as they read this blog. It really is not enough to hire people to handle these things. Especially, typically, young people very junior people, in customer relations roles. The whole point about social is that it’s like saying you’re sorry; you can’t have someone do it for you. We have CEOs and CIOs, effectively, entirely disengaged from the most potent value-driving force on the planet. And part of their disengagement is the idea that hiring kids to monitor this stuff will do the trick. What a fail whale.

So: Latest input that one would have thought would get even the most inert analog executive mind moving: The McKinsey report suggesting up to $1.3 trillion can be released through companies’ forthright engagement with social media has drawn attention in the past week or two. It would however be interesting to note whether there has been an uptick in C-Suite engagement with Twitter, which seems to me to be the touchstone of “getting it” where social is concerned. Further down the totem pole all kinds of social media engagement is in progress (though remarkably there is still a big minority of companies who make no use at all). It’s strategic engagement that counts, and that will come only when the CEO and CIO are setting the pace – and giving evidence that they get it.

That’s why @rupertmurdoch’s joining Twitter at the start of the year was so revealing. Here we have one of the smartest, most controversial, and (face it) also oldest CEOs jumping in. With both feet. As his erratic typing and often unpolished tweets reveal, this is Rupert himself. Not a PR functionary. And he is not just pumping out opinions from on high. He reads the incoming (“watch the language,” he tweeted one time.) And he often answers (he has answered me). He’s found a way to break out of the gilded tower in which corporate leaders are imprisoned to read what his critics are saying, to catch the latest memes, to learn from the 24/7 cocktail party that is Twitter.

At the same time, lower down the organization, it’s plain social media is slowly catching on. Even here the slowness is staggering – 50% of utilities do not even have Facebook page? The headline on this report refers to companies’ widespread take-up of social, but it seems to me it has been slow, sporadic, and – as I have pointed out – almost entirely to the exclusion of the CEOs and CIOs who are the ones most able to develop a strategic understanding of the social revolution underway around them. Point is: Social is not about adding some new media opportunity to marketing, or handling a new customer relations channel. Yes, these are real; but they are far down the list of what is interesting and important.

One well-informed source responded to this argument with the claim that many C-Suite officers are actively engaged in Yammer-like private, secure networks within their organizations. This may well be true, though I have not seen figures. But in fact it adds to the problem. There is a vast gulf between the CEO chatting with CMO and CIO on Yammer, and what @rupertmurdoch and a handful of others have begun to do on Twitter. And if the C-Suite view is that “social” is about Yammer for private chat and marketing/customer relations channels lower down, the net result is a disaster for strategic decision-making.

There’s no doubt that certain types of personality adjust far quicker to social media than others; and age is not the only factor at play (as Murdoch has neatly demonstrated). It’s now a serious question whether those unable to adapt are fit occupants of their C-Suite offices. Well, in respect of the CIO, I don’t think it’s any longer a question. Time for house-cleaning.

Social Media is NOT necessary for the C-Suite . . .? (futureofbiz.org)
The CIO Issue is about Strategy; Strategy; got that? (futureofbiz.org)
The Social Revolution: Customer Service and those who don’t get it (futureofbiz.org)
Most Organizations Still Fear Social Media (futureofbiz.org)
Rupert Murdoch Can’t Stop Tweeting About Mitt Romney (nymag.com)
The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work (fastcompany.com)

On the Death of the Man on the Moon

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Neil Armstrong (Photo: Wikipedia)

An odd thing on a Saturday evening to discover on Twitter that the most interesting man in the world has died. And to recall that he had shared my birthday, August 5. There’s a curious boding in birthdays.

I had met him. Met him at an embassy in Washington, DC, where despite the fact he was guest of honor there seemed much more interest in the cocktails than in shaking his hand. So I shook it. And we talked. About the moon, about the occasion, and about C-PET. And our shared birthday.

A man as modest as Steve Jobs, that other defining figure of our technological age, was self-absorbed. A man whose anguish as 43 years were spent by this allegedly visionary nation in failing to build on what he had signally achieved was kept almost entirely quiet (the Obama administration’s space strategy emerging in 2010 finally drew him and his fellow astronauts into polite regret). The first earth-man to set foot on another body in space; who for all we know was the first sentient being ever to do that in the vast expanses of the cosmos. (And before you start poo-pooing and raving about extra-terrestrials, go think for more than 5 minutes about the Fermi Paradox.)

The comparison with Steve Jobs is illuminating in so many ways. I don’t know whether they ever met. It would have been a fascinating encounter. The visionary of the miniature in conversation with the epitome of the astronomic. Together, these two dead engineers define an era, itself the platform that lays claim to the future, a future in which the exponential explosion of digital technology has enabled us to leverage our human engineering capacities beyond all prediction – and which has engaged them to serve ends that history will surely see as equally cool and equally trivial.

It’s Peter Thiel, whom I greatly admire even though I don’t share all of his analysis, who quips that we wanted flying cars and got 140 characters. Had his target been Facebook, on whose board he sits, rather than Twitter, it would have been easier to cry Huzzah! But his point is fundamentally sound. When I was a kid (and, by the way, ran the astronomy club at my English boys’ school), the coolest of all kids wanted to be astronauts. Raise the question now and you are likely to get a yawn, or worse. Anyone who’s into engineering wants to work in the Solar System that for so long circled around Steve Jobs. Micro has displaced macro; the human imagination has become absorbed with digitally-enabled human interaction, so “the social network” seeks, allegedly altruistically though undeniably IPO-ly, to connect all 7 billion of us so we can share our kids’ (and kittens’) pics. This cosmic narcissism stands in so great contrast to the vision of cosmic Columbuses and Vasco de Gamas as to be hard to grasp by those who love children (and kittens) and yet stare at the night sky and lust after both knowledge and presence.

Andrew Keen’s brilliant and non-naive critique of naive digital culture, Digital Vertigo, has forcibly reminded us of the flawed genius of utilitarianism. If what truly matters is for us to be happy, if the summum bonum of Homo sapiens lies not in the beatific vision and the cultural mandate (and if, dear secular thinker, you don’t know what they mean, o boy, you should), or even a post-theistic re-statement of them both, but in a mirror and a merely social network, then who can challenge the Lotos-eaters or their chip-popping couch potato cognates, for whom the good life is merely the life at ease?

This same week, Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of The Murdoch, turned her family’s business debacle into an exercise in education – in her Edinburgh lecture which the establishment of my former nation regards as the year’s top occasion for media discourse. What is the point of profit, she asked? It needs to have a point. The transcendence milled into human nature, whether or not understood within the Judeo-Christian frame – which set the stage for science as well as democracy (yes, through the proud Enlightenment) – demands always something beyond itself. Else why for modest rewards and ambiguous esteem have so many of our countrymen and women lost limbs and lives in jungles and deserts and mountains far from our alabaster cities? Humans constantly grasp after reductionism, with happiness as its goal and no judgment as to means; at the same time as their striving for what lies beyond becomes frenetic.

And yet, three short years after Armstrong set his feet upon that other cosmic body, we lost interest. Budgets, priorities. And we had knocked the Soviets into a cocked hat. And space costs moolah and does not win elections.

This modest engineer became a Right Stuff pilot and the first walker on another world. 43 long years later we are ambling back into the game. There’s time to make up. Perhaps, with SpaceX and others, we can.

It’s hard to see what sense America makes without a sustained engagement in the future. JFK’s moon commitment and its follow-through across a decade of leaders offer a benchmark of national capability and trans-party vision.

And that takes us back, of course, to the 19th century, where most of what needs to be said was said. And Tennyson’s Ulysses, penned in 1842, the closing lines:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
  We are not now that strength which in old days
  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
  One equal temper of heroic hearts,
  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Ulysses, aged now, sets out on another voyage. It was of course Tennyson who had written 10 years before of the Lotos-Eaters. There really are only two courses. In 1832, and 1842, he laid them bare.

Oh yes, and Tennyson was born on August 6. Close.

Farewell, man on the moon.

———————————————————————-

NASA and the Wrong Stuff:

https://futureofbiz.org/programs/future-of-nasa/

On the Death of Steve Jobs:

https://futureofbiz.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-dies-a-generation-ends/

Neil Armstrong, First Man on Moon, Dies at 82 – NYTimes.com.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/people/2012-08-25/neil-armstrong-1st-man-moon-dies-82.html

Watch Neil Armstrong’s legendary 1969 Moon moment (slashgear.com)

$1.3 Trillion from Social, Says McKinsey. BUT . . . .

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

English: McKinsey matrix as described in McKinsey Quarterly Español: Reproducción de la Matriz de McKinsey según se describe en McKinsey Quarterly (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This looks a very interesting projection. The value is mainly to be found from better productivity that will come from better collaboration using social tools.

All this may be true. But the wild card lies in what I term strategic social – not incremental tools for biz collaboration (which are important) but the much messier and so far little engaged possibility of public social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. In general companies have seen presence in these media to be useful for advertising and customer relations efforts, and delegated that presence way down then line. The prospect of values alignment between customers, employees, and the corporation; and the ready flow of information via relationships across the organizational boundary; have been little tapped and not that much noticed. My sense is that the value lying there is in fact much greater, as it can, should, may, drive innovation and culture change within the company. Culture change/innovation is where, prospectively, all the value lies – in the context of rapid change.

Evidence of very low levels of hands-on engagement with social in the C-Suite suggests this value is a long way from being realized.

McKinsey Says Social Media Could Add $1.3 Trillion to the Economy – NYTimes.com.

McKinsey Says Social Media Could Add $1.3 Trillion to the Economy (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

The C-Suite: Social-free Zone – but IBM’s report says things are cool

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

IBM’s Watson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IBM‘s latest report on global CEOs – Leading Through Connections – makes fascinating reading and I commend it to you in extenso. It is packed with data and based on interviews with many hundreds of the top corporate (and some other) leaders.

But I have a problem. I just don’t find it very convincing. The answers are too good, too positive, too forward-looking. And on�the core issue of “leading through connections,” social, while the nostrums are as expected the evidence (as we know separately; see various earlier blogs here and much elsewhere) is that hardly any top CEOs (or CIOs! hard though that is to believe) are engaged with social at all. In fact, the evidence suggests that the Fortune 500 C-Suite is largely a social-free zone.�

My problem is that knowing this distracting fact undermines my confidence in the generally smooth prose of the report at large.

Read it, and read the social-usage evidence, and try to make sense of a situation that looks so good from the outside (or, should I say, from the inside; it’s the CEOs themselves who shaped the data in this document).

The IBM CEO Study: The Directors Cut (dealarchitect.typepad.com)

The Social Revolution: Customer Service and those who don’t get it(futureofbiz.org)
Social Media is NOT necessary for the C-Suite . . .? (futureofbiz.org)
Risk, Risk, Risk: Competitive Advantage, Value, and Knowledge in C21(futureofbiz.org)

Most Organizations Still Fear Social Media

Aside

From Gartner via HBR comes another handy report on how major organizations are responding to social media. Despite the alliterative categories (sorry, not into that) there’s great data and analysis here, although it is focused on the tactical and not so much the strategic value of social.

The “fear” term is interesting. Seems to me that fear requires a level of (perhaps mis)understanding that the failure of the CEO/CIO class to engage personally with this new world is somewhat OTT.

My recipe stays the same. A serious immersion in social for every member of the C-Suite and the board. Best time/money spend any major organization could make; and let’s start tomorrow.

The grim details: 14/500 CEOs tweeting . . . .

https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/13/the-grim-details-on-ceos-and-social-14500-are-tweeting-for-example/

Most Organizations Still Fear Social Media – Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald – Harvard Business Review.