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.

Brands will shape Global Labor Standards: Apple-Foxconn Company

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Tim Cook, Apple (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Apple signed on to Fair Labor I wrote a column in which suggested that the logic of their decision – a big shift in approach post-Jobs – would be to bring about alignment between western and Chinese labor standards. Nothing that has happened since has changed my view. Not that this will happen overnight, of course. But it’s the result of several potent forces that are shaping, not least, this company’s effort: branding and global communications. Whereas these forces twisted the unwilling arm of Nike what seems a long time ago, the superlative quality of the Apple brand and the explosion of social media are together pouring gas on the flames.

While it has been traditional to label western brand efforts to ensure decent manufacture conditions for their products as “corporate social responsibility,” the logic of the Apple case demonstrates that it is naive to see CSR as an adjunct effort, or a marketing ploy, or as anything other than central to value. It’s a case where the values-value connection (another theme of mine) is especially glaring.

The harrowing case of the Foxconn worker with severe brain damage, whose family is now going to the Chinese courts to seek to maintain full company support of their son, drives the point neatly (if tragically) home. This man is, as all can see, a de facto Apple employee, whose conditions of service are so far removed from those of the guys at HQ as to be hard to compare. As his family struggles to ensure that he has long-term care after an undenied industrial injury, they have a bullhorn to the world, and that includes the fashionistas for whom the latest Apple gadget is a must, and who have helped drive up its astronomical share price and stack up a mountain of dollars that could buy Facebook twice over for cash (or buy everyone on the planet a half-decent bottle of wine). As the technological gap, and the design gap, between Apple products and those of its rivals narrow, the brand magic is going to be even more key – and therefore even more exposed.

It was a smart move for Tim Cook to jump into Fair Labor, and then arm-twist Foxconn into big wage increases. It would be even smarter for them to leapfrog the moral/CSR competition and drive excellence in Chinese manufacturing and labor practice without needing to be pressured further.

http://bclc.uschamber.com/blog/2012-02-03/csr-and-burden-outsourcing-apple-opens-door

Foxconn goes to court over severely injured worker | Business Tech – CNET News.

To the Bankers of Sibos: Integrate and Innovate from the Board down

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Credit: bsterling

The world’s global financial community’s annual bankers’ “Davos” should be a time for urgent reflection and remediation for our financial institutions.

It’s time for high-level integration for innovation – and that begins with the Board and the C-Suite of this very traditional set of institutions at a time of explosive disruption. They have a long way to go.

“The past,” as novelist L.P Hartley famously wrote, “is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” When it comes to the future, we ain’t seen nothing yet. The pace of change is picking up very fast, and institutions – and whole industries – unable to keep up are finding themselves on the wrong side of history.

Let’s be candid. Banking has never been everyone’s favorite industry. Hardly a customer has had a consistently happy experience on the retail end. And the events of 2008 have left a sour taste that may last a generation – like the losses that millions of citizens have accrued as a result. “Too big to fail” sticks in the craw of Americans of left and right – and makes capitalism, markets, risk, look ridiculous. It takes a lot to make Big Oil look good. And one way or another, the business-as-usual revolving door relationship between Wall Street and the Treasury/supervisory agencies and the Hill and the While House (donors . . .) is tottering. It may survive an election cycle or two. Not more.

So what’s ahead for the bankers? They are sailing into a perfect storm.

First, three potent waves they need to ride. If they don’t, can’t, won’t, then all the clever innovation ideas on the planet will not help them.

1. Service. Banking has to rebuild its brand from the ground up as a “service” industry that is actually seen and experienced as a service. Example: GEICO. Insurance is boring and costly. GEICO customers love their company. I called them the other day to sort out a problem, looked forward to it, enjoyed the experience, and am smiling as I recall it. Banking must be seen to be re-inventing itself as a service.

2. Shared. While “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has now been almost universally adopted as an element in corporate strategy, by banks like everyone else, it continues to be handled by most players as an adjunct exercise. Michael Porter‘s notorious prognosis that “shared value” is properly the only source of value, incorporating the traditional bottom line and the “CSR” extra, has been treated with derision in private and sometimes in public. Banking must be seen as a leader in building shared value.

3. Social. “Social media” remains an outlier in most mainstream businesses, and barely registers in banking. Not only is social vital to customer service and marketing; more fundamentally it is emerging as the driver of innovation and the continuing renewal of corporate culture – which, as we know, is the cause of all competitive advantage and value creation. Banking must be seen to take the lead in social engagement.

Second, two (of many) special challenges coming their way.

4. Retail. Retail banking is ripe for dramatic innovation. It is almost entirely mechanical, and the perfect subject for machine intelligence. While we debate separating retail from banks’ investment operations, the former is peeling off in its own. The launch in the past few weeks of the Wal-Mart/American Express Bluebird debit-card based banking system is the first major shock. Look at the fee structure (to the consumer, there are none at all), the utter convenience (I opened an account online in literally 3 minutes), the services (huge range and they will be added). Traditional retail banking is ripe for collapse.

5. New currencies. This is more esoteric, and for another post, but from barter to Bitcoin the consumer need for standard money-based transactions has begun to shift. Just begun.

Third: What banking needs in the midst of all this and more is the skill-set it has so far shown it lacks above all else: flexibility, imagination, the capacity to turn on a dime, all those smarts that are distinguishing both New Economy successes and traditional organizations demonstrating themselves capable of re-invention. The core enabling capacity lies in a combination of board governance and executive leadership, and, specifically:

6. Diversity across generations, genders, perspectives, and disciplines. I discussed this in respect of gender diversity and engagement in social media in an earlier post – https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/07/the-two-most-stunning-facts-about-american-business/

We know the problem, but to give an example: in a recent study American Banker found that of 9 large financial institutions operating in California 8 had boards that were at leas 80% white and 80% male. http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/board-diversity-greenlining-1039171-1.html

It’s unfortunate, to my mind, that gender diversity issue has been widely perceived as an issue of equity. It’s about value. And whereas in times of stasis a non-diverse board may have worked very well, in times of revolutionary change is represents the voluntary addition of a huge and indefensible element of risk to every decision. Boards and C-Suites need to represent diverse perspectives of all kinds. Only thus will these institutions designed to thrive in an entirely different environment have an opportunity to flourish a second time around in a dramatically different and ever-changing marketplace.

Otherwise, as Kodak and other failed and failing once-great companies like RIM are constantly reminding us, the market is unforgiving. Technology and other emergent forces are toppling the very assumptions that made old-style organizations successful. The logic of service, shared value, social media, and radical diversity at the top level, is finally the logic of the market.

My take? The next decade will see the disruption of financial services on a scale comparable with what has happened to print publishing in the last one. There is everything to play for. But thanks to Moore’s Law and globalization and other forces on the loose in C21, the clock is speeding uo all the time.

Sibos – Sibos – Osaka, 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2012.

Sibos conference of global financiers opens in Osaka (english.kyodonews.jp)

Three Digital Fallacies Holding Back our Top Companies

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Andrew McAfee Talk at the Berkman Center (Photo credit: Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

Make no mistake, a fundamental embrace of the revolution just beginning in digital communication is core to every company planning to be around in more than a couple of years. Not many (any?) of them really get it. Here are three key reasons.

1. The “social” fallacy. We use this term, yet it merges, blends, squishes together many divergent phenomena – from the chit-chat/cat pic end of the data explosion to what are still generally Sears-catalog marketing efforts – to what we are really talking about. Andrew McAfee recently explained why he coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” and avoids the term “social” with “hard-headed” C-Suite types, as it suggests something soft. I’m not suggesting we can give it up, or that “2.0” language (itself now, well, jaded) will answer. But we have a big branding problem here.

2. The digital/IRL fallacy. Someone tweeted today that in a year or two 25% of business will have a Chief Digital Officer. O boy. The “social” revolution is not about segmenting off yet another slice of the dispersed responsibilities of the C-Suite; it’s about integration. And now, I suppose, we await a new fad: the Chief Integration Officer. Integrative thinking comes very hard to “functional” people and, in a fundamental way, is rendering them systematically dysfunctional. There are a lot of people in high places in these organizations who need to check out their golf swing.

3. The generational fallacy. OK, there is a certain utility in throwing around “digital natives” language, but it’s getting not just passe but dangerous. The depressing lack of engagement of CIOs in social media (now well-documented) is nothing to do with their age. It’s to do with their inability to flex, to roll with the continuing punches of innovation, to grasp a rising level of risk as a friend, to grab the keys to organizational transformation – and value creation.

I’ve argued before that the neglect of social, side by side with a far more long-standing refusal to bring women into the top echelons, reveals a deep-seated death-wish on the part of U.S. business. What we need above all is to reframe the questions raised in the search for value, and rebrand the resources of the 21st century economy. Now.

What Sells CEOs on Social Networking.

On 9/11, Asymmetry, Exponential Change, and Washington’s Culture Challenge

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

As 9/11 comes around again, 11 years on, it’s time to think about risk, asymmetry, and the long term. Because a key lesson of that dark day is a simple one: that advanced technologies and the global communications they have enabled have reset the game of security, once and for all.

Three key reflections as we grieve anew – and look ahead.

The core mission of C-PET, the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, is to advance, in Washington, DC, the long view – in which we ask “tomorrow’s questions” as the context for today’s decisions, at the interface of policy and technology. In parallel, my consulting practice Strategic Futures, LLC (akaFutureofBiz.org) asks “tomorrow’s questions” as the context for today’s decisions at the interface of business and technology. The corporate/government relationship, which we all agree is too mired in lobbying and short-term advantage should be stronger and visionary.

1. I wrote some time back that the past decade been dominated by two global experts on asymmetry, neither of whom worked for the U.S. government. Their names were Bin Laden, now dispatched, and Assange, now incarcerated in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy in a situation somewhere between scandal and farce. Point is simple – and I make no suggestion of moral equivalence between them. These two men intuitively grasped the capacity of strategically deployed small means and small numbers to shape global events. There have always been asymmetries of power – I fly tonight to London, where Karl Marx sat writing Das Kapital in the British Museum. But technology has changed the game. And the key issue for our security in Century 21 is how we play it when we no longer set the rules, and they keep being changed.

2. While destructive technologies are developing apace, and increasingly accessible to individuals – synthetic biology, which we have addressed in our Roundtable series in Washington, is one key example; and cybersecurity, another C-PET theme – the principle we need to keep in focus is that of exponential change. While change has always been at a gathering pace, it’s in our generation – powered by Moore’s Law but other factors too – that the impact of exponential has begun to have dramatic implications. We all know this, of course, as a fact. The degree to which it has been absorbed in Washington is another matter, of course.

3. To begin to grasp the implications of asymmetric shifts and the exponential pace of change, we need not simply to be far-sighted (that is, constantly working the long view, future scenarios, asking what tomorrow’s questions shall be); we need to be integrative, interdisciplinary, radical in our patterns and practices quite aside from our thinking. Our politics, in my own view, is in general the realm of good men and women incapable of rising above a “corporate culture” that sets their foreshortened agendas and is dooming us to decisions that take tomorrow for granted. The rumblings of what I have named “exopolitics” suggest a seismic change to come, one that is indeed cognizant of the asymmetric potential of social media and other aspects of our new communications technologies.

So on 9/11, a day that will always be somber to us, let’s take a fresh look at asymmetry and the impact of the exponential change that has given it such significance, for ill and for good; and let’s redouble our efforts to bring about a culture of government in synch with such dramatic shifts and attuned in Century 21 to the values that laid down the foundations of this nation, and the technologies that, in large measure, have resulted from its efforts.

Facebook Crashes. My 5 Questions.

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Facebook settles to just over $20 and all kinds of problems emerge for the company as a result (chronicled here at length, including lock-up releases, tax issues, cash issues:�http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lockup-release-2012-8#ixzz22mj8cB6e) we keep coming back to the basics.

My 5 Questions, following up my earlier post Is #Facebook Doomed?

1. How do we value such an effort in terms that synch with Wall Street when all digital companies are fragile if wonderful things? (Answer: Dunno)

2. How do we project value into the future when (as I keep saying, over and over) interoperability looms in the social space, and with it the end of economic profit? (Answer: Modestly)

3. How can it be that our definitely “social” company shows less interest in social engagement (and diversity!) than almost any other on the planet, when it is probably the company most in need? (Answer: A Dreadful Mystery)

4. Why did Mark Zuckerberg and his buds, who claim serious social purposes for their enterprise (which I have no reason to doubt are genuinely held), not explore innovative financing and governance techniques instead of chanting IPO and setting up a governance structure that a C19th steel baron would admire? (Answer: A Curious Lack of Imagination?)

5. When will a major “social” effort decide to fund itself, in part at least, through subscriptions from its user base – with commensurate accountability – in place of the vortex of ads/analytics/privacy into which our premier social network is being sucked? (Answer: None too soon)

Facebook Crashes To End The Day – Business Insider.

Is #Facebook Doomed? (futureofbiz.org)
Facebook’s market meltdown is far from over (blogs.reuters.com)

Of Risk: Weather Threatens Infrastructure

Aside

Since success in biz and politics alike come from managing risk, it’s remarkable how bad we are at it.

This report in the NYT takes further the discussion we noted earlier (see below) on resiliency and risk in the context of the areas around Washington, DC, which were badly hit by recent storms.

https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/03/more-risk-resilience-amazons-snafu-and-the-cloud/

Rise in Weather Extremes Threatens Infrastructure – NYTimes.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.