Learning Economy newsletter 03, July 29, 2019
To what ends should we direct our now wholly connected intelligence and collective internet social literacy?
This issue follows more closely than I had anticipated on the heels of the last, but having been reading, researching and saving far longer than I have been publishing newsletters, I have a backlog of stories and links to share. And my studies have led me to some fascinating content along the way.
I am also eager to hasten my first-hand research into where we can take, and to what uses our imaginations can put, our collective internet social literacy, other than posting to Facebook, and so on.
Believing there is far more intelligence in the world than ever gets heard or used, I am also convinced there is much new value to be created and learned from by making sense of and bringing focus to previously disparate, disaggregated and underused knowledge.
The internet lends itself neatly to such ideas. It is the only vehicle we have ever had that does this. And it is also favourably disposed to the discovery of where knowledge isn’t being applied to learning where one might have hoped it would be.
For this reason, living in Australia, I am seeking a partner to create a learning index of the companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, or ASX. I believe that only when we understand better those businesses’ undertakings on how they will use their own collective internet literacy to get smarter will we understand their true investment potential. This is in nothing less than Australia’s national interest.
Currently, with those specific companies in mind, their annual reporting makes for a disappointing read.
For those interested in this idea and perhaps in partnering with me and possibly even sponsoring some low-cost research, I’ve written a couple of pieces.
The first was an analysis of the ASX’s listed financial services sector, entitled Led by its banks, is Australia sleepwalking into creating the dumbest and most unreliable financial services industry the country could dream up?
The second was On the basis of its understanding of the Learning Economy, which of these top 25 Australian Listed Investment Companies would you give money to invest for you? It drilled down on the published learning declarations of only the Listed Investment Companies (LICs), but I found it no more heartening than the first.
And then, as something of a come-on to their leaders, I wrote Questions for ASX investment fund leaders: Post-Facebook, it’s time to bring your reporting up to date to meet the future needs of small-scale Australian investors.
In Australia, with the minerals boom slowing and the emerging forces of greater regional geopolitics shifting around us unpredictably, we need to be getting better use out of every brain engaged in our workplaces. That will partly result from us getting better use from our collective internet social literacy, and recognising its power to transform everything we perceive, which is the subject of the first piece I have linked to here.
That aside, until next time around, I hope you enjoy the others.
Regards
Graham Lauren
graham@thelearningeconomy.com
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Learning Economy research: What is universal internet social literacy and what can we do with it?
Graham Lauren, The Learning Economy
To those reading here, I’d like to invite your personal participation in, first, an Australian, but ultimately, an international study on the subject in the title. Please follow the link above for more.
My Eureka Moment With Strategy
Roger L Martin, Harvard Business Review
When everybody has an opinion, Roger Martin writes, getting around the block to formulating strategy lies in asking the single most important question in strategy.
Scott Berkun, Scott Berkun
Ideas demand change. By definition, the application of an idea means that something different will take place in the universe. Even if your idea is undeniably and wonderfully brilliant, it will force someone, somewhere to change how they do something.
Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review
It's old, but Gary Hamel really is the master in his field, and in this, his 10 principles are timeless.
Sabri Suby, Smart Company
As James Dyson told Entrepreneur in 2012: “Failure is interesting — it’s part of making progress. You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure.”
The Four Building Blocks of Transformation
Al Kent, David Lancefield, Kevin Reilly, Strategy + Business
Successful transformations may be relatively rare, but they do exist — and yours can succeed as well. A transformation, in this context, is a major shift in an organization’s capabilities and identity so that it can deliver valuable results, relevant to its purpose, that it couldn’t master before. It doesn’t necessarily involve a single major initiative (though it could); but the company develops an ongoing mastery of change, in which adaptability feels natural to leaders and employees.
To Take Charge of Your Career, Build Your Tribe
Gianpiero Petriglieri, Harvard Business Review
We heard freelance journalists, consultants, designers, software engineers, and executive coaches share tales of creative struggle, bitter loneliness, and chronic uncertainty. And yet, most of them claimed that they would not have it any other way. They might be uncomfortable, but they were free.
MarketBusting: Strategies for Exceptional Business Growth
Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan, Harvard Business Review
As industries emerge and evolve, most players eventually settle on a common unit of offering. Yet, it’s often possible to grow a business by changing your unit of business to reflect more closely value created for customers, or your performance on existing key metrics that uniquely favours your company.
How “systems thinking” can level up your work - and your life
Aytekin Tank, JotForm Blog
Shared learning is powerful. When groups work together to achieve significant goals, it solidifies understanding. It etches the lesson into our minds.
Why your design team should hire a writer
John Saito, Dropbox Design
The mechanics of writing are hard enough to get right, but do you know what’s really hard? Those hand-wavy concepts like word choice, tone, and rhythm. Those skills take forever to master.
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Who am I?
I am an independent writer for hire, and by professional background, a former sub-editor on the pages of the Australian Financial Review newspaper group at Fairfax Media in Sydney.
I also have an MBA (Technology) from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The forward-looking focus of that qualification is on creating and managing the organisations of the future, both driving and in response to changes in technology.
Through it, my professional experience, my skills and other related study, I discovered a fascination for documenting and transforming knowledge to drive social organisational and community learning, for its many applications, using the best technologies ever invented for the purpose.
I have a professional aim to build my business on the back of transforming workplace knowledge into reports managers and leaders can act on, using Wikipedia, broadly, as a model for an early deployment, as I have described in this post on The Learning Economy.
I aim also to work on helping ASX-listed companies transform their knowledge into annual reporting that will attract investors and bolster their share prices.
That aside, as a freelancer, I’ve written much corporate and marketing documentation over a number of years, and one thing I enjoy and feel comfort in doing is turning speech into blog posts, features and documents for business purposes.
I also have an appetite for assisting busy executives by helping them, by recorded interview, turn and tidy their knowledge, experience and thoughts into opinion pieces, posts and corporate statements.
If my skills can prove of help, contact me to find out more at graham@thelearningeconomy.com.