Learning Economy newsletter 05, September 21, 2019, and a link to an interview with Imagine Intelligent Materials’ Chris Gilbey
To what ends should we direct the power of our now wholly connected intelligence and collective internet social literacy?
This fifth issue of The Learning Economy newsletter is the second to include a link to a feature interview, this time with Chris Gilbey, executive chairman of Imagine Intelligent Materials, who accepted my request to participate.
Again, I’d have liked to have included the content of the entire interview here, but had to make do with a link.
Chris and I have been friends for 10 years, and, oddly, long before we made each other’s acquaintance, unknown to each other, we worked on the same musical acts at opposite ends of the planet.
His earlier career was spent in the music industry, shaping the careers of acts such as AC/DC, InXs, Keith Urban, Tommy Emmanuel, The Church, and The Saints and managing the publishing catalogues of The Beatles and Elvis Presley in Australia.
While he was already in Australia, I worked in the London press office of WEA Records on AC/DC, and subsequently as a press officer at RCA Records for The Church and InXs. So, although we’ve known or encountered many of the same people, it is nothing other than an odd coincidence.
But, immersed in deeply technical issues through championing applications of graphene – “the industrial equivalent of skin” – Chris is as alert to the value and implications of internet social literacy as anyone I know. Indeed, he thinks I should be writing about it for publications such as The Economist, which at some appropriate point, I will.
The usual preamble
As a general and possibly recurring note, I intend that this newsletter will most likely comprise from six to 10 links as I find items I consider interesting enough to pass on, and its themes will be much as you see beneath. If you know others likely to be interested, please pass this on to them.
And, if you are able to suggest additional links, content or sources you find interesting and believe will fit both your own and other readers' purposes, please let me know at graham@thelearningeconomy.com.
In anticipation, thank you, I always love to be better informed, and thanks for reading. And in this instance, please forgive my indulgence in linking to one of my own posts first, but I do so in the belief that it points to one argument for organising knowledge in a familiar and structured way that most businesses can adopt as a usable platform.
That aside, I hope you enjoy the content I have linked to beneath.
Graham Lauren
The stories
An interview with Imagine Intelligent Materials’ Chris Gilbey
Graham Lauren, The Learning Economy
Look at Amazon, that what they do, and what they've done. As some book company, it's an information company, right? They have more information about customers than anybody else, and that is the reason that makes them a valuable business.
Tim Hogarth, Medium.com
Learning is the most important skill organisations need to gain in the coming decade — and we’re going to need to do some things very differently to achieve it.
Exponential answers or fake news
Robert Hillard, Information-Driven Business
Exponentials are exciting. But exponentials can also have a dark side. Fake news spreads because of the exponential power of social media. Yet, despite the downsides, the power of exponentials has been crucial for humanity.
The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
Roger L Martin, Harvard Business Review
All executives know that strategy is important. But almost all also find it scary, because it forces them to confront a future they can only guess at. Worse, actually choosing a strategy entails making decisions that explicitly cut off possibilities and options. An executive may well fear that getting those decisions wrong will wreck his or her career.
Graham Lauren, Learning Economy
If you are an investor, you may previously and perfectly justifiably have backed past performance. But on the lip of a fully blown digital economy, it is the future learning-driven value growth of your shareholdings that will most interest you. For those with money at stake, this is big news.
The Industries That Are Being Disrupted the Most by Digital
Rhys Grossman, Harvard Business Review
Just over half of the respondents answered “yes” to the question “Do you have the right people to define your digital strategy?” It might be hard for people in HR to hear, but only 20% of those who responded said that their HR function was enabling them to transform.
Creating a culture of learning
Art Kleiner, Strategy + Business
You need to develop a culture of learning if you want to be innovative. Investing in people, and helping them continually develop their skills, should be embedded in a company’s culture. The role of the company is to continually challenge and develop its people, starting at the top. In fact, I think the company has an obligation to do so.
Salesforce CEO Slams 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Maximizing Shareholder Value
Steve Denning, Forbes
Jack Welch has called it “the dumbest idea in the world.” Vinci Group Chairman and CEO Xavier Huillard has called it “totally idiotic.” Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has said that “customers are number one; employees are number two and shareholders are number three.”
Fred Wilson, AVC
I believe business model innovation is more disruptive than technical innovation, and I am excited about the move to crypto based business models supporting decentralized apps for this very reason.
Credits
Thanks to these writers: Tim Hogarth; Robert Hillard; Roger L Martin; Rhys Grossman; Art Kleiner; Steve Denning; Fred Wilson.
Please participate in Learning Economy research
What is universal internet social literacy and what can we do with it?
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.
To those reading here, I’d like to invite your personal participation in, first, an Australian, but ultimately, an international study on the subject above. Please follow the link above for more.
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.