Redefining the Top Leadership Position
In 2017, John Chambers (who was then CEO of Cisco Systems) was the guest speaker in an executive education class at Harvard Business School, where he delivered the following message: "A decade or two ago, CEOs could be in their offices with spreadsheets, executing on strategy. Now, if you're not out listening to the market and catching market transitions, [...] if you're not understanding that you need to constantly reinvent yourself every three to five years, you as a CEO will not survive."
Competing Commitments
It has been a consistent narrative in education conferences for the past ten to fifteen years: "we need to become more agile, more innovative, more digital, adopt a growth mindset, and focus more on the user..." I have attended a fair number of conferences during this time period, and I think that all of them have featured speakers and workshop leaders who repeat either this exact mantra or something quite close to it.
Learning as a Core Competence
Paul Daugherty, H. James Wilson, and Nicola Morini Bianzino wrote in 2017 about jobs that, in their opinion, artificial intelligence would create. MIT Sloan Management Review recently interviewed two of the three co-authors to find out what they have learned since that article was published two years ago. For those of us in education, the interview is a worthwhile read, as we consider how learning (itself) is a core competence.
Nine Lies About Work
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure…that just ain’t so.” This quote, which opens the tome Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, frames an important issue—namely: we think that we know a number of things ‘for sure.’ Reality, however, may be otherwise. Nevertheless, we continue to insist that we know things ‘for sure.’
The 4iR and Its Discontents
Like many, I find the 4iR concept fascinating; it pushes me to contemplate how education (let alone ‘society’) might adapt. In my darker moments, I envision education being squashed by the 4iR because we are rarely timely in our response to such transformations (with some notable exceptions). In my more optimistic moments, which is where my mental musings tend to live, I question whether the entire thing is a load of rubbish. In other words, have we overestimated the impact and utility of those technological elements (AI is a great example) that represent the 4iR? Have we reduced ourselves to a world of algorithms to the extent that we are willing to let the algorithms programme our lives, effectively leading to a conformist society…a sort of monoculture?