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MBA oath – a social innovation at Harvard Business School
The MBA Oath is a voluntary student-led pledge that asks graduating MBAs to commit towards the creation of value “responsibly and ethically.” The grassroots effort was launched in late May 2009 by a group of thirty graduating Harvard Business School (HBS) students in Boston, Massachusetts.
Source: Wikipedia
The principles (short)
Therefore I promise:
- I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.
- I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
- I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
- I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.
- I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
- I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.
- I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.
- I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.
Source: Wikipedia
Some weeks ago I reached some conclusions about the demographic/technographic wave of the Digital Natives. I foresee deep impact, if not cultural clash. For a CEO or manager there are narrow options for sustainable strategic response to this challenge.
So my pro-active imperative was: Time to transform your company into an academy
Today some other fruit of analyzing the wave and emerging power of Digital Natives / Millenials dropped. Manager Magazin online published the article about the emerging issue:
“Digital Natives”: Die Revolution der Web-Eingeborenen – manager-magazin.de http://www.manager-magazin.de/it/artikel/0,2828,625126,00.html
“Digital Natives”: Die Revolution der Web-Eingeborenen – manager-magazin.de
(Andreas Neef, Willi Schroll, Björn Theis)
Just enjoy the insights.
See my business mind map
Dear reader, you realized my low blogging frequency. I am so busy with projects and my own business development of <Strategic Labs> in these days of exciting developments in the media and communication industry.
Just follow @willischroll and watch my tweets about emerging trends and the future at twitter.com/willischroll.
Will microblogging kill the blogs, will it kill my blog? No way, don’t worry. Social micro and macro media are in great symbiosis! 140 letters is just too short for complex knowledge communication. But I see a bright future for twitter and other microcommunication stuff. As I twttered: It could be some stem cell (with pluripotent applications) in the coming realtime – social – semantic – sensing – paraphysical Web 3.0. Just think about a mashup like this, found at mashable:
++ Twitter Meets Google Street View: Stweet! http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-street-view/
Prof. Knight is angry – but does this help to recover and transform? (source: thisislondon.co.uk)
G20 summit under immense pressure
Radical measures must be decided at the G20 summit or it could become the “fateful moment” when the global recession lurches into an outright slump, Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said today. (guardian.co.uk, 2009-03-30)
The crisis and the consequences for business and politics are still in the focus of mass media and the blogosphere. When I check the stats of future facts blog I find a lot of phrases containing “financial crisis” still on the top of the most used search terms. Surprisingly most of the visitors checked in here on the post of Oct. 2008 Global financial crisis may end 2009 – which is not really a typical post in a blog concerned with long-term trends. The news seemed significant at that time because
- it had been expressed by an insider, Michel Camdessus, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
- it was extraordinarily optmistic.
Let us contrast this sunny quote of last year with doomsday news like this of March 25th 2009: “Russia Expects New Financial System Crisis Outburst”. Russia’s Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin said:
“We were standing on the brink of the financial collapse, but we prevented it, and I must here thank the Central Bank and the State Duma for giving us an opportunity to take decisions quickly,” (my emphasis, www.marketoracle.co.uk)
The coincidence of some news urges me to come back to the issue of the spreading crisis. In these days we read Read the rest of this entry »
At the worlds biggest IT fair, CeBIT in Hanover, ending on Sunday they tried something new. With “Webciety” there has been a new format to close the gap between hardware selling companies on the one hand and increasingly important web companies on the other. We hear this for so long and it is from year to year it is more true: We are on the way to web society / “webciety”. At the panel there have been issues like Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing and Identity Management – but the most interesting subject for me has been the upcoming and invasion of the “digital natives”. The consequences for enterprises, media industry and marketing are still in the debate. At webciety there has been a book presentation concerning the topic. You can access and download the book at scribd as a PDF (German):
DNAdigital – Wenn Kapuzenpullis auf Anzugtraeger treffen
Digital Natives – different mindset, communication habits and consumption patterns
Marc Prensky coined the term “digital natives” in the context of education some years ago (“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” 2001). Since Gartner and other analyst firms took it seriously since 2007 today companies start to analyze more thoroughly the rather heterogeneous group of digital natives. The core definition is trivial:
A digital native is a person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3. (Wikipedia)
Prensky realized the disparity in the realm of learning and teaching – teachers are just ill-equipped to educate digital natives, whose sophisticated use of digital technologies is incompatible with practice in schools and universities. No question the disparity today is virulent in the enterprise context (actually I am preparing some stuff concerning the issue and Read the rest of this entry »
STOA Report "Looking Forward in the ICT & Media Industries"
Today “Web 2.0″ is just mainstream and seems more or less boring as a subject of research. The prevailing question is how to realize practical and efficient Web 2.0 solutions, what to do and not to do with social networks, social media – as a user and in the business perspective. As a typical example see a lengthy blog post like this from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 blog – this is what a lot of people care about: 50 Essential Strategies For Creating A Successful Web 2.0 Product
But there is still the demand for critical assessment of the dynamics, the effects and side effects of the transformation (revolution, yep) of ICT and the media industry. Even politicians have come to understand the issue, lately when they realized the role of Web 2.0 in becoming the 44th president of the USA (BTW I have been blogging in last July: “Maybe Obama can win with swarm mobilisation effects in the internet – and is the first “user generated president” of the USA.”)
In the last year I had been asked to contribute some statement in the STOA report “Looking Forward in the ICT & Media Industries”. The acronym STOA means Science and Technology Options Assessment (for the European Parliament) and you are educated enough to enjoy the allusion to the ancient philosophy school.
Critical assessment of Web 2.0 and the user’s social capital
Don’t get me wrong – my attitude concerning Web 2.0 is rather affirmative (see my record) . But as with most technological innovations there are some downsides. To know them is just a necessity if you want to secure the acceptance and value of a technology in the long run. After the “BeaconGate” there was a second “Facebook scandal” (the terms of service thing) some Read the rest of this entry »
Copernicus changed our direction of perspective (source: wikipedia.org)
Hm, what a long winter break. Well, I have been reading some predictions for 2009 (like this at RWW or that at VentureBeat), I enjoyed texts looking back at 2008, too (e.g. Andrew McAfee or McKinsey). When I came across the RWW post I thought about my own “social media wish list”. I have to confess in the first place the radical and techno heretic thought occured to me: “Could please someone just stop the noise!” The majority of folks out there has no ”social media wish list” just because they are not participating. Their social networking is working fine with phones, address books and calenders – and so the question is: Why is it a mess for so many to organize the social life(stream) on the web? There is a complexity of service options, habits, expectations, aggregators and this makes users really tired. The landscpae is unripe and there is much space for improvements. I want to pick only one issue.
Copernican revolution of the social web in 2009?
When users complain about social networking one point is fragmentation and the resulting number of services and feeds one has to manage. So, could we please have some paradigm shift with the services serving the user and not the other way round? This Copernican revolution of the social web could mean to build up a technically autonomous layer for identity, authentification, social relation management. This is like a u-turn in perspective and isn’t it this, what the ideas and approaches of social network portability etc. are about? But reducing the work load to manage the networks will not be enough to bring the social dimension to flourish.
Social network concepts of today are primitive and stupid
It is time to integrate professional experts of the social in the development process – i.e. the guys of the sociological and humanities department. Think about the “collision of worlds” and role conflicts, when the social architecture (relation modes, transparencies, “hiding places”) is not adequately designed. User control and service transparency have to be much better to avoid the user’s dilemma (what to show and what to share with whom). There have to be relation types (friends, family, relatives, colleagues etc.) with differentiated rights to share parts of your life. For the moment I would call this “transparency management” – which is more than identity management. To understand the issue just read this article: ABC News: Friended by Mom and Dad on Facebook.
Image source: en.wikipedia.org
Update: Links
Claudia Langer, Utopia conference (source: konsumguerilla.net)
To be green or not to be
First part of my coverage of the Utopia conference was about necessity and possibility of the coming transformation. This global transformation is politically, economically and technologically. How we shape things, connect material flows, structure systems, control communication, this is all about technology and design. Prof. Braungart reminded us about the “next industrial revolution”, he and William McDonough really did this for quite a while (The Atlantic 1998) and successfully.
Efficiency potentials and radical new mobility concepts
As I said before there is no consensus about goals and means. One good example is the seemingly polarity of Braungart’s paradigmatic radicality on he one hand and the optimization strategy of Dr. Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) on the other. Both approaches will coexist even when a holistic approach and some disruptive innovation is always more impressive than the “optimization of the old” (see also my post “Dont’ worry …“). But sometimes the sum of many tiny steps could mean revolutionary consequences, too. Take mobility based on fossil fuels. The cars of today are completely stupid in their basic design, Dr. Lovins calculated that only 0.3% of the total energy invested in driving actually moves the physical mass of the driver. Obviously there is huge potential to eco-optimize mobility systems. So maybe car driving will not be illegal in 2018, because cars have very different features then, e.g. are made of very light materials.
An other way to “save the car” was demonstrated by Rolf Schumann of Better Place, a company which could mean a new way to realize personal mobility. Think about sustainable mobility and using a smart infrastructure to cope with the problem of batteries. Better place is acting like an operator selling kilometers not cars, like a mobile carrier is selling minutes to you (Better Place how-it-works).
These are the times for visionary leadership
I want to end with another lesson. As a researcher and speaker I am frequently stressing the potential of the social web, participation, collaboration and “collective intelligence”. This “social thing” always has to be balanced with the respect of individual genius and leadership. I suppose Claudia Langer as the initiating founder of Utopia shows the decisive role of personality.
