Organizational Structure and Innovation
April 28, 2012Steve Denning at Forbes.com wrote an article about Valve, a high-tech company with a unique organizational chart: there are no managers. Everyone is free to choose what project to work on. They are green-lighted to risk and fail. They are expected to be creative and use that creativity. It is messy, chaotic, and very successful.…
Great Teaching and Finding Problems
April 26, 2012First, thanks to all who have started to follow my blog. I will try to mine important sources that are helpful and might be outside your radar screen. If you find these posts useful, please pass along the blog link to members of your PLC, PLN, Critical Friends Group, or department. Hopefully some of the…
Game Changers Amongst Us
April 25, 2012Education is in need of evolutionary game-changes, and there are two important aspects to that simple statement. First, we need evolution, not revolution. Our foundations and traditions are strong, so we don’t need to blow up the walls. What we think of as revolution due to fear of the unknown and of change itself will…
Gary Hamel Interview on Principles of Management for Innovation
April 24, 2012Last week I read a series of interviews with author Gary Hamel on his new book What Matters Now, conducted and posted by Steve Denning on his blog on Forbes.com. Hamel is an expert on change management and innovation and I thought a number of the points he made in the interviews are highly relevant…
Innovation or Tradition?
April 22, 2012Is the soul of our educational system more attuned to innovation or tradition? What about your school or business? It is easy to say “both” or “in balance”, but I am not sure the balance point is where you need or want to be. Over dinner at the JRPO spring academic meeting last week some…
A Game-Changer for University Education?
April 18, 2012This morning on NPR there was a short story about a new start-up company out of Stanford that has piloted offering FREE university-level courses with full assessment of student performance, for free. University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and University of Michigan are also participating. The new company is called Coursera and venture capitalists have put in…
Students Hit a Home Run From Looking at Grass
April 16, 2012After leading two successful summer workshops on my Falconer seminar for West Point cadets, the faculty mentor and president of our Francis Parker School Upper School ASB (student government) asked me to tailor a set of classes for the ASB leadership team. They could only give me about 8 hours over a couple of months,…
A Good Read on Innovation
April 12, 2012I have been following the Management Innovation eXchange site and recommend it to those who want to bring great ideas from the world of innovation thinking into our system of education. For a number of reasons, primarily related to both inertia and fear, education has been slow to adopt a world of proven innovation practices;…
Passion and Value Proposition
April 10, 2012In an interview with Steve Denning, innovation author Gary Hamel talks about the role of passion in separating successful companies from also-rans in a fast-moving business cycle. K-12 education is in the middle of such a cycle, driven by both dramatic changes in connective technologies and global economies that have significantly strained traditional educational goals.…
Tidbits About Kahn Academy
April 9, 2012I had the good fortune to have breakfast a week or so ago with a young Parker alum who works for Kahn Academy. By now, you all know the basics about Kahn, an incredible story of great young people doing the right thing with determination and imagination. So just a few tidbits following that breakfast:…
Welcome to the Cognitosphere
April 4, 2012Welcome to a new term, concept, and definition. Welcome to the “cognitosphere”. Our world is comprised of four major, highly integrated environmental systems: the atmosphere includes the gases that surround the Earth; the hydrosphere includes all of the water on the planet; the lithosphere represents all of the rock and hard material of the Earth’s…
Schools Making the Shift
April 2, 2012Sorry to be late on this post, but better late than never. Over the last couple of years there appears to have been a real and true awakening that the world is changing…in fact has already changed…and that our schools need to catch up at the risk of becoming obsolete. The recent NAIS annual conference…
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