WOW.. what an interesting week this has been. Have you been finding that there are more opportunities, changes, things to learn, things to read, people to meet than you’ve got time for?
.. the feeling of how the hell am I EVER going to catch up?!
I woke up this morning with the words of powerful exponent of innovation and leadership – GE’s Jack Welch – cutting through the clutter.
Shun the incremental, and look for the quantum leap
As South Africans this kind of thinking is crucial to our success. Anyone who’s travelled through countries with developed economies and you’ll agree that we haven’t a hope of catching up if we choose a tried & tested, conservative, incremental route to get there.
I laughingly inferred that the Patricia de Lille camp had strategically been campaigning a la Bullard on the post that I thought I was posting for SA Rocks on Monday. South Africa has slipped backed again on the Global Entrepreneurial Monitor’s annual report. Nigeria kicks our butt in entrepreneurial confidence, and hungrily using any tools that give inexpensive leverage.
Technology, particularly web and mobile technology offer us the opportunity to circumvent the heavy infrastructure that was historically required to be a world force. South Africa’s success in business or politics requires a perception shift, from working hard to working smart.. the lifeblood charged with embracing innovation. Innovation requires leadership to provide a solid framework, and guidance but NOT control. Do our leaders have that level of courage?
“Small companies have huge competitive advantages. They are uncluttered, informal. They thrive on passion and ridicule bureaucracy. Small companies grow on good ideas – regardless of their source. They need everyone, involve everyone, and reward or remove people based on their contribution to winning. Small companies dream big dreams and set the bar high – increments and fractions don’t interest them.”
Confidence always precedes courage. The risk to venture into using emerging technology or taking the entrepreneurial leap, is most often not taken because of a lack of knowledge. Being clear kills fear.
I’m helping to design the Nomadic Marketing course running at the UCT Graduate School of Business using the principles of tech-enhanced brain-based learning to make a daunting subject relevant and immediately useful. [So if you find yourself at sitting next to someone at dinner who's in digital denial.. send them the link. They NEED to know how easy it actually is to use technology without being a geek or spending a fortune now]
South Africa hasn’t got the luxury of waiting for the hand-me-down, safe applications of social technology if we have big dreams for our little country.
BUT if we’re happy hanging out on the benches .. then slamming blogger’s rights, or waiting till the “playing field” is levelled is the surest path. Uninspired, derivative success is guaranteed, we’re getting there: slowly and incrementally.
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May 24th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
My first leap would be, albeit the course is referring to ‘marketing’, but using a healthy dos of technology, to have the cabinet attend it first. Then parliament and finally all department-staff.
Based on that experience and their enlightment, there should be a course to be thaught at schools.
The 2nd leap would be to abolish most of traditional learning – public schools in this country deliver students that are in no way ready to compete with students from abroad – there are several reasons for that, one of them ‘politics’, so I’m not going there – nor am I fingerpointing or blaming anyone: it’s just the observation – denying it would only be cruel and stalling progress.
As, my suggestion would be to teach English only, with say Chinese as a second language, maybe 2 or 3 other topics and that would be it – next to that, every student gets a laptop on which to learn other topics, but in a playfull, interactive way, using the internet to learn about the rest of the world: art, technology, engineering etc. etc.
Sure, there have to be exams, but they will be in a more stimulating way than we had to endure – certain topics will not be popular: how much did you enjoy chemistry, for instance?
The result will be students that know how to use technology: boys will be encouraged to explore it more (to talk in stereotypes), girls will use it to discover their interests and specialise on those.
Based on a principle of finding out what you enjoy, discovering related stuff and exploring, a generation will be created that is curious. Not indifferent because they had to learn the ‘wrong stuff the wrong way’.
Curiosity leads to innovation and inventions. If not, then at least that new generation knows how to survive in a high-tech world.
May 25th, 2007 at 8:51 am
great post max.