Events
Book Recommendation - Gang Leader for a Day
Monday 28 April 2008
When it comes to quality strategic futures work as part of making the pragmatic decisions that shifts beyond theoretical futures work, I encourage my clients to question the assumptions they make about the information they have available to them. Which is why I am recommending the book 'Gang Leader for a day - a rougue sociologist takes to the streets' by Sudhir Venkatesh. What Venkatesh highlights so succinctly is that making decisions when you are disconnected from reality will ultimately lead to outcomes you didn't expect.
Interestingly enough, the 'rogue' element in the title exists because Venkatesh engaged in a practise that apparently was outside the realm of standard sociology - he actually spent time with the people he was writing about! Can you imagine that, someone daring to 'get informed' through first hand experience rather than trite and shallow quantitative based market surveys? Unbelievable, I mean, who does he think he is? :-) The book itself has some wonderful gems, like the observation that policy makers had no clues about how 'the projects' housing area actually worked and one of the lessons is clear - making decisions from on high without questioning your assumptions and assessing your expectations leads to a pretty fragile final result.
Mr Venkatesh - much Kudos! Published by Penguin this year, a truly enlightening read to say the least
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Events
Tuesday 8 May 2012
Have just spent a few hours discussing the Future of Money, hosted by James Bibby at Microsoft in Sydney and facilitated by Peter Vander Auwera from SWIFT/Innotribe. I'd like to flag that everyone understood that the session was way too short for such a big topic and everyone would agree that we just scratched the surface (not that the scratch would leave too much of a mark just yet). The session was a kick start for a group from a wide variety of interests: banks, payment providers' IT specialists and some specialty consultancies.
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Wednesday 2 May 2012
Ernst & Young and GreenBiz have completed a survey of business executives looking at the development of Corporate Sustainability around the world. The report shows that there has been a clear rise in awareness; that employees are a core source driving sustainability actions; that reduction of costs is a core appeal and that return on investment in sustainability actions is required to be judged in the same way as other corporate investments. For me this poses a dichotomy of thinking - the environment was built up over millennia and our use of it has taken just a couple of centuries yet we judge sustainability actions at the same 'speed of delivery' criteria. That poses a challenge and is perhaps an unrealistic set of expectations.
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Tuesday 24 April 2012
On the eve of ANZAC day here in Australia ABC Radio Darwin's Vicki Kerrigan chats with futurist Marcus Barber on the future of war - what the future triggers of war might be and how war will be fought
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