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Jane Sparrow with be presenting a webinar on Monday 18th March, 2013 at 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM GMT discussing how HR can unlock the value of the middle manager.
Jane believes it is essential that managers have the confidence and capability to be great engagers and this is the only way to truly build and sustain a high performance culture. Within the webinar, she will provide proven and practical strategies for HR Professionals which they can use in order to support their managers and use throughout their organisation.
You can register for the webinar here.
Jane is author of The Culture Builders.
Ireland’s higher education sector is undergoing significant change through mergers, clustering and the development of a new type of university – a technological university.
The first major event in the change process is being organised by the Higher Education Project (set up by Anto Kerins author of An Adventure in Service-Learning). This event will be taking place in the Department of Education’s Clock Tower in Dublin, on the 12 April 2012.
More information about this event can be found here.
If you wish to attend please contact Martin O’Reilly tuworkshop@dit.ie.
On 23rd March, Nicola Johnson will be presenting at the LNM Inaugural Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Nicola’s presentation will be on the subject of ‘The place of theory in learning and new media research’.
Although the conference is invitational there is a public lecture by Neil Selwyn on Thursday 22 March, 6-7pm on Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age – thoughts from a UK perspective. More details can be found here.
Nicola’s book, Publishing from Your PhD is now available from Gower.
“Innovation is not a process, but an outcome.”
The Forbes Leadership Forum brings renowned speakers and thought leaders who discuss their leadership strategies. As a speaker at the Forum, Gower Author Alexander Manu was interviewed by Shaku Selvakumar for the IBM Impact 2011 Blog. In this interview Manu discusses in-depth the concepts of Imagination and Innovation in business Extract:
The redefinition of innovation as a human behaviour outcome, a dynamic in constant change, requires the shaping of new responses in business and the economy.
The past understanding of what innovation “is”, was generally connected with a breakthrough in technology – some new tool being employed in some new way. This understanding limits the potential of innovation as bound by the tools employed, instead of the imagination employing them. The latent imagination triggered by an innovation outcome is the true goal of innovation. It is not what “I can do with this now”? but “what can I become doing this in the future”? The tool is not a response, but a question. Every innovation is a question. The truly important innovations are a series of questions.
A few definitions: Innovation is an outcome, a new behaviour, a new way of doing things. Disruption is a behavior – an outcome involving a media and a user – changed by invention. Invention is a moment of discovery or creation of something new. Disruptive Business means the sum of new behaviours and their support models. Innovation is a moment of use, a manifest behaviour that engages an innovation object into new uses, and modifies the habitual conditions of the present.
This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, and some of the labels applied to innovation typologies, such as the label “disruptive innovation”. In general, the current discourse around innovation addresses competently the technology side of an invention, at the expense of the motivational side of the user, the human motivation which leads in the behaviour of use.
Alexander Manu is Chief Imaginator and Senior Partner at InnoSpa. He is the author of Distruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-design of Business published by Gower.
Arguably not the most dynamic and explosive of revolutions but one that we depend on if our organizations are to remain competitive and if we, as employees, are going to remain employable. Ann Alder’s blog post suggests ten thoughtful ways in which organization’s can encourage and nuture this form of development. Ann Alder is author of Pattern Making, Pattern Breaking: Using Past Experience and New Behaviour in Training, Education and Change Management.
Jeff Gold’s inaugural lecture is well worth watching. The conundrum he refers to in the title is ‘a position where a nominated leader is expected to be a leader while power and influence are significantly distributed throughout and between organisations.’ These ideas of distributed leadership are becoming increasingly accepted as the new reality of many organizations. Jeff offers hope and help to those people expected to lead and floundering around to work out exactly what that means. He argues that leaders need to become ‘hands-on’ and ‘heads-in’, which is essentially, if I have understood his piece, active facilitators of learning and change. Jeff Gold is co-editor of The Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development
I like to make sure we balance stories about success and failure in the blog, so that it doesn’t simply become a digital Cassandra. But there are very useful articles out there on the causes of project failure and Howard Hills research report 33 Reasons Why e-Learning Project Fail is a case in point. I recommend it to trainers and e-learning developers alike. Although it’s ostensibly about project failure there is a raft of pragmatic (and rigorous) advice to ensure project success, so it’s not all doom and gloom. Howard Hills is author of Team-Based Learning and Individual Preferences in e-Learning
Sadly, in a number of companies, there is still something of a gap between the rhetoric around developing employees and the reality. Stuart Emmett’s refreshing article on the subject, ‘Learning in Companies’, offers you a mirror to hold up to your own organization’s performance in this area. Stuart Emmett is co-author of The Relationship-Driven Supply Chain.
When students are responsible for a charity fundraiser, an awareness campaign, or people needing help, the buck stops with them. This is real life and if they fail they have to take the consequences. One student said that ‘if you go into an exam and you bomb at it, there’s no one there looking at you’. However, if you fail in the service activity there is no hiding place. The nature of learning in service activity is different to classroom learning: ideas are grasped or apprehended rather than acquired or comprehended. The student has to deal with and manage the whole phenomenon rather than just the textbook and teacher talk element.
Find out how things can be different – read Anto Kerins introduction here.
