Shifting my blog address to http://quayle/blogs.sauder.ubc.ca/. Hope you can still find me!
Category: Post Secondary Education
…is a book by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland (2008). The UBC Sauder School of Business; Borden, Ladner, Gervais; RBC; and, WomenOnBoard pulled together to present the 2009 Women on Board Forum: Transforming Corporate Culture.
Everybody seemed to pick this week to host a Forum or Conference. So I only managed to attend the first part of the Forum — but I did catch the intriguing presentation by the first author of this book, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. I had planned to leave earlier (feeling conference overload) but her presentation held me.
Avivah is a Canadian living and working in Paris (envy). She is the CEO of 20-First, a company that works with progressive companies interested in diversifying their leadership teams and optimizing both halves of the talent pool and both halves of the market — the female and male halves (this from the bio).
I have never been much for focusing only on women — women-only events, women’s business networks and so on. It was so great to listen to somebody intimately engaged in this area who offered gems like (and I am paraphrasing from my notes):
- The world is moving from the image of pyramids (hierarchical) to the image of the pomegranite (when you view it cut in half) — decentralized and networked.
- It isn’t really about getting more women on boards, it is about getting more women in executive positions — then the board balance will happen.
- It’s not a women’s issue — it is an economic issue. Re-frame it around the 3 W’s: the web (technology); women (arrival of women and their economic roles especially as consumers (lots of evidence is Sept’s Harvard Business Review’s feature on The Female Economy)); and, Weather (climate change/sustainability).
- What is importance is the correlation between gender balance and a better bottom line.
- Stop talking about “fixing women” — somehow there is an assumption that we need tips and lots of help. Avivah is saying that we need to turn the question around: What is wrong with companies that can’t retain or attract women?
- Women and men are different — don’t try to treat them the same. We need to recognize the differences.
There was a ton of info in her talk. It hopefully was video-taped — but I can point you to her book (thanks to RBC all attendees got a copy) which I haven’t read yet but look forward to doing so.
It makes me wonder about our business education globally. Given our gender balance in business schools — what is the language we use? How do we discuss this issue? Is it even on the table?
I guess I had better find out!
The Blue Man group (loved their blue masks) were an engaging introduction to the Tuesday morning session of the Vancouver Peace Summit on Educating the Heart: Creativity and Well-Being and Heart-Mind Education. I hadn’t seen them before so was in for a treat in terms of their multi-media presentation and then the way they took the large audience at the Orpheum got us totally engaged. The topic was around how to promote creativity — and the Blue Man group shared their process with us. They enter a series of creative mind-sets that are opposites — the scientist and the shaman, the group member and the trickster, and the hero and the innocent. One of the most fun moments was when everyone (except me because I somehow didn’t get one) had to put on their red clown nose and be “innocent” and playful. It is all about how to focus your attention. Another quote I like was: Play with the rules instead of playing by the rules.
The session on Creativity and Well-being included an impressive cast of speakers — people like Sir Ken Robinson, Eckhart Tolle and so on. I noted down points like…
…the power of the imagination…creativity is putting the imagination to work or applied imagination…relationship between economic development and creativity… its all about problem formulation… creativity needs to be sown into every part of the education process…
Similarly, the session on Heart-Mind Education had a stellar line-up — Stephen Covey, Clyde Herzman, Adele Diamond, Mairead Maguire.
There were some challenges for me in getting the most out of these sessions. There seems to be a human propensity for trying to do too much in a defined amount of time. 180 minutes to fit in Blue Man, 7 speakers in the first session and 7 speakers in the second session. And hear from the Dalai Lama — which was also an issue for me — I couldn’t hear him very well. I really wished they had focussed on one panel and therefore had more time. I also had issues with the space — we really don’t have an inspirational space in Vancouver for these types of numbers. The Wosk Centre for Dialogue works so well for a smaller group — but going big presents challenges for us.
What I most enjoyed was the fact that we were talking about educating the heart and its importance in all part of our lives. And the fact that the Dalai Lama left us to go and talk to 16,000 teenagers — I think that might have been his most important gig!
I missed the Women and Peace-building session in the afternoon. It was probably amazing. Partly because they allowed 30 minutes for just the Dalai Lama and Maria Shriver in conversation.
What a week — so great that Vancouver hosted the Peace Summit. Hats off to Charles Holmes and all the folks at the Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education.
For more SI2 info go to http://www.si2.ca/.
The afternoon brought a connection between social innovation and ecology — Frances Westley from the University of Waterloo talked about social and ecological resilience –and evoked the work of Buzz Holling, the famous UBC ecologist (even tho’ he left us awhile ago for southern climes).
Frances is the JW McConnell Chair in Social Innovation — she is heading up a Canada-wide initiative in social innovation, SiG (Social Innovation Generation), a cross-sectoral partnership to build capacity for social innovation in Canada funded by the J.W McConnell Family Foundation, University of Waterloo and the Ontario government. She is a scholar in the area of social innovation — her most recent book Getting to Maybe (Random House, 2006) focuses the dynamics of social innovation, and institutional entrepreneurship in complex adaptive systems.
Her presentation gave us a theoretical framework for understanding the engagement of vulnerable populations, building linked socio-ecological resilience and building capacity for social innovation. Relevant for the “Resilient Cities” conferences coming up October 20 (www.gaininggroundsummit.com).
On Saturday morning we finished up with an Open Space session with groups tackling topics such as:
1. How can we have broader investment in social innovation across Canada?
2. The idea of a Canadian Drug Policy Consortium.
3. How do we engage the broader community in social innovation?
4. What should the research agenda be around social innovation?
5. How do we tell the community story around the 2010 Olympics?
6. How do we accelerate knowledge mobility around social innovation — and take action?
and others that I seem not to have noted!
In group 6 we actually ended up talking a lot about the idea of “social patents” — we even bought (for $14) the domain name www.socialpatents.com. And we started a blog at: https://socialpatents.wordpress.com/. Desperate to take action and find some new ways to mobilize knowledge — to get it out of our institutions into the community.
Thanks again to Tom and Graham. As usual, workshops like this provide good time for reflection and learning. Can’t have enough of that.
Innovation and BC’s 2020 Economy. A great topic and well-covered by the third session — a panel discussion entitled: Tomorrow’s Technology Today: Innovation and BC’s 2020 Economy.
The final panel of the summit was well moderated by a pro — Dr. David Turpin, President of the University of Victoria. Dr. Turpin started off the session with a succinct summary of the report that he and some colleagues authored for the BCBC on Universities and the Knowledge Economy (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Turpin.pdf) which emphasizes the important role that graduate students can play in the research team –especially their role in knowledge transfer.
Which led into comments from the founder of MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) Arvind Gupta — Dr. Math (those of you who read the Vancouver Sun will remember the great series on the importance of math — and Arvind’s approach to helping parents (and students) learn to love math). But Arvind was on the panel to talk about what it takes to build a knowledge economy — basically knowledge workers. And what we need to do to make BC attractive to the best possible students from around the globe.
MITACS operates a kind of “dating service” between research programs/students and industry. It matches up graduate student expertise with identified problems from industry. Money is matched and the outcome is often a job in the end for the student. The Provincial government put in $10million into the internship program several years ago (Accelerate BC) and the program needs another infusion soon to keep these matches going.
Dr. Michael Gallagher, President and CEO of Westport Innovations Inc., talked about the vision of Westport to promote natural gas as an alternative fuel to oil. Westport is one of BC’s poster companies for global success in terms of rate of growth and potential in the clean-tech landscape. Michael emphasized three themes — the importance of commercialization of research results, the challenges that face companies as they grow such as intellectual property issues and finding skilled employees, and the importance of partnerships with other businesses (like Terasen (natural gas) and Cummins (engines).
The last panelist was Jayson Myers, President and CEO of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. Jayson talked about the importance of the commercialization process — how do we generate something of economic value? He talked about new solutions, new products, re-engineering existing businesses and differentiating our various products and services. He also called for leadership from both business and government to tackle these challenges.
So now a plug for Chapter Three: Positioning for Prosperity: Commercial and Industrial Opportunities for a New BC Economy. Tuesday October 20 7:30am-12:15pm. That is one busy week in Vancouver — Outlook 2020, the Gaining Ground conference, and various other activities!
What will BC’s next economy look like? Chapter Two of the BC Business Council’s Outlook 2020 series is entitled: Foundations for the Future: Innovation, Human Capital and BC’s Next Economy. Yesterday morning we were in the Pan Pacific “Crystal” Ballroom (you know the one with all the ceiling of solid little hanging crystal pendants — talk about a design problem — how to design a space for several hundreds of people that has good ventilation, views and a sense of place and energy about it — but that is another topic).
The “we” in this case is notable — need to look into the average age of participants but it seemed older than it should be for the topic of the future economy. Maybe we need to have a Summit where we each invite a 20-something or a 30-something.
Anyway David Baxter — our favourite demographer — led off the morning. In nutshell — baby boomers are entering their senior years and the pine beetle eating habits have changed the structure of our economy. How are we going to pay our bills given our top-heavy age profile? Interestingly enough while women still outlive men, that is gradually changing and eventually we’ll be housing more elderly couples.
A moment of levity came with a slide of a young boy holding a knife in an electric socket — this was in response to the question of “why” women live longer than men. Baxter called it the “goofball” gene.
So how will we pay our bills? Migration, work longer, work smarter and increase our productivity, increase employment in general and enlarge the availability of work.
Comes down to an import-export dilemma — we export fuel, natural gas, forest products, mineral products and services internationally. All good. But we import more than we export now — partly because we don’t grow our own food (also requires a longer discussion — not sure I buy all David’s arguments about why local food won’t work as part of the equation) so we need to import food products and of course manufactured goods are a large % of what we import. As Baxter writes: “…what we do, primarily, is to import manufactured products that we pay for by exporting natural resources (raw and processed).”
Interesting about our trading partners — US is number 1 ( 52% of our exports), Japan number 2 (15%) — and South Korea (6%) (not China) is number 3. So we need to pay attention to that.
All-in-all a good set-up for the panel on human capital and on innovation. Blogs Part 2 and 3 coming up.
You can find David Baxter’s full report at: http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Baxter.pdf
What I was left wondering is where does the new, green economy fit into this demographic/economic picture? In the next little while we’ll be talking a lot about the green economy — the Province and the City are both setting out green economy agendas. The Gaining Ground conference (www.gaininggroundsummit.com) has the green economy as an important theme. If we think about it in import and export terms — what will the clean tech sector, for example, contribute? And what policies need to be in place for this sector to flourish?