Tag: New Learning Models

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Business Education Post Secondary Education Sauder Business School

Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our Next Economic Revolution

…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!

Categories
Business Education Post Secondary Education Social Innovation

Reflections on Educating the Heart

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.

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Policy Shaping Collaborations Post Secondary Education Social Innovation

Social Innovation and Knowledge Mobility

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.

Categories
Business Education Pacific Coast Collaboration Policy Shaping Collaborations

MQ Summary of BCBC Summit: Part 2

It’s all about people — how we educate them, value them and motivate them to learn, re-tool and learn again.  The second session at the Chapter Two Summit was entitled:  In Training for Prosperity:  Education and the Real Value of BC’s Human Capital. Tamara Vrooman, President and CEO of Vancity Credit Union was a superb moderator — smoothly linking the presentations and asking questions that drew out the essence of the issues and a focus on what can be done.  The panelists were Clyde Hertzman, Director of the Human Early Learning Program at UBC,  Judith Sayers, Strategic Advisor for the Hupacasath First Nation and Anibal Valente, Vice-President, PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc.

Clyde gave us a passionate and fluent summary of ‘15 by 15‘ — a comprehensive policy framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC.  15 by 15 refers to the BC government Strategic Plan commitment to lowering the provincial rate of early vulnerability to 15% by 2015.  Clyde presented six recommendations from his report (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Hertzman.pdf) but perhaps most useful was when Jock Finlayson asked from the floor — what are the top 3 to-do’s to get results in improving our early childhood education and development — which is an important investment to help us tackle the demographic challenges that Baxter talked about in terms of a skilled workforce.

1.  Support the government’s plan to institute full-day kindergarten as part of the strategy to provide “seamless transition for families as the parental leave period ends in order to make quality services for children age 19 month to kindergarten affordable and available…”

2.  Expand maternity and parental leave — we need to “support parents to synchronize caring and earning” —  we need a good balance of time and resources for in-family care and resources for strengthening the community service component.

3.  Keep following the development trajectory — make sure we monitor regularly so developmental challenges are caught early when they can be corrected relatively easily.

Next, Judith clearly outlined the challenges facing First Nations people and encouraged the business community to look to First Nations as an incredible pool of talent and human capital at a time when we see the general population aging and retiring.

Dan Perrin’s paper on First Nations and Economic Prosperity in the Coming Decade (http://www.bcbc.com/Documents/2020_200909_Perrin.pdf) contains two important messages:

1.  Aboriginal education achievement has to be a high priority in terms of maintaining some of our gains from the last few years and ramping up to achieve more gains, more quickly.

2.  Economic Success for First Nations “…has highlighted the importance of improved governance, self-determination and leadership for the economic and social development of Aboriginal communities.”  Information/assistance needs to get into the hands of First Nations as they get into business — various institutions and programs can help.

I have always imagined a wonderful scenario where the grade 9 aboriginal boy is bored silly by school, wants to quit and needs to have a sense of finding his way in the world.  Miraculously we have developed a program that will allow him to leave “traditional” schooling and move into the workplace where he learns on the job, is motivated by seeing what he can produce and at the end of the day gets credit for this work/learning in a diploma form and becomes a hugely productive and happy member of our workforce.  There has got to be a way to do this.  We are losing too much human capital because our system isn’t flexible enough to allow different kinds of learning.

And finally, Anibal from PCL outlined some of the programs that PCL has in place to respond to work force and skills training.  For example, this company has been proactive by creating the “PCL College of Construction”.  They have field personnel advisors who promote construction careers in high schools.  And they have made good use of the Provincial Nominee Program which assisted in bringing 86 skilled worked from other countries into our  BC workforce.

When asked about what the Business Council way forward might be, there was the following advice:

1.  Don’t wait for government or the competition to do it for you!

2.  Develop a Strategic Human Capital Plan — that coordinates levels of government and industry and educational institutions.

3.  Think about human development across the life course — from our first learnings as baby to our life long learning through to our senior years.

Whew — this post is too long.  Will make the one on Innovation shorter!

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