Great story in the NYT about Bell Telephone in the 1950s launching a liberal arts-oriented learning program to its high potential employees: The Learning Knights of Bell Telephone
The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.
…Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame…
The kicker:
Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities.
Would love to go to NOLA for this conf. @tribecon: Leveraging online communities to create offline action. Oct 28. http://www.tribecon.com#
@jason_baker I use it, but miss the drag n drop data portability of yojimbo. i find lots o tags is the best assurance of rediscovering info. in reply to jason_baker#
When Seth Godin announced a series of reader meetups oriented around his new book, Linchpin, I decided right away to organize the Vancouver event. Linchpin’s themes of overcoming internal resistance and bringing a sense of art into one’s work have resonated with me as I have developed RedRovr, and I looked forward to meeting others who felt the same. Vancouver had an absurdly high number of folks interested in this meetup, on par with New York and London’s responses, so it was clear I was not alone!
Thanks to everyone who came out that night for creating a great event! Here’s a recap of how the night went, and links to the books and blogs we talked about:
Gift, Skill, Attitude
We kicked things off with a short talk by Steph Corker Irwin, who spoke about her week with Seth in New York as part of his nanoMBA program. Steph led a discussion about the extent to which the qualities of leaders we admire are a gift, skill, or attitude. As the group weighed in, it was striking and somewhat liberating how almost every quality was seen as ultimately a skill or an attitude, i.e., something you can wake up in the morning and choose to work on.
Open Space Discussion
I had the group write up topics they wanted to discuss and post them at the front of the room. We organized the topic suggestions into clusters which formed the basis for lightweight discussion groups. In line with open space principles, people could come and go from these groups as they wished, joining in on any discussion they wanted. The topics were wide-ranging, and included:
Overcoming the lizard brain
Gift, Skill, Attitude continued
Moving ideas into action
Crowdsourcing innovation
Making a difference in the world
Linchpinning education
Using business to save the world
What should I read next?
Creating community
Painting your life’s picture
The NanoMBA
When to ship
Creating Linchpinvilles
Book Recommendations
I spent a lot of time in the “What should I read next?” group. Thanks to Matt and Dave for drafting up this fantastic list of the books we discussed. For those inspired by Seth Godin’s work and Linchpin, check out the following books.
I went a bit berzerk here: you can see them all on this Amazon list of Linchpin Meetup Book Recommendations. You can see the raw list of books below, loosely categorized by me. And if you scroll down all the way, you’ll see a Librarything widget with covers and other info for every book.
I’m organizing a meetup in Vancouver tomorrow (June 14) around marketer Seth Godin’s book Linchpin. The Vancouver event is part of a worldwide series of meetups about Linchpin all on the same day – set into motion by Seth but organized locally by volunteers.
Vancouver has the 7th largest showing worldwide (!), behind cities like New York, London, and San Francisco. If you’re in Vancouver on June 14, you should come. If not, see if there’s a meetup in your city.
For more info on Linchpin: see roundups of reviews here and here.
Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.
In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it’s the word “teleportation”, used seriously, in a headline. My “no kidding” module was activated: “No kidding,” I said to myself, “teleportation.” A slight amazement.
One of the best things about being an incredibly childish adult is that there’s nobody to tell you that you can’t use the power tools. Or in this case, a simple ratchet and screwdriver, because that’s all I used to turn our old jogging stroller into a wagon that our German Shorthaired Pointer has been joyfully pulling around the neighborhood for a week. And with this I have further cemented my reputation as a total nutjob among all our neighbors:
