I have been following Hugh MacLeod on his blog www.gapingvoid.com for some time.

Hugh is one of those rare people who has sat back, looked at what he is doing, what he is good at, what he is not good at, and made the choice to follow his heart.

10 publishing offers later Hugh is going to see his book on the shelves June 11th.

The take home form a conversation with Hugh MacLeod?

Rise above the crowd and consistently sustain your ideas because for the most part people are light on them and more willing to follow the other lemmings!

Listen and learn from Hugh MacLeod!

So what do we do?

Mr. Dave Harris talking about education re-design.

There are no simple answers.

But we can be sure that waht we do need to do is ensure that we are not letting the fixtures and the framework get in the way of the desired outcome, and believe me this is no easy task.

What do we need to keep our eyes on, according to Harris?

Attitudes and Abilities!

Build our education around the attitude to confront challenges and create the base abilities to facilitate the necessary learning and thinking to confront those challenges!

The education segment of the 2009 Abu Dhabi Book Fair is going to allow the interested public to confront these very issues!

What it all comes down to when we think about education is a community of young and old learning together, said Mr. Harris.

I wonder when we are going to wake up and remember this?

The OECD is full of bright ideas that often seem to be left hanging.

The OECD in its work on sustainable development talks about the idea of books on demand.

I do not want to suggest that the bookstore is going to die or even be challenged.But the the idea of OnDemandBooks is pretty basic.

What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow.

Library quality paperbacks at low cost, identical to factory made books, printed direct from digital files for the reader in minutes, serving a radically decentralized world-wide multilingual marketplace. In essence, an ATM for books.

Where is this going?

All sorts of new places to sell books!

How about setting up the book machine in a library to sell other books or copies of the books that students might like to own?

What about using this machine to print textbooks?

The fact of the matter is books still play a vital role in both our informative and entertainment complex and the ondemandbook might actually change the way we think of that very old technology that seems to constantly reinvent itself.

Who says the publishing industry is dead?

At school it is every man for himself.

Yet in the work place we are thrust into an environment where in the end we are expected to work as members of a team!

What?

We train as lone wolves and then get told we are ant and need to work as a team?

Sadly this is the case and our education systems are failing miserably at getting us ready for this reality.

Sadly things are not going to change in the near future because academia and the business world are light years apart.

The business community has contempt for academia and academia, well we are in the ivory tower and maybe the key has been tossed.

But Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School has put up the white flag and may, in her new book HOT SPOTS, be suggesting how the stodgy academics and the business community could learn from one another!

If you have not read or seen HOT SPOTS go and buy it!

Here is the idea from Professor Grratton herself!

I listen to students complaining day in day out about the fact that they have too little time to get things done.

Given that students, generally speaking, are so awful at managing time, setting priorities and figuring out how best to direct their energy is it any wonder that so many in the work world suffer from the same malaise?

Tim Ferriss the author of the book titled THE FOUR HOUR WORK WEEK has set out in black and white a few common sense ways to wrestle your life back from that time sucking abyss called a job.

I love the idea of putting a cap on the amount of time you spend on email.

I love the idea of putting a cap on the amount of time you spend on the phone.

I love the idea of empowering those around you to stop second guessing and calling on you to make decisions that they can make.

Once again I am left asking if we are doing enough as educators to re-focus the thinking process from how much time we invest in something to the quality of time we invest?

I gave students a project, over 10 weeks that asked them to do just as Ferriss is suggesting, more with less.

The students were shocked and beside themselves, it took them 8 weeks to realize that there is amazing productivity when you have a clear focus and when the worst case scenario is well defined.

Give my conversation with  TIM FERRISS about taking control of your work life a listen.