Do you actually care?

I do!

And like many professors I often wonder if anything I am doing is actually having an impact on the future.

By the future I mean are my students taking any of the lessons, internalizing them in some way and making use of the aggregate in the future.

Well last night I had a conversation with  2002 Zayed University graduate, one of the 1st students I taught int he UAE.

Sure this is not a statistical sample!

But there is no question that the education WE provided at Zayed University had an impact on this student, even if it was tiny, it was an impact.

Farah is doing some very clever things and has a hunger to engage in social experiments!

Listen to our conversation to hear what I am talking about!

It made me feel pretty good to know that this person thought that there was some value to the education I helped deliver.

I think we need to see and hear the product of what we do in the ivory tower a little more often!

Thanks Farah!

We spend a lot of time looking for cues and clues as to what leadership is and how we can develop it.

Professor Lynda Moore explained on Nightlinedxb the conundrum.

What if whe it comes to understanding leadership, group dynamics, creativity, design and how it all can come together we looked to the one global example that is consistent, the orchestra!

Philipp Maier, the conductor of the UAE Philharmonic talked to me about the forgotten linkage between the way business operates, building teams based on talent and outcome, and the way an orchestra does the same thing.

This is great food for thought and food for the ear!

A conversation with Mr. Maier the conducter of the UAE Philharmonic Orchestra.

Design is the great underdog in today’s business/cultural/social and political environments.

For some fraught reason people seem to think that if the idea is good, if you are good, then things will simply come together and workout.

NO, this is a dream world that does not exist.

Those who succeed and those things that succeed have one commonality, design thinking!

Mark Dziersk VP Design at Brandimage is doing his part to change the thought process.

I suspect we need to think about why visual, auditory, tactile and aesthetic design is so important in a kindergarten class but not at all considered in a PhD seminar on cultural industries!

It is no wonder the world seems to be falling apart we have compartmentalized the thinking process, orphaned it, to the point that we are thinking in fragments or incomplete modules that have little to no hope of meshing with the bigger picture because they have no context.

Design thinking needs to be part of our education process, because lets face it we live and breath design, just look at how you have organized the desk your computer is on, you too are a designer.

Mark Dziersk walked me through the whole idea of getting design back on our minds today.

A conversation with Mark Dziersk VP Design Brandimage.

Well this is a must watch interview.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is what I got from this piece, a great meal for thought!

There are other ways of seeing things and that is convergence of Technology Entertainment and Design is everything we do!

Convergence is in how we communicate and what it leads to is new things becoming possible!

Conversations are multifaceted and maybe we forget that.

When we make what we do PERSONAL it is easy for others to join.

WE ARE MADE BY OUR FAILURES, BY WHAT GOES WRONG!

In the end why do we do things? We do things for ourselves!

What does it all mean anyway?

Ask yourself!

We have had it drilled into us that cash is king.

But is it?

If I have a skill and you have a product and my skill is worth your product don’t we have good thing going? We trade and we are both happy, if you need my skill and I need your product? It is called barter.

Yet our education, and our business education in particular does little, maybe nothing, to prepare us to think outside of the cash rubric!

So we are being educated for failure?

We sure are not being educated for success beyond the case study and textbook!

Mr. Bob Bagga of BizXchange joined us for a quick rundown on how barter is alive and well in the business community today.

A conversation with Bob Bagga the CEO of BizXchange.com.

Nightline once again demonstrates the education value of the wireless and the power of the voice to provoke thought and disseminate ideas.

A return to a percentage of barter in our personal economies might be what we need to create a healthy cash, service and product relationship in our everyday lives.

Marketing. Advertising. Women.

Over 50% of the worlds population are women, yet when it comes to getting into the heads of women and presenting them ideas in the form of ads it would seem that the marketing industry is like an inflatable boat caught is a huge swell, hopeless!

Michele Miller has been writing about marketing to women as long as I can remember AND she points out what we men really need to know when it comes getting into the minds of women.

Silly really.

In my conversation with Ghassaan Kassabji director of TBWA Saudi Arabia we took the issue to a very specific group of women. Could it be that we spend too much time thinking of women in a macro context when in reality we need to be thinking micro?

Ghassaan Kassabji on marketing to Saudi Arabian Women gives us some incredible insight into one particular group of women and the challenges being faced in getting the message right.

I suspect at the end of the day when we talk about marketing to women it all comes down to the story, getting it right and getting all the aspects right.  Remember a good story is more than just words!  A good story includes images, smell,textures, and sounds!

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.

We are being led down a very narrow path that I call the ARTIFICIAL DEPENDENCY.

We are being told, over and over, by Apple, Microsoft, Lenovo,HP, Xerox and the bucket full of content and service providers that we need this and that to be whole/complete/active/connected/collaborative members of society.

I feel that I am being guilted maybe even blackmailed into buying and using technology that I do not need or want!

One of the greatest claims of our modern day technology snake oil sales people is that it is technology that will allow us to collaborate and create a more connected society.

I say what if I say no? Will I be less connected?

The reality is no!

In fact if you get off the cell or mobile phone, if you pull yourself away from the Blackberry and tug your eyes away from facebook you might actually be amazed at how much old school social networking and collaboration is going on!

And the best think about this networking and collaboration is it does not depend on bandwidth, does not have a huge cost, maybe none, and it is portable!

RADIO! Marconi had a big hand in making this little idea a real big thing!

I believe that radio is more immediate, reaches a greater community audience and can have a far greater impact than the Internet any time and any place.

How you might ask?

Last night on Nightline we spoke about terrorism with Dr. Raymmond Hamden and we had an amazing call from a person who survived a terrorist bomb attack!

Our conversation took place live, and was immediatly broadcast to the UAE and the impact, fantastic!

This is our conversation with a terrorism-survivor !

This is the power of radio, the power to tap into our community and bring to life the ideas, motivation and conflict that lives around us and to do it in a contextualized immediate fashion without any real effort on the consumers part and to do it for little to no monetary investment!

Maybe we need to think twice before we jump to hard and fast on the technology band wagon!