In October this year I had the privilege of being an ‘industry leader’ at the initial Horizon Leadership Institute run by CAVAL. I always feel a bit embarrassed by being called such things as an industry leader and the like as I certainly don’t feel I am compared to some of my more illustrious colleagues. No matter I attended nevertheless at the first institute held at the Sofitel Mansion and Spa at Werribee, just outside Melbourne or an $80 cab fare from Tullamarine Airport to give you some indication of the distance. As this was the first institute run on behalf of CAVAL by Annie Talve and Monica Redden of ‘Make Stuff Happen’ there were a few teething problems with the content but I think its got the potential to shape up pretty well.
The accommodation was in quite a majestic setting but the rooms were interesting. As a former seminary the rooms were quite small and had interesting bathrooms, eg no where to hang your towel. There were other bathroom stories which many of us shared one evening.
My fellow industry leaders at the two day workshop were John Arfield from UWA and Margaret Allen from the State Library of WA. We’ll be having a follwoup workshop in Sydney in February. Today I joined with Andrew Wells (UNSW) as the other industry leader on a teleconference with Annie and some of the institute participants to discuss leadership in difficult times. Our discussion was stimulated by two presentations on creativity - Tim Brown, CEO IDEO , and Sir Ken Robinson . Both quite interesting and thought provoking about creativity and the need to nurture it . I think this is particularly important when things are tough as w need new ways to do business with fewer resources.
While I was viewing the Ken Brown presentation I stumbled across another one by David S. Rose called 10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money. I foolishly though he was gonig t talk about pitching to Vice Chancellors (duh) but he was talking about pitching to venture capitalists. The first 5 minutes are particularly interesting when you consider leadership traits in addition to traits you need to make a convincing presentation.
I’ve got an RSS feed from TED if you want to see or hear more .
In some ways the presentations by Brown & Robinson relate to a presentation by Piet Kommers who was a keynote speaker at the ASCILITE conference I attended recently in Melbourne. He gave an interesting if not rather concentrated presentation on learning. his concluding points were creativity and conceptual thinking were the most difficult things to teach students. According to him, Tim Brown, ken Robinson and no doubt others, we all have it as children but lose it with age and in reaction to the education system.
For me the best of the keynotes was Gary Poole from UBC in Canada. Gary’s presentation was called, A place to call a learning home. It was essentially about making learning spaces student centric and enabling the student s to feel like they’re at home when they wish to learn on campus, study somewhere like a library or, if you extrapolate that concept, t even to an on-line environment. His presentation provided a theoretical understanding to the concepts underpinning information commons such as the modest ones we have in our libraries at CQUniversity.
