Running a business used to be an analog affair based on straightforward principles. Retail? Buy low, sell high. Services? Give a little, charge a lot. Rinse and repeat. But then a flood of zeroes and ones invaded business, disrupted everything and changed the way we work, making us dependent on it in order to perpetuate itself. Whether we become slaves to the beast or tame it to serve our own ends depends on us.
Learning Chinese is not as hard as you might think. It just looks scary to Westerners because of the unfamiliar writing. In fact, Mandarin Chinese is refreshingly simple and logical to learn. Here’s an example from the British Council in which they introduce us to Chinese characters:
The relentless pace of Formula 1 innovation is legendary. Performance on track depends on the constant examination and improvement of every aspect of a complex machine and its track team in order to gain a small but significant edge on rivals, who are themselves all striving in the same way. Competition is so fierce in F1 that the sport’s HQ have launched a series of management events aimed at bringing some of that constant innovation thinking into the business world.
The Institute for Digital Business Strategy is a new online school with the aim of helping executives in Africa and other continents to manage the process of realigning their strategies in the face of digital disruption.
Forbes is angling for a bite of the Continuing Professional Education market with learn.forbes.com, its new eLearning platform launched June 6. Aspiring professionals, the bedrock of Forbes’ readership, can now choose from 60-plus self-paced online courses focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, business, IT, sales and cybersecurity.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
The Centre for Alternative Technology is a renewable energy and eco-tech hub based in Powys, Wales, in the foothills of Snowdonia. Its Graduate School of the Environment offers three postgraduate courses in Sustainability and Adaptation and a Professional Diploma in Architecture, but its appeal is strengthened by the range of short courses offered to the general public outside the traditional academic framework.
Storytelling – in particular oral storytelling to a live audience – is the most powerful may we have of communicating ideas or feelings to other humans. Not only for getting our children to sleep, but also for business, the Arts, politics, and for keeping the social world turning. Telling a good story is a skill that gets people far in life, whatever their field of endeavour. Those who lack the skill of storytelling are likely to resemble the subject of Van Gogh’s melancholy quote: ‘One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it.
Net Neutrality. Free Speech on the Internet. Music Piracy. Governments snooping on their citizens. Who decides if all this is right, wrong or just plain murky? Who’d want to tackle the big ethical issues of the Internet Age: Wikileaks, Super-injunctions and social media, Edward Snowden? Who’d want to head Microsoft’s legal team in their Anti-Trust cases?
If business can be defined as a language, your fluency in it defines your level in the global hierarchy of commercial activity. From hot dog stand to corporate boardroom there is a spectrum of fluency in business terms, concepts and ideas. At the top you find people who have mastered these to enable themselves to move in C-suite circles with confidence. Many of those who didn’t get there from the hot dog stand by sheer force of will and chutzpah will have got an MBA under their belt to help them progress their careers.
Christmas does not come with a global user manual. There aren’t really any written protocols for what must happen in every country on Christmas Day. There is plenty of variety in how religious or secular the last week of December is, when and how gifts are given, what is eaten, and what traditions are observed. Over the years each country has made up the celebration of Christmas in its own way, created its own iconography and found its own blend of the Pagan and the Christian, the culinary and the playful.
