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.
In manufacturing, one measure of the efficiency and quality of a process is its sigma rating – which can refer either to yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. The number in front of the sigma symbol (σ) indicates where the process’s output lies on the bell curve of standard deviation. 1σ is terrible, with 69% of products coming off the production line with defects – a massive waste of resources. 2σ would see around a 31% defect rate. 3σ would be about 7%.
Business is all about calculated risk. The key word there is ‘calculated’. In order for a business to prosper in the long term, it needs to identify, quantify and manage the risks it faces. In the mind of the astute businessperson ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ is not a rhetorical question. If it IS used as a rhetorical question, it often heralds disaster in the same way as the words ’Here, hold my beer!’ often herald some kind of pratfall that delights YouTube viewers.
The #MeToo movement has brought all forms of sexual harassment into the spotlight and there has been a corresponding spike in subscriptions to online workplace harassment training videos and eLearning courses for staff training.
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.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Those involved in decision-making in business and law might have heard of the OODA loop. Standing for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it is a methodology for treading carefully, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and winning in challenging situations by performing actions based on rational decisions. To make those decisions, one must first fully understand the situation by observation, and get to know one’s opponents’ intentions and likely actions by orientation. The four steps in the loop are:
