The February meeting of the Creativity Consortium, was held last night
at the Royal Bank, Corporate Banking Centre, in downtown Toronto, Canada.
The Creativity Consortium was formed in 1993 and is dedicated to fostering
and promoting the use of lateral and creative thinking skills in education,
business, government, culture and society. It's a club where members & guests
can practise their own creative thinking in a supportive and stimulating
environment. Waht Toastmaster's is doing for public speaking, we hope
to accomplish for lateral thinking. Toronto was once called the intellectual
capital of the world by the New York Times, in the heydays of Marshall McLuhan.
The Creativity Consortium is trying to bring back some of that spirit and
passion for fresh ideas and concepts.
A packed boardroom of creativity consortium members and guests listened to
Dr. Matthew Kiernan, author, management consultant and CEO and Chairman of
the Innovest Group International, S.A. outlined the framework of
his latest book titled, Get Innovative or Get Dead - Building the Strategic
Architecture of Tomorrow's Companies.
Below, I've included some of the overhead materials from his talk and I hope
they will stimulate as much insight & discussions on the net as they did in
our meeting last night.
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The New World Order
11 Mega-Trends
-Communications & IT Explosion
-Globalization
-Knowledge-Valus Revolution
-Geo-political Rebalancing
-The twilight of Government
-The rise of the Synthetic Economy
-Sectoral and Industrial Convergence
-The Eco-Industrial Revolution
-New organizational Forms
-The rise of the SME's
-Velocity and Discontinuity of Change
..............Result: Hyper-competition
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Organizational Paradigms
That Was Then...20th Century This is Now...21 Century
Stabilty, Predictability Discontinous Change, Cont.Improvement
Size and Scale Speed and responsiveness
TopDown: Command & Control Empowerment, Leadership from all
Organizational Rigidity Virtual Organizations,Permanent Flexibility
Control by Rules & Hierarchy Control by Vision and values
Process Driven Results driven
Rational, Qualitative Analytics Creativity, Inution, Thinking about thinking
Need for certainty Tolerance for Ambiguity
( and I would add...
(Reduce requisite variety Increase requisite variety where needed)
Ashby's Law from Cybernetics)
focus on variety attentuation focus on variety amplification,
where needed
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More on Organizational Paradigms
Information closely guarded Information shared ( ie look at Netscape)
Reactive, Risk Averse Pro-active, Entrepreneurial
Corporate Independence Startegic Alliances
Vertical Intergration "Virtual" Integration
Domestic Market focus International Market focus
Internal org focus Focus on Comptitive Environment
Sustainable Competitve advantage Hyper-competition,constant re-invention
Competing for today's markets Creating Tomorrow's markets
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Leveraging Intellectual Capital
Finacial Capital <- structural Captital + stakeholder capital + human
capital
(see full details in our newletter)
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The 11 Commandments for 21st Century Competition
1 Compete for the furue not the present
II Develop conscious mechanisms for repeated innovation
III Leverage Hidden Value Potential
( the group then worked on a 30 minute thinking excercise to create
new concepts for leveraging or using intrinsic assets in a new a
different way...see some of the results in our newsletter...Creativity
Consortium News (CCN) Feb 1996)
IV Develop a bias for speed and action
V Be pro-active, enrepreneurial and experimental
VI Break barriers
VII Use everybody's talents: empowerment
VIII Globalize your Persective and Knowledge base
IX Leverage the power of the Eco-Industrial Revolution
( see article in Feb 96 issue of CCN)
X Make Organizational learning a corporate Jihad
XI Develop performance metrics which are strategic, dynamic and
forward looking.
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We then went on the explore the Hallmarks of a learning organization:
-Intellectual Curiosity
-Organizational humility
-High tolerance for change, complexity and ambiguity
-Capacity to imagine alternative futures (scenarios)
-A propensity for experimentation
-A preference for learning by doing
-An appetite for Feedback
-A high Pain threshold for "Constructive Failure"
-A conscious mechanism for creating, collecting and disseminating knowledge
-strategic performance metrics
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BTW, Get Innovative or Get Dead is published by Douglas & McIntyre,
Toronto & Vancouver, ISBN1-55054-430-6, 1995 by Matthew Kiernan.
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For lateral thinkers in the Toronto area, call (416) 588-1122 to join
the Creativity Consortium. Our meetings are on the last Wednesday of
the month. Corporate sponsors include the Royal Bank, Price Waterhosue
and the Toronto Business Development Center.
Come out and train for brain...fitness for the mind
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A new "virtual membership" package is now available via the internet.
Email me for details. Ask for information about Virtual membership to
the Creatvity Consortium.
Walter Derzko
Founder
Creativity Consortium
Toronto Branch
(416) 588-1122
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