Vijay Viatheeswaran, Economist correspondent, was the Chair of the Economist Summit on Redesigning Business: The Big Rethink which ran in London last week. “Need, Greed, and Speed” was his theme for day one.
Our mission at the Summit to consider incorporating the principles of design thinking in order to avoid being tripped up by those three principles of short-term thinking. We need said Vijay, to come out of the comfortable silos in which we have operated for too long to avert the obstacles of too much legacy thinking.
There was much to think about from the speakers that followed. Jeff Denby Chief Creative Officer of PACT talked about the firm he co-founded on the principle that “Change starts with your underwear” – he makes pants. His mighty claim that new knickers will change the world would I think hold more water if they were machine washable! (www.wearpact.com)
Be yourself
Thursday, March 25th, 2010“It resembled some kind of Stalinest Show trial”. This description was not of a bad buying audit or tricky new business pitch. The incident in question referred to someone’s experience of part of a training course. Following a profile report the attendees of this particular training programme had to explain their profiles to each other, and give their future intentions for behaviour modification.
For many of us training has become a luxury in the current economic climate when many companies have cut their training and development budgets down to the bone. For the lucky ones whose companies have continued to invest in them it is surely churlish to complain about the kind of training that they’re receiving. And yet some people are left feeling that team training and personality profiling can lead to them having to apologise for those profiles and try to reverse them. People can be left to feel that they’ve been stuck in a box, labelled and well and truly told off for the label that they’ve been stuck with.
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