Tag: New Zealand

Standing on the Wall

Image Credit: US Army / Flickr (CC: by)Today I was discussing the recent work by the New Zealand Police in bring a number of people up on charges for their part in an international pedophile ring. While I’ll save you from the details (you can do your own reading using this article as a starting point), some of the alleged offenses are pretty horrific. Suffice it to say, the conversation quickly turned to how soul-destroying it must be for the OCEANZ team and organisations such as ECPAT. Continue reading “Standing on the Wall”

TEDx Auckland – Session One: Michael Henderson

As I alluded in my initial TEDx Redux, the inaugural Auckland event was awesome. In the next three posts I will briefly cover my perspectives on the presentations delivered at this, the first TEDx event in Auckland, New Zealand.

TEDxAkl - The only passable photo I haveThe first speaker was a fascinating guy called Michael Henderson [UPDATE: Looks like something ‘weird’ is happening with his domain,try here for his cached page in the interim] , a Corporate Anthropologist. As well as being unemployable (who want’s an Anthropologist anyway?), he is never bored – because people are so interesting to study. Some observations:

  • Organisations are the modern tribes
  • CEO – Interesting title
    • Chief – Head of the tribe
    • Executive – Head of Structure
    • Officer – Very Militaristic – Head of Strategy
  • The difference between a cult and a culture is:
    • In a cult, the leader sees greatness in themselves
    • In a culture, the leader sees greatness in people
    • Silo mentality never occurs in a tribe
  • Engagement Studies
    • Organisations:
      • Engagement = email sort
      • Worldwide ~20% of employees are engaged and 80% sit on the fence
    • Tribes
      • Engagement = contact sport
      • No tribes run engagement surveys, all members are engaged 100% as you are either learning, doing or teaching

“Why is no one teaching GenY to respect those who came before them as sources of learning?”

Executives go on a ‘retreat’ (never an advance?) then return to proclaim new company values to their employees.

  • Employees don’t hear values, they hear violations;

“Integrity, really?? Aren’t you the CxO trying to set up XYZ to fail so you can get more headcount/budget?”

“Language is the bloodline of a tribe”

His parting observation was on the two dynamic forces of organisations: Relationship versus Results

“Measure yourself on Relationship versus Result – is the win [on this point] worth more than the long term relationship?”

The interesting observation I made about his talk was that, not only was I noting the same points as one of my colleagues, these same points were also being noted by a number of other ‘corporate types’ around where we were seated.

For another summary of the talk, click here to see what Missing Link said.

Update: A TED talk on this theme of Anthropology and Tribes was posted recently “David Logan on Tribal Leadership”

Update: Domain seems to be back – have adjusted links & text

Update: September 2011 – Added Michaels new business sites and the following TEDx video…

Ideas Worth Spreading – My Journey to TEDx

TED. Three letters, a veritable treasure trove of new ideas, challenging thinking and incredible people with finely honed presentation skills.

TEDx Auckland

I first stumbled across the TED initiative in 2006 when I was shown a presentation by Hans Rosling using Gapminder to do some incredible data visualisations. From that day onward, they have been a regular both in my RSS feed readers and in my browser as I immersed myself in the site from which I have gained so much.

It was with huge excitement then that I saw that TED was not only allowing independently organised events (under it’s banner of TEDx), but one of these events was going to be in Auckland, New Zealand – my home town.

I must admit I was initially reluctant to fill out the registration form, as chest puffery and self promotion doesn’t sit well with New Zealanders. Encouraged by some colleagues, and with the knowledge that the official event attendee spots are so coveted I did sit myself down and force my fingers to the keyboard to tap out an introspective view of what I have achieved to date, and why I should be amongst those fortunate enough to sit in attendance. The exercise in itself was worthwhile as it gave me an opportunity to cast back over many years in the technology industry, and to re-celebrate a number of the awesome innovations that I had been involved in over that time. The submit button was clicked, the “Thank you for registering” page loaded – and then all there was to do was wait.

In the fullness of time, I received an acceptance email and, excitedly, I checked in with my other colleagues to find they too had secured their place – timing-wise, the TEDx Auckland event was scheduled for the day before a weekend away at TelecomONE, a FOO style “Innovation Unconference”, so I knew that we would be in for one heck of a lot of brain stretching. We made our plans to meet up and attend together, and then again we waited for the beginning of the first ever TEDx Auckland, October 01, 2009.

TEDxAkl Redux

What. an. event.

There is simply too much to type to do justice to what I got out of last nights event, so I’ll post this entry as it is, unfinished, but linking to some of the cool stuff which was discussed…

Keep up with the tweets surrounding the event here – and I’ll be summarising my notes over the weekend.

For now, check out this vid which was shown as a segway between speakers…

Awesome

Awesome Siverlight / Photosynth Demo

New Zealand Microsoftie Nigel Parker had a demo slot to fill at the WEB09 event and, after a chat with a colleague, decided to use crowd sourced images tagged as New Zealand to promote our beautiful country. The embedded video is the result of his frantic 3 days work where he used these images to present a truly stunning example of what a mix of Siverlight, Photosynth and SmoothStreaming video can do.

NZsynth Demo shown in the Keynote at WEB09 from Nigel Parker on Vimeo.

You can read more of the detail here on his blog, and he’s certainly worth a follow on twitter or friendfeed.

Mad props Nigel – incredibly awesome stuff.

NZ Copyright Act Section 92a

Changes to the copyright act may see people removed from the internet on the basis of 3 ACCUSATIONS of infringement. This clause was reinserted by the government AFTER industry feedback explained how unworkable this would be.

Okay, I’ve been sitting on this for awhile but, while I’m still to angry about the changes to post objectively just yet, I thought I’d link in some other commentaries.

I encourage you all to follow the links, read up on what this could mean to internet users in New Zealand, and to make some noise! (it is election year after all)