The DTMC is dead!
The Leadership Forum Lives!
Long Live the Management focus event before Autodesk University 2011!
We're doing it again and the newly named Leadership Forum will offer more access to Autodesk senior management and a wide range of higher level sessions from a wider range of the best of the best Autodesk University speakers.
The Leadership Forum begins on Sunday night, Nov 27, 2011 and includes an FULL day of management level sessions (Nov 28, 2011). There will be short Personal Point of View talks from Carl Bass, other senior Autodesk people, a Special Guest Speaker, in addition to a full and in-depth conference schedule. Great Stuff.
Lots of time is set aside in the schedule for conversations with your management level peers, Forum speakers, and the Autodesk people in attendance. There are two receptions included in the event all designed to facilitate (and probably lubricate) more communication about what matters more to you.
I'm honored to once again to be able participate and speak in this growing participatory management event. At this point I'm doing a People focused Unconference session. Here's a preview of my topic.
Outliers on the Road to Extremistan
Are you one of these people? You learn and burn. You eat Change Management bars for breakfast and Fail Forward cups for lunch. Mindset Coffee is both enemy and friend. You see the need to seize technologies, shift the culture, and generate business—not just do business. They expect all that and pay you to do It—for now. Most days it feels like you drag them kicking and screaming along with you. You ask yourself, “Do the best just get better and do even more?” Join the People Technologist, Tench Tilghman, and fellow attendees for a special People Skills session about us. Where we are as leaders today? What do we share and what do we battle in common? We will mutually explore and try and build a map to a more productive future in Extremistan. There will be a skeptic’s homework and the post-humorous "Virtual Musical" won’t be shown unless time allows.
Perhaps you may not understand all the named references in the Title and the course description. Can't say I blame you. I do have a way of hooking together the unlikely and the improbable. Frankly, I read too much or think too out of the box. Here are a few tips and books to study if you are interested.
In affect this is the Reading List for the class...
Everyone should watch Bob Hope's classic "Road to" movies at least once.
Malcom Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and one of my favorite and most recommended books - blink. He followed up that with yet another best selling work - Outliers The Story of Success.
An Interview with Malcom about Outliers
In Search of Extremistan
If you google the word "Extremistan" you discover it is not a country. You'll understand this is an explicit reference to yet another best-selling and a bit less well-known business book. The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable. ("The Black Swan" in the title is NOT a reference the bad movie that alos employs the name.) I consider that to be an unintentional conspiracy to hide the book in the search engines :).
The term "Extremistan" is the invention of the Lebanese born, mathematician Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Taleb is a statistical mathematician. He happened to work closely with Benoît B. Mandelbrot, who invented Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry. Most people don't know Mandelbrot got initially famous and actually received his Nobel Prize for work in economics. Mandelbrot died last year on Oct 14, 2010.
Taleb's terms "Mediocristan" and "Extermistan" are words with KNOWN (and sometimes partially understood) special business and socio-economic context.
A Word of Warning - Reading anything by Taleb will take work and time and not at all because he is difficult to read.
A Short Video with Taleb with a clueless talking head
The contents of these significant works (one about personal and one about business improbability) and those terms are central to the theme of the class which portends to examine why, how, and where industry leaders can get together build a map to the future as a part of the Leadership Forum at AU.
In the light of the current world economic improbabilities, I think both authors have More the a few significant things to say to us all.
Autodesk University 2011 sign up and registration starts at the end of August and/or first week of September depending on who you talk too. Stay tuned for More AU 2011 details.
The Leadership Forum an AU 2011 seats will only be available on a first come first served basis.
You did become an AUGI member?