The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 20 May 2011 05:17 PM PDT Chicken Lips, Wheeler-dealer and the Beady-eyed MBA: An entrepreneur's wild adventures on the New Silk Road Author: Frank Farwell Publisher: John Wiley & Sons AN inspiring and entertaining story of a tenderfoot start-up company and its neophyte trail boss who manoeuvres his way out of hostile territory into a land of plenty. The sequence of mishaps and recoveries offers lessons on the perils and pitfalls of running a company. This book serves as both an engaging real-life story, as well as a guide to starting and succeeding as an entrepreneur. It entertains and instructs based on the author's 11 years as founder and president of silk garment company WinterSilks. 6 Secrets to Startup Success Author: John Bradberry Publisher: Amacom AUTHOR John Bradberry explores the benefits, dangers of startup passion, and reveals key principles you need to follow to ensure your big idea is on the right track. The book poses questions like Are you ready? The most fundamental driver of your company's success or failure is you. This books helps you to take an honest look at yourself, your skills and help you to aim your enthusiasm in a productive way. It also helps you to cultivate a market orientation, develop strategies and execute your moves. One Simple Idea: Turn your dreams into a licensing goldmine Author: Stephen Key Publisher: McGraw Hill AUTHOR and entrepreneur Stephen Key has licensed more than 20 ideas that have generated revenue. He writes about how one can license one's idea, or what he calls "renting" ideas to a company. These ideas can be in any department, some of which include production, research and development, accounting, distribution, marketing and sales. He writes about keeping your ideas safe without spending time and money on a patent, being your own boss, seeing your product go to market and making money, without having to quit your day job. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Posted: 20 May 2011 05:13 PM PDT Title: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative Author: Ken Robinson Publisher: Capstone 2nd Edition "It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future. They are, but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away, even from those they belong to. Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves. To realise our true creative potential – in our organisations, in our schools and in our communities – we need to think differently about ourselves and to act differently towards each other. We must learn to be creative." – Sir Ken Robinson An internationally recognised leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources; Sir Ken Robinson has worked with governments in Europe, Asia and the United States; with international agencies; with Fortune 500 companies; and with leading cultural organisations. Organisations are competing in a world that is turbulent and transforming faster than ever. What is distinctive now is the breathtaking rate and scale of change. Robinson opens the latest 2011 incarnation of his book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (first published in 2001) with many interesting facts: If you have an iPhone, it probably has more computing power than was available on earth in 1940. Many children's toys today have more computing power than 1960s mainframes. Robinson starts with a highly engaging discourse on the matter by pointing to a perpetuating paradox of our times: As children, most of us think we are highly creative. However, as adults, many of us think we are not. What happens in the "in-between" as we are growing up? In a sense, we have been "educated out of our own creativity." The author argues that people and organisations are today dealing with problems that in fact originate in schools and universities; as many people leave with no clue of their inherent creative abilities. Using his inimitable witty, humorous and sometimes caustic writing style, he emphasises that realising our creative potential is really about finding our medium, of being in our element. Education should ideally help us achieve this, but too often it does not and too many people are instead displaced from their true talents. This is because there is a kind of misplaced "mania" driving present educational policies. In place of much needed strategies, there is instead a tired mantra about raising traditional academic standards originally designed for other times, based on deep-seated assumptions that are no longer true. The dominant global corporations used to be in industry and manufacturing. Our mass systems of public education were developed primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution and in many ways, continue to mirror the principles of industrial production. As a result, they continue to emphasise linearity, conformity and standardisation even though these are largely out of sync with real life today that is organic, fluid and diverse. We continue to believe in mass education, despite all the evidence that this system is failing so many people within it. We often ask how we can raise academic standards but do not critically question whether they deliver what we need to survive in the future. The real issue is not that academic standards are falling but that the very foundations upon which our current systems of education are built are shifting beneath our feet. Many of the key companies today are in communications, information, entertainment, science and technology. Our established ways of thinking and doing things in business, in government and education, are rooted in old ways of thinking and not designed to face the challenges that confront us. The dogged focus on traditional educational processes build principally on rigid economic and intellectual pillars has led to "academic inflation". The market value of degrees is falling due to the unprecedented numbers going to college as well as the real disconnect between what students are being trained for and what is truly demanded by the marketplace. This has led to a global glut of graduates and frustration all around. We can no longer continue a culture of just "teaching to the test". To drive home his very valid viewpoints, Robinson dives into historical perspectives relating to educational systems and the measurement of intelligence; and draws on many examples to illustrate their limitations. We are introduced to Dance United, a professional contemporary dance company based in the UK that provides a very successful dance-based education programme called the Academy, as an option for young offenders within the local criminal justice system. Other powerful examples include the School of One and the Blue School (started by the world-renowned Blue Man Group) in New York City and the progress of Big Picture Learning (supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) with "at-risk" students in the US who do not fit into conventional schools. Chris Wink of The Blue Man Group says, "On a metaphorical level, the traditional model of education is that children are freight cars and the school is a giant silo. It fills each of the kids up and then moves them down the track." In essence, he says we need to create "a launch pad where kids are the rockets and we're just trying to find the fuse." Robinson demonstrates to us the heavy price we have paid due to the scholastic schism of the arts and sciences, the division of intellect and emotion as well as the domination of the rationalist attitude in our existing educational platforms. Robinson's main point is that we need to rethink creativity as "we will not succeed in navigating the complex environment of the future by peering relentlessly into a rear-view mirror." We have to enlarge our definitions of intelligence; ensuring that these are more inclusive. Otherwise, important abilities are overlooked and marginalised. People with strong academic abilities will fail to discover their other abilities. Those of lower academic ability may have other powerful abilities that lie dormant. Being good at something is also not enough if ultimately you do not really care for it. It is often thought that creativity relates to special people and activities such as the arts, advertising, design or marketing. Robinson contends that anybody can be creative if the conditions are right. Creativity should not be confined to the arts and "artistic" endeavours. Creativity is possible in all fields, whenever we are using our intelligence. He notes that "if someone tells you they cannot read or write, you do not assume they are not capable of reading or writing; but that they have not been taught how." Creativity can similarly be a learned response. Out of Our Minds is a recommended read, especially for educational policy and decision makers, as it manages to be authoritative, entertaining and thought-provoking all at once. Robinson believes we "cannot meet the challenges of the 21st century with the educational ideologies of the 19th. We need a new Renaissance that values different modes of intelligence and that cultivates creative relations between disciplines and between education, commerce and the wider community. Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine." Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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