At a time when corporate America is exploring and exploiting its new Supreme-Court-bestowed role in the management of American election results, an earlier transformation in the composition and political role of American business leadership should be recalled. This was the replacement of the Gilded Age capitalists and industrialists—audacious, rapacious and innovative, who created the post-Civil War American industrial economy—by the early 20th-century professional managers who took their place.
Paul Wilson, in his review of Madeleine Albright’s Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948 [NYR, June 7], sensibly puts quotation marks around the word “success” in referring to the seventy-eight-day NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, hailed at the time by John Keegan as “proof positive that wars can be won by airpower alone.” As Wilson correctly observes, the war “transformed liberal attitudes to military intervention,” its legacy celebrated in subsequent campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and, perhaps in the near future, Syria and Iran.
THE MOMENTOUS LEAP Spiral Dynamics in Action: Deciphering the Master Code in the Age of Complexity, Collaboration and Emergence. A Functional, Integral Pathway
to a Sustainable Future
A few days ago I posted about CultureCon (Philly 9/12 and Boston 9/14), an upcoming event hosted by Agile Boston that’s focused on culture analysis, design and implementation in the workplace. The objective of the conference is to “bring to more popular awareness how culture is the gating factor in satisfaction, productivity and learning at work.”
The premise is that agile and self-management principles are essentially a culture hack – meaning that if a group of people decide they're willing to align around a set of values, principles, practices and processes, they can upgrade themselves to a high-functioning learning organization that continually adapts and upgrades itself. Next I could say some kind of sentence about how “in today's fast-paced world, we can't afford NOT to” …. etc etc. You get it.
I’m personally really eager to level up in this domain, and plan to attend both the Philadelphia and Boston open space unconferences.
If enough friends and enthusiasts in our global tribe join in, we can rent a party bus that connects us from location to location! How fun! I’ve never done that before, and the excitement I get from imagining a roadtrip filled with discussions about culture hacking and social evolution just shows what a nerd I am. 😉
Anyway —
The Call for Speakers page has just gone up.
Some sample topics of what they’re looking for include:
The open source cloud made waves in the news this week with the results of a RightScale study that claims widespread adoption among enterprises of open source cloud computing services. VMWare and IBM showed their agreement by announcing plans to expand their open source cloud investments. These positive stories offset the shocker that NASA has abandoned OpenStack entirely for Amazon Web Services.
According to the research firm Wikibon, the big data market is on the verge of a growth spurt that will hit $50 billion worldwide within the next five years. Data volumes are growing to the point where companies are being forced to scale their infrastructure, and the traditional “scale up” technologies, legacy systems and licensing models are simply not working. From its onset, open source technology has been at the forefront of massive data management. Today, open source provides the most effective way to address such a large-scale problem and get the job done faster and more accurately at a fraction of the price of alternative solutions.
“While NASA has stopped funding active development of OpenStack as it has matured, which is very much in keeping with their focus on basic and early-stage applied research, there are still organizations within NASA that are actively scaling up their OpenStack adoption ,” McKenty explained.
Worth a Look: Black Duck Softwareis the leading provider of strategy, products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process.
