Wednesday 28 January 2009

The Art of Business

Three hundred powerful Davos executives standing up with their arms outstretched, singing Happy Birthday at the top of their voices to a complete stranger balancing precariously on a chair at the front? That's what happens when you attend a session led by the Conductor and management guru Benjamin Zander. That's what happens when you mix the arts and business and that is typical of the mixing that goes on here at Davos.

Zander took us on a journey from the Nine Dot problem to the Holocaust, from a spontaneous, deeply emotional performance of Mozart by a string quartet to the whole room thundering Ode To Joy in German. His message was simple. It's up to us as individuals to decide how we look at the world. We decide whether our conversations are about downward spirals or about possibilities. As his father told him "there is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothes". We left buzzing and it certainly made a huge contrast to a parallel session that I think should have had the title "That's Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into".

Thus inspired, I now need to deliver my own talk this afternoon at a Harvard Business Review session, on the emergence of the Semantic Web in the artistic Pecha Kucha format. You get exactly 15 slide images. Each slide stays on the screen for exactly 20 seconds. And that's it. 15 pictures and 5 minutes to explain to a completely non-technical audience one of the most fundamental, technical changes that is happening to the Web over its 20 year life.

You can take this "art of business" thing too far, you know!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would it be possible for you to post your slides on the emergence of the Semantic Web? I think it would be a great help in understanding a topic many, including myself, find both intriguing and confusing. Many thanks.

Anonymous said...

I would like to second Jasper Orlando's request for more information. I would be interested in exploring the Semantic Web but I don't know how to get on to it - my Internet Explorer will only give me the old web. Could you post a link to a download that lets us get on to the semantic version? Many thanks.