Joining Dots On A Saturday
Or How Twitter Feeds Your Mind
What’s this post about? I am musing on how the blogs and sources I read are rich in parallels, loops and connections. Several articles from this week changed my view on the future of large corporations.
Future Of Higher Education
I was responding earlier this week to an article in Fast Company entitled How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. Asking what business schools are for now that quality content is free and widely available, I said that business schools create the opportunity for shared experience in a place and time. Strong networks and personal bonds develop. There is also the prestige associated with many institutions. For these reasons, there will always be a demand for expensive business school education.
Then later in the week @josiefraser sent a link via Twitter to a blog from George Siemens reflecting on the the future of universities. George asks a similar question, “What does higher education look like when all content is freely available?” He goes on to say:
The importance of university reform should call us to do our best thinking. But, what is the response by our community and quasi-researchers like Don Tapscott (see The Impending Demise of the University)? Primarily rhetoric with a blend of nonsensical proclamations.
Universities aren’t going anywhere. They are not going to disappear. Recent UNESCO (here and here) and World Bank publications (here) speak to the centrality of universities in international competitiveness.”
Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation does not apply. Business schools and universities are in no way threatened by edupunks and open education, but what the edupunks do offer is wider choices from among increasingly innovative alternatives. Higher education will be both traditionally taught and open.
Future Of Large Corporations
I had been thinking recently that large corporations might be under threat. This is what I said:
“Why do valuable knowledge workers need to be employed at all? Social media and digital communication technologies are enablers. But it is other trends and shifts that are tipping the balance of power in favour of knowledge workers becoming self-determined. “
Then another interesting link came to my attention via Twitter from @markgould13. In Why We Need Big Organisations, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison ask:
“So, corporations increasingly need talented individuals to survive. But why would talented individuals join or remain in large corporations? Why wouldn’t they simply strike out on their own and leverage the digital infrastructure to connect with other individuals?”
They predict that “large-scale corporations will remain a prominent feature of our professional landscape: because they will be best positioned to develop and support scalable, long-term, trust-based relationships”.
Now that is a seriously interesting statement. And it immediately links in my mind to a key reason I think people will continue to pay for expensive business education. It is partly about access to networks and the creation of long-term trusted relationships, which are additionally associated with institutional prestige and belonging.
This post is getting far too long. The comments on the Hagel et al article are thoughful and thought-provoking. One is from Daniel Pink, who says:
“My sense is that organizations, like so many things*, are going bimodal. We may be seeing an ecosystem of the very large and the very small — nation-straddling megacorps and folks in their home office — and not much in between. The ends grow, the middle hollows.
*See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/start.html?pg=2″
Final Thoughts
Business schools and large corporations are changing but they are not going away.
Just as ‘edupunk’ companies expand options for business education, so there is increasing choice for knowledge workers. My own experience as an independent knowledge worker is that I have the possibility of developing long-term relationships with people in a number of large institutions, giving me the benefit of ‘belonging’ while retaining independence.
Very interesting post Anne Marie. I tend to agree with those that predict that universities and large corporations that do not adapt to these changes in the availability of content and the ability of knowledge workers to market themselves like never before will ultimately be left behind in the marketplace. How quickly this is manifested is certainly debatable. Thanks for an excellent article.
Hi Steve
I am really glad you found my ramblings to be interesting. Thank you for taking the time to read and comment.
Yes, definitely adapt or die. The fact that people do now have choices in work and learning should concentrate institutional minds – both corporate and HE.
My feeling is that large corporations are particularly attractive to young people in their early careers. Many will put up long hours and intensive working conditions because they like the kudos of working for a large corporate employer.
Large corporations cannot be complacent, though. Gen Y will go where they can learn, and where they have discretion over how, when and where they work.
Hi Anne Marie,
This is a cracking post and a great build on the original article. It seems that our educational delivery models will certainly change but I am reluctant to believe that universities will disappear. Content has long been easily available – at least in the UK where libraries are free. It’s great to see MIT’s material on the web but education is more than simply the provision of information.
My view is that we integrate learning through conversation and reflection – maybe the universities need to take a more facilitative approach to their processes but it is hard to imagine who would be better placed to undertake such a task.
Steve
Thank you! If it is a cracking post, it is because I have had access to so many quality sources and thoughts via Twitter.
I read recently that Twitter is a flowing stream of comment and links. Whereas we used to go to the library (and still sometimes do), the thoughts of people we respect can now be delivered right to our own brains for consideration and further insight. Isn’t that something?
The universities are indeed well-placed to facilitate conversation and reflection. Isn’t that what we do in blogs, though?
A downside to web conversations is that they can lack critique. I discern widespread “famous person says” syndrome; unquestioning acceptance of web personalities’ pronouncements. Being critically reflective is often viewed as being negative by the crowd.
Universities teach us how to think, dialogue and be critically reflective. As I said in a previous post, that is no longer the sole remit of universities. The criteria / characteristics of Masters-level learning is publicly available. This allows people like me to create learning programmes with these criteria as key design principles. We have the content, we have academically trained people, we have the experience and we have the technologies. What we don’t have is the power, influence and institutional clout.
Universities are here to stay. Their influence is increasing as they embed within their local and regional economies and are instrumental in creating the knowledge and skills needed for economic wealth.
We really do live in interesting times.
Thanks again, Steve.
Thanks for your reply, Anne Marie. I’m pondering…. and wondering about a line that I think (and apologies for inaccuracy) is attributed to Robert Pirsig – ‘is the church the building is it or the way of thinking?’
It does seem like the University model of education could easily tolerate a much looser sense of affiliation among academics and students alike – and that might make it a much more attractive option for people like us to deliver our work!