Luiz told me a story about trying to coax a group of professionals to try blogging. He asked everyone to make a blog entry; no one did. He instructed them to take a sheet of paper and write out something interesting that had happened to them. Then he asked them to pass their papers to another person and write a comment or observation on the bottom of each person’s paper. During a break, he posted all the papers on the wall. When people returned, he announced, “See? This is the blogosphere.” He asked them each to write an entry in their blog that evening. Guess what happened. No one did. Often people do not see the relevance of technology to their lives.
John described a seminar on collaboration for managers he led for HP in Israel. The first day was a disaster. People were so wrapped up in personal politics that working with one another was the furthermost thing from their minds. Yet their organization faced problems that could only be served by working with one another. John asked the group to reflect on their earliest encounters with effective collaboration. They discovered a common denominator: it was childhood play. The participants needed to play with one another. When the workshop reconvened the next morning, John was astounded to find that the managers had already been up for hours, telephoning one another to work on solutions. Metaphor is power.
Nearly half of the organizations in my recent survey do not take time to learn from major mistakes. I’ve suggested that companies post a list of Our Ten Greatest Mistakes to foster reflection and learning (and avoid repeating the same mistakes). Here’s one for my list of screw-ups. The organization that sponsored my talk in Sao Paolo invited me to deliver the keynote presentation at their conference. They offered no fee but would pick up my expenses and provide a grand tour of Sao Paolo. It turned out my presentation was positioned as a workshop, not a keynote. The guided tour was fiction. The organizer charged people who wanted to attend just my workshop part of the event more than $400. More than a hundred people participated. I generated in the neighborhood of $40,000 for these people and received nothing but expenses. Jay’s lesson: no more freebies for profit-making entities.
The Pinacoteca art museum is built in the shell of a beautiful old brick building that was gutted and fitted with a translucent ceiling that fills open courtyards with natural light. In one giant gallery formed from five rooms that flow from one to another, the walls are jam-packed with paintings, sometimes stacked five high. The placement of the works is anything but random. A wall of portraits shows the transition over time from formal, stiff pictures of power figures to people from all walks of life displaying emotion. Another room contains still lifes of food. Four cubist renditions hang together, inviting comparison. More traditional subjects of hams, game, lobster, cornucopia, and bowls of soup are light/dark, clear/vague, sensual/cold, isolated/together and presented in a way that makes you reflect on the alternatives chosen by the artists as well as the artworks themselves. Later I encountered the same instructive hanging at the Museu do San Paolo, where Titian, Cezanne, Botticelli, Picasso, Leger, El Greco, Van Gogh, Renoir, and hundreds of others were grouped in progression from formal to romantic, spiritual to descriptive, angular to curved, flatly lit to dramatically lit, sacred to vernacular, and so one. Reflecting on these a day later, I remember them better because I recall the relationships of the paintings in addition to the paintings themselves.
With a few exceptions, Sao Paolo seems intent on devouring its past. In a New York Times story last year, Jeffries Blackberry wrote, “Rio may have samba and Speedos, but these days it’s São Paulo that is swinging like the hips of the girl from Ipanema. Brazil’s largest city — 11 million and counting — has transformed itself from a dull and featureless capital of finance into the epicenter of Brazilian culture, where art, architecture, design and fashion are flourishing.” He saw a different place. I found Sao Paolo’s architecture and cityscape an endless parade of bland concrete towers, the perfect set for one of those son-of-Bladerunner horror shows about the future as ruled by machines and punks. Traffic is everywhere. Smog burns the eyes. Buildings lack ornamentation. Instead of making buildings over, they are razed and replaced. Sao Paolo has entire cities within the city that to untrained eyes have no personality whatsoever.
My new friends Barbara and Lilian. Lilian completed her doctoral dissertation the day before on how teachers adopt (or don’t adopt) new technology. Barbara is grappling with similar issues among teachers of English as a second language.
These guys were in the yard across the street when we arrived back in Berkeley this morning.
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I am glad to see that the issue of adoption is pretty much the same no matter which part of the world you are in! What this does bring out is that we need to address the benefit and value part of it, rather than look at it purely from the technology perspective?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but what you said about the city’s architecture can be said of America cities (or anywhere).
Fast expanding populations kill architecture. And goodness help you if you have no city planning.
You can’t do something fast *and* do it well.
JC, I hear you, but Sao Paolo struck me as an extreme case. Some rapidly growing urban areas have enlightened zoning restrictions that mandate occasional patches of green.
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