Do you still dream?
What is your BHAG for the UK? What is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal for your industry?
What is the one thing that could take your industry from stagnation to contributing to the 2.5 million new jobs or the equivalent that we need here in the UK?
Big Hairy Audacious Goal
Last night, my heart soared when Roland Harwood welcomed the ‘Network of Networks’ at Amplified08 with this BHAG:
to be the most networked nation in the world.
Getting down and dirty
Toby Moores, founder of Sleepy Dog and Visiting Professor at De Montfort University brought this goal alive.
Leicester, cotton city of the English Midlands has been transformed from 5% design:95% manufacturing . . . to . . . 50% design:50% import/export.
Networking via Creative Coffee Club and other social media configurations, using technologies like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, provides designers with the hyper-competitive domestic environment, or space, that an industry needs to be competitive in the international world.
Breaking the British reserve?
One of the epiphany moments in my life was visiting Roman ruins at Coimbra in Portugal and imagining running water several centuries before Christ. Superimposed on the ruins I was looking at were mental images of the dams that Italians have built all around the world. Civil engineers, then; civil engineers now.
Leicester is also taking their core competencies and the best of their past into the future.
Something tells me the British may be very good at networking. Something verbal, something witty, . . . .?
A highly networked country also offers advantage that is not here now. Youngsters can find mentoring more easily. New ideas transfuse in that mysterious way they do between two people who have never met yet share a common acquaintance.
As a goal, to be the most networked country in the world, is sufficiently concrete for us to monitor it. It is sufficiently open for us all to agree. It is sufficiently enjoyable for us all to get started.
It is inclusive. It is generative.
Some of the new 2.5 million jobs will be directly in the networking industry. Most will be because our knowledge workers are finding it easy to access to information, make decisions, and provide services that are valued throughout the world.
Good input NESTA. Thankyou. And thanks to @DT, @sleepdog, @loudmouthman and @joannejacobs who did much of the organizing.
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P.S. 2.5 million jobs are Obama’s target for America. About 30m people work in the UK and 3-4 people may be unemployed before the economic downturn is done. What is our target?
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