Entries by Ross Dawson

The Question: What is the most interesting thing you came across today?

Twitter has moved from asking ‘what are you doing now?’ to ‘what’s happening?’, and now describes itself as an ‘information network‘. The Twitter News Network is a manifestation of the global brain, in which we create value for others by contributing to the visibility and availability of high-value information. While many contribute nothing of value […]

Creating the future of local government

I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past. Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s […]

Looking for talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media on cool tech, media, and future topics

We have just posted an ad on Elance, looking for editors/ writers/ project managers for some of our existing and forthcoming online publications. Please apply on Elance if this seems like a match, or pass it on to others if you think it might be of interest. If you have questions before applying you can […]

Capturing all your browsing data: the difference between Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mobile

Chris Espinosa has written a very interesting piece about the Silk browser that comes on Amazon’s freshly announced Fire tablet. The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based […]

Compulsory viewing: A CEO perspective on the business value of internal social networks

A few days ago Arie Goldshlager pointed me to the fantastic video below of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia, talking about the company’s use of micro-blogging. Shortly after Forrester announced that Deloitte Australia’s Yammer network had won its 2011 Forrester Groundswell award in the category of Collaboration Systems. Undoubtedly a major factor in Deloitte […]

Why diverse viewpoints are critical in dealing with complexity

The September issue of Harvard Business Review focused on complexity, with several excellent articles. One of the pieces was an interview with Michael J. Mauboussin, the chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management, whose investment approach is fundamentally based on understanding complexity. His answer to the last question in the interview was very interesting: […]

Keynote slides: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

This morning I am giving the external keynote at a closed conference for senior client executives run by a major professional services firm. They know the technical content they are presenting is rather dry so my role is to provide a highly engaging kick-off to the day (spouses are invited too) which is also practical […]

The global polarization of work: what we can do about it

Today I gave the keynote at an invitation-only meeting of senior executives looking at the future of their industry. My role was to bring perspectives on the broader drivers of change in business. One of the central themes of my keynote was the future of work and organizations. There are of course many facets to […]