Creating Blue Oceans

Re-imagining how we learn

 

We’ve previously presented solutions for the broken educational systems in the USA. And we continue to share insights from experts who are passionate about this topic, including for example Gabor’s chat with Sir Ken Robinson. 

Today we highlight the Khan Academy, which in a Slingshot-like approach to learning. Watch the inspiring video with the Academy’s founder Sal Khan as he explains how he is singlehandedly providing  a system of quality education accessible to anyone in the world. 

About the Khan Academy: With a faculty of 1, the Khan Academy provides 1,800 lessons through its website, which have been viewed over 24 million times. Each lesson covers a specific academic topic, and systematically advance in complexity. Therefore students, teachers, and adults can all benefit from both learning and reviewing topics of interest.  The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to everyone  completely free of charge. 

[Video via YouTube.]

 

Why give your data away for free?

In a blue ocean strategy-like move that stands the traditional social networking industry on its head, Swedish-born entrepreneur Johan Staël von Holstein is hedging bets that he can create an antithesis to the facebook model simply by placing value on personal data. 

From Fast Company: 

Staël von Holstein is launching a Facebook competitor out of Singapore called MyCube; it's currently in private beta. To hear Staël von Holstein tell it, MyCube will be the liberation forces poised to overthrow Zuckerberg's autocracy. MyCube, for all its grandiose ambitions, actually has an intriguing set of principles at its core. It is private in ways that Facebook is not; users have complete control over their data, and MyCube will never mine that data to sell to advertisers or anyone else. And, in fact, MyCube believes that people should view their own data as valuable--offering a means for members of the site to monetize the information they share.

[Image via MyCube.]

Re-Imagining Personal Boundaries with Paul Hoffman

TUNE IN Friday as we feature Gabor’s recent radio discussion with Paul Hoffman, bestselling author, creative director, evangelist and restaurateur, and find out the answer to the question: 

How can you re-imagine your personal capacity for projects that fuel your passion?

What if you could re-imagine your business, and your life? SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT appears through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, article series, accompanying illustrations and music. 

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities that are re-imagining our world today.  Learn the Slingshot concepts yourself, see how they prime you for Blue Ocean Strategy application and for shaping the world through meaningful creativity and innovation. 

Re-Imagine your busines, re-imagine your life. Click on over to Slingshot Living for inspiration.

What does your company’s Accordion Chart look like?

An Accordion Chart™ is an illustrative tool that enables the flexible exploration of market spaces that an organization’s offering occupies. It illuminates the full spectrum of the offering’s positioning from its core utility to its most general application. It is called an Accordion Chart because, just like the musical instrument, it is collapsible. It can be used to flexibly look across, combine, and integrate various gradations of market detail. 

An Accordion Chart is used to search out new, broadened relevance for a business’s offering. A recent example of such an expansion is Mattell all the sudden getting in to the business of vehicle safety by looking at itself more broadly as a technology company. 

From BusinessWeek:

Before long, thought-controlled objects may move far beyond games. "Toys are just the beginning," says NeuroSky Chief Executive Officer Stanley Yang. Future applications may include early detection of Alzheimer's, helping children cope with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and keeping people from falling asleep behind the wheel of an automobile, he says.

Learn more about Accordion Charts in Gabor’s much-anticipated book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life, available July 15th. 

[Image © 2011 Slingshot.]

Who is limiting you?

 
What if you could re-engage your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities—in order to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success? Embracing the same core priniciples of Slingshot, an inspiring group of seniors is doing just that and along the way creating new meaning and enrichment in their lives. 

From AARP: 

The main reason people stagnate is that they limit themselves through their mind-set or habits. Or they simply set their sights too low."

Though it’s natural to mourn what we lose as we age — be it our hearing, our hair, or our house keys — older artists offer vivid proof of what we may gain in wisdom, insight, and purpose.

[Image © 2011 Slingshot.]

What kind of tree would you be?

Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way to do so is to think about what happens before, during, and after your product is used (Blue Ocean Strategy by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne, 66).

Here’s one creative combination of products and services designed to do its enriching in the afterlife. 

From BigThink:

Bios Urn is a biodegradable urn made from coconut shell, compacted peat and cellulose and inside it contains the seed of a tree. Once your remains have been placed into the urn, it can be planted and then the seed germinates and begins to grow. You even have the choice to pick the type of plant you would like to become, depending on what kind of planting space you prefer. 

[Image via BigThink.]

 

The danger of dwindling relevance

In order for companies to deliver lifestyle enrichment to consumers, being relevant is much more important than being best in any traditional measure.  

Just what can happen when a company fails to innovate and allows its relevance to dwindle? They tend to look like this.  

From Forbes:

Sears had once been a retailing goliath, the originator of home shopping with the famous Sears catalogue, and a pioneer in financing purchases.  At one time you could obtain all your insurance, banking and brokerage needs at a Sears, while buying clothes, tools and appliances.  An innovator, Sears for many years was part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  But by 2004 the world had shifted, Home Depot displaced Sears on the DJIA, and the company’s profits and revenues sagged as competitors picked apart the product lines and locations.

[Image via PatyC.]

Gabor presents live today at TEDx - Grand Rapids

Following the runaway success of his recent talk at TEDx - Danubia,   today on the other side of the pond an audience of 600 Midwestern shakers and movers is being treated to Gabor’s special talk on “Re-Imagining Innovation." This highly-anticipated event, themed “Innovate: X,” brings together 16 diverse speakers from all over the world to share their personal insights on innovation.

From the official TEDx - Grand Rapids website.

Without imagination there is no art, no science, no innovation. We cannot access the realms of the big, the small, or the hidden. Without imagination there can be no empathy. We need it to have an idea of any reality other than our own. We also need imagination to render anything new, to go beyond what and how our world already is. We need it to create visions and without it we cannot discover hitherto undetected connections and relationships. Without imagination there can be no hope, and finally, above all and simply put, we need imagination to lead a life worth living... The conference will take you on an adventure of the mind, an intellectual and emotional journey through five consecutive sessions.

[Image via TEDx - Grand Rapids.] 

 

Re-Imagining boundaries—all the way to Olympic success

TUNE IN tomorrow as we feature Gabor’s recent radio discussion with Dudley ‘Tal’ Stokes, four-time Olympian, founding member of the Jamaican Bobsled Team and entrepreneur, and find out the answer to the question: 

How can you re-imagine boundaries and realize your daring goals?

What if you could re-imagine your business, and your life? SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT appears through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, article series, accompanying illustrations and music. 

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities that are re-imagining our world today.  Learn the Slingshot concepts yourself, see how they prime you for Blue Ocean Strategy application and for shaping the world through meaningful creativity and innovation. 

Re-Imagine your busines, re-imagine your life. Click on over to Slingshot Living for inspiration.  

 

 

 

Defying conventional wisdom to create a new national security strategy

Here is a rather powerful and provocative observation by Steve Forbes: “Anyone who accomplishes something great or unique, whether in business or politics, often does so by defying conventional wisdom.” But if you think about it, it seems perfectly true and accurate. Just imagine how profoundly different our world might be today if the American Founding Fathers didn’t have the vision and audacity to create an entirely new model of government based on the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and on the principle of checks and balances (excerpt from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life by Gabor George Burt). 

In this continued spirit of deyfing conventional wisdom, see how two American military stategists are creating a national security strategy that doesn’t focus on the threats. From the New York Times: 

A paper written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices in energy and agriculture.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

[Image via USAGeorge.]