Pocket of Thoughts™ by Saint Akanji

              To innovate, you must design.           Innovation is hard. We now know, thanks to Rita McGrath (Professor, Columbia Business School and author of the End of Competitive Advantage ) that there is no such thing as sustainable competitive advantage. We live in a very unpredictable world where the rate of change is accelerating at geometric proportions. New technologies disrupt once novel creations making it difficult for companies to settle. Welcome to a world of transient Competitive Advantages. Innovation has become an imperative for enterprises irrespective of industry to evolve new methods, products and business models. The era of white space and blue ocean may have been lost forever. Ours is a post modern world where the factors of production have become commodities. Even patents aren't sure fire ways. If you doubt this, ask Apple. Yet, innovation remains the only viable so...

  There is this big question around the viability of new models of delivering learning. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as they are called provide digital educational contents to interested learners mostly FREE or at ridiculously cheap prices if at all. Examples are Udacity, Coursera, MIT Open Courseware who deliver learning via online channels. I took a refresher course on Micro-Economics via MIT Open Courseware recently and I must confess, I was thoroughly educated. This was a pre-recorded lecture and the pedagogy was not limiting in any way at all. In fact, there were assignments and although it was not real time, I felt as if I was part of a live class.   Its a question of time Some have described them (MOOCs) as disruptive technologies that threaten the Brick and Mortar traditional learning models. Others posit differently along the lines of the argument that the technology is complimentary and not necessarily a substitute. It is difficult to say fo...

When we cry, we shouldn't stop seeing - African Proverb Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED speech ( The Danger of a Single Story ) is instructive. The wisdom I gleaned from it is that "When we cry, we shouldn't stop seeing". It is true that this country brings out the skepticism and cynicism in her people. The elements (common bond and patriotic sentiment) that make up a nation are missing from the Nigerian state. I know that not all is bad for us but,   Check this out:   A good friend of mine was involved in a domestic brouhaha with a neighbor which ultimately led to a Police case. He called me in to provide moral support and I was glad to do just that. The scene at the Police Station sank my soul. Permit my seemingly harsh choice of words but I couldn't phantom that a right thinking human would even consider being in such an environment. Hungry looking, shabbily dressed Policemen littered the shanty looking station. It was an ey...