I've been a regular at every SOMESSO event so far, and Lee Bryant kindly invited me to the latest incarnation last Thursday - a joint SOMESSO and Headshift one day Social Business Summit.   Sorting out a very embarrassing attack of the ave.exe virus delayed me enough that morning to miss the two keynotes from Jeff Dachis and JP Rangaswami (my Mac friends tell me I should make the switch, but I'm stubbornly staying on Windows along with 90% of my customers).  I was particularly disappointed missing JP, as everyone told me his session was excellent, breaking the way ahead with the social business topic down to transaction cost.  As soon as the video of his session is available, I'll update this post to include it.  

The social business theme is dear to my heart.  The word social and the social media term can be counter productive when talking to some business leaders about the way businesses needs to change in the 21st century.  This summit meeting was all about applying what I would call enterprise 2.0  and some would call social tools (blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, tagging and other collaboration tools) to help businesses be more ...

Last Thursday in Durham FutureStory launched as part of the North East Economic Forum.  I've already blogged about why I've got involved in this joint initiative between Lucy Parker's Talent and Enterprise Taskforce and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS).  The BIS press release on the day started like this:

"Business leaders in the North East today (on Feb 18) urged young people to proactively research local industries so they can rise to the challenge of getting a job in tomorrow’s global economy.  In return they pledged to help local schools and colleges play an active role in plotting the North East’s economic future."

The NEEF annual conference was a fitting forum for promoting this new initiative.  Adam Boulton of Sky News introduced a series of speakers focusing on the regeneration of the region which has moved from its industrial heritage of mining and steel to housing the UK's largest car exporter,  the National Centre for Excellence in Plastics, and a whole host of low carbon initiatives.  During the day we heard about huge off shore wind farms, a national training centre for Green Collar Workers that is in the process ...

This will be the first in a continuing sequence of posts here on BTZ about FutureStory, a government initiative from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) which connects businesses to schools to help make young people wake up to the opportunities, rather than the threats, of globalization.   Caroline Teunissen called me and Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, and a number of other interested bloggers in to help promote the topic.  Caroline introduced me to Lucy Parker, head of Talent and Enterprise Taskforce, who is spearheading the initiative in conjunction with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS).

So why did I think this is important? Why did I want to get involved?  As we progress in to the 21st century, we live at a time of astonishing extremes and rapid change.   Globalisation, climate change, the explosion of advanced technologies and what some would call a broken education system here in the West have come together to make a perfect storm of complexity.  FutureStory directly addresses two of these components.  Globalization is a fact of life to be dealt with.  Although we hear many stories of losing . ...