Capilano’s Best Take on the World

The lectures are finished, the all nighters have been endured, and the exams were crushed – the class of 2010 Capilano School of Business is Graduating! A collective fist pump rolls across the hundreds of grads who are leaving our sprawling campus for opportunities, careers and paycheques, but that can wait for at least one more night. Tomorrow night the class, some supportive faculty and local businesses will gather at the Pinnacle Hotel to celebrate their achievements. The event will be the first ever Capilano University Grad celebration, and promises to kickoff the tradition in a fantastic way. It’s made possible by the initiative of our Business Enterprise President Courtney Lange, and the extreme generosity of our Dean Graham Fane. Both of those people have done so much for the School of Business in their short tenures that a simple listing of accomplishments couldn’t possibly suffice. Graham and Courtney killed it this year. Unfortunately we lose Courtney to graduation this year, but we hope to benefit from Graham for a while yet. I could gush on about the amazing people at Cap, but I’ll embody the collective in the Grad Committee who put in a ridiculous amount of work and stress to this effort – headed up by Saralyn Nickerson. These guys rock.

Clearly I’m pumped for the event, even though it means that we will be losing what is indisputably the greatest grad class that I’ve seen in my near-decade stay at Cap. I may be biased in that I’ve had the opportunity to work with these people longer than most, but the rockstar ratio is ridiculous. We have entrepreneurs who are owning the competition before even graduating, effortlessly brilliant people headed off the world’s most prestigious Universities for graduate studies, and an unbelievable pool of talent that we will all be able to tap long into the future.

Faithful Stoked readers will be familiar with the fact that I will not be one of the victorious few to cross the stage, and some are starting to wonder if I ever will. Next semester I’ll be putting in my application for the mandatory golf cart that comes with 8 years of campus life. Readers will also be familiar with the fact that I somehow manage to squirm my way into as many exciting Capilano events and initiatives as possible, so how’d I pull this one off? Rather than hiding behind a computer screen and ripping on defenseless people and ridiculous issues, this time I’ll be doing it live and in person as the MC of the event. Terrified? That’s probably the correct response; however I have promised to be on my best behavior and will be donning my formal persona for the occasion.

Aside from my barely coherent ramblings, there are legitimate reasons to be excited about the event – the keynote speaker will be Vanoc’s Design Manager Roger Bayley. The man who somehow coordinated over 150 consultants and produced the Olympic legacy that is the Olympic Village. Additionally, local businesses have stepped up and supported our grads, resulting in a fantastic collection of takeaways for the attendees. One of the gifts is redeemable by all Capilano graduates, attending or not: Business in Vancouver magazine has extended a 12 week subscription offer to us, and I have the exclusive pre-release! Check it out here: Business in Vancouver

Have a great time at the event to all who are attending, and I apologize in advance for the MC. Congratulations Grads! Your work has paid off finally; I can’t wait to see you all out there rocking what you do as hard as you did here.

Americans Do Nothing

As predicted, the rate remained unchanged. Does that mean that we’re getting set up for another bubble? Possibly.

The bigger question is: which bubble are we talking about? Speculators are back in the real estate market, driving prices up using the extremely low interest rates as fuel, there’s a possibility that many areas could re-bubble in housing as a result, but not everyone has returned to even early ’00s levels yet.

Gold? Definitely. But this is a bubble that won’t burst, it will slowly sag and then pick up speed only if confidence in a solid base currency returns. The USD doesn’t seem to be coming back any time soon, and certainly not the precarious Euro, so how about the basketed Renminbi? Could the communist coin really be the solution? We can only hope that the answer is no, the way that the Chinese have manipulated rates with the limited power that they’ve had until now.

Here’s hoping that I’m wrong and the miraculous Americans can pull somethoing out of their collective hat again and provide some stability to an unstable world.

All Ears on the Fed

The world is poised and ready for today’s 2:15pm announcement from Bernanke and the boys at the US Federal Reserve. Lately, all talk has been about significant recovery and positive signs in several markets. It’s unlikely that times are so good that the Americans will be pumping their rates up just yet, but the world will be over analyzing every word said for indications of the next move. Today could be a big day depending on what is said. Stay tuned.

RIM: The Cutting Edge of Success

Response to:

Research in Motion: Managing Explosive Growth

By Daina Mazutis for the Richard Ivey School of Business

Growth is what we all want, its what every company is working towards and what every shareholder is betting on when he/she buys equity. RIM shows us that even world beating sales figures come with challenges.

The core of RIM’s success is its ability to anticipate the needs of consumers, needs that even buyers were unaware of, and to develop technology that meets those needs. Even more than that, the technology that Lazardis and company develop is the world’s most efficient and difficult to replicate. To date, despite the billions spent on R&D in the world’s largest telecommunications think-tanks, no comparable products have been released. The iPod is the world’s most user friendly interface, and the Nexus One is the world’s fastest consumer device. The Blackberry, however is the only encrypted push e-mail, while using the least amount of data to fully integrate all of a person’s mobile technology needs.

That competitive advantage is fleeting, and its shocking that it has existed as long as it has. The new versions including the Curve, Storm, Tour and Bold offer no significant new functionality, just an upgrade of the only model. In order to maintain the lead, RIM will not be able to just beat its head against the same old wall using larger sums of money. Another game changer is required, and required fast to satisfy the end-user and the shareholders. Rather than focusing on straight ratios that equate increases in expenditure to increases in innovation, RIM must now focus on developing a real edge that differentiates the Blackberry brand from its competitors.

The supply of talent is clearly one of RIM’s greatest challenges and massive numbers are required to satisfy the growing demand. It is simply not realistic to assume that organic growth or even traditional onboarding can double the organization’s size in a short time period without damaging either the culture, the quality of work, or both. Instead, RIM should look to build on its history and past successes with acquisitions to grow. Opportunities abound, especially as companies like Palm are being left in the wake of progress. A huge takeover like Palm would supply RIM with a sudden jolting influx of seasoned talent as well as a glut of intellectual property that has is currently in Palm’s possession. Most likely, those developments could be coupled with Blackberry code to produce new reasons for customers to be excited about the boys from Waterloo and their toys.

The bulk of the effort must be spent on the onboarding process as Palm people become RIM people. Blackberry-ing Palm-ers will be the crux of the challenge and, if successful, the edge that keeps Steve Jobs and his legions of iUsers at bay.

Waterfalls, Warren Buffet and why knowledge can’t be managed

Response to:

The Rise of Knowledge Towards Attention Management

By Davenport and Volpel

The Rise of Knowledge

Knowledge management is people management? I take issue with that statement. Knowledge is a factor of production much the same way that skills, processes, IP, and even muscle strength are factors in the production of computer chips, railroads and hamburgers.

The topic has been on the tip of my tongue for a while, though as I’ve been wrestling with a seemingly unrelated topic: what makes America “great”, what (other than war profiteering) propelled it to the top of the global heap, and what does it have to leverage itself back to the top?

Clearly, the answer to the first two questions is knowledge. Knowledge alone allowed the United States to tear the title of World’s Banker from the British, and to remain the undisputed richest country for 40+ years before the emergence of China and the financial meltdown.

Does that lead us to believe that the third answer is also knowledge? That’s where Davenport and Volpe come in. The world is getting smarter – India is producing Earth’s greatest engineers, the best doctors are German and Chinese business acumen is the envy of American industrialists. Attribute that to the spread of wealth or communications, whatever the cause, the U.S. doesn’t have a corner on the smarts market anymore. If we place ourselves in the American corner, let’s consider how to regain that competitive advantage. If we believe the paper, and managing people is managing knowledge, then we just need to start producing the world’s best managers and the world will once again become our smorgasboard.

Were Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs well managed? All three of those men embody the American Dream that we are taught is the heart of what makes America great. People who struck out and became world beater by taking risks and resolving to win at all costs. Their knowledge has shaped the world and came at us not as neatly bundled packages of value, but as wild explosions of innovation that refused to be denied.

Knowledge within an organization is no different. Efficiency can be gained by directing the collection of knowledge and steering the allegorical library of smarts in a desired direction, but successful knowledge acquisition comes at us like a giant waterfall of unrelated curiosities. It is the beauty of the human mind that we can thread seemingly unrealted gems together, not as volumes to be managed, but as potentially new knowledge and idea that will emerge brand new if allowed to evolve.

That’s why the last, current and next earth-shaking innovations all came not from Billion-dollar labs, but from dusty basements and abandoned garages.