"The problem of the steady change of ideas (or the perpetual need to imagine new ideas) also demolishes the notion that the essence of education consists in mastering certain contents or materials. You are not little birdies sitting in the nest with your mouths open to receive half-digested worms of knowledge regurgitated by the faculty. Education is not about content. It is not even about skills. It is a habit or stance of mind. It is not something you have. It is something you are." So says educator Andrew Abbott. To work towards...

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Sitting last week in a workshop on the theme of ‘design’ I found myself uncomfortable with the tone and tenor of the offering. I realized eventually that the source of this discomfort was the assumption on the part of the workshop facilitator that ‘design’ was a manipulative process, a means of imposing one’s will on the world, of giving the world a shape related to one’s ‘picture’ of how things might be or should be.

I found myself wondering about alternative ways of practicing design which might be...

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Putting together a coaching bureau is an interesting challenge. I've been working on this for some months, gathering together half a dozen friends and colleagues with coaching experience in a group I hope will make a very wide range of expertise available to my customers, Edgies, entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of their business. It's a challenge because not only should these people implicitly and explicitly understand and accept Edgeware's DNA - Make money, have fun, change the world - but each should demonstrate a skill set which has 'stand-alone' value and also particular strengths...

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I'm pretty new to the world of podcasting, but I found this interview refreshing in that Cameron Reilly, the owner-operator of the G'Day World Podcasting Network, allowed time to really explore and flesh out ideas in a way that other forms don't tend to allow, in favour of more clipped and sound-grabby formats. I found this particularly useful in trying to discuss the 'bigger picture' context for my practice and the Edgeware business generally. People have been telling me for a while that short audio clips are useful ways...

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 I was asked to give a short talk at a Brisbane networking function called The Hive on 30 June 09, on the topic of 'entrepreneurship'. The talk was filmed, and video is now on Youtube, but to save the bother of looking it up, here's the talk, in three sections.

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Business Ethics

July 12, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

Business ethics is an important field for Edgeware because it’s in the ‘change the world’ bit of our DNA.

You don’t ‘adopt’ ethical practices; you can’t operate without ethics, even if you couldn’t name them and you don’t have a code. We make moral judgements all the time and they’re the basis of our actions a lot of the time whether we recognise it or not. The question is: are these good ethics or not so good ethics, is this action which is good or action which is not so good? And this ‘good’ concept, that’s...

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6 Word Memoirs

July 12, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Smith Magazine invites us to summarise our lives in six words - 'Six Word Memoirs'. I thought, 'Easy! I have the Edgeware motto, near enough to six words: make money, have fun, change the world. I could lose the article before "world" and that's the six.'

Then I looked at the phrase as a 'memoir' and it didn't feel right. It struck me that a motto, or a guiding statement of principle, or a goal, or a home truth, has to chunk things up to get to a seamless, clear whole. Life...

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Coach as Cartographer

May 20, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Everyone is coaching or being coached; there are life coaches, career coaches, personal coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, coaches for getting out of bed in the morning and coaches for getting to sleep at night. Why do we need coaches so much and so often?

Could it be that the old, well-worn and predictable pathways - any path to anywhere and every path to everywhere - are dsiappearing, the maps no longer even remotely relating to the territory? Are coaches our conceptual cartographers?

I'm not a great fan of mind mapping, but I find the...

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Speaking at the Brisbane Ideas Festival

May 14, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 I was invited to convene a session at the Brisbane Ideas Festival in March 2009, a panel on the topic of Creative Entrepreneurs: The Artists of Commerce. I selected a group of Edgies from a variety of businesses and a variety of demographics, reinforcing the concept that creative entrepreneurship is a matter of psychographics, not demographics, as in Ian Plowman's proposition that Edgies are essentially 'weird', and that Edgeware is a platform for 'validating weirdness'. More on the video itself, also accessible through Youtube (and thanks to Edgie Sarah Moran for this).