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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...


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...


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).

 


Edgeware's Build Your Business

September 11, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Edgeware's Build Your Business program is an alternative to business education for new entrepreneurs, and for entrepreneurs who want to re-imagine or grow their businesses. Each time it runs, it changes, because the needs of participants and the dynamics of the group make changes necessary. Edgeware aims to provide more than just a course, because there is no single pathway to success in business. Each participant comes to Edgeware with a different mix of expectations, ideals, capabilities and needs.

So Edgeware aims to provide practical skills and competencies, but also the kinds of...


Hard Wired for Stories

September 11, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

 

We are social animals

We are hard wired for stories

We use stories to sing the world: Body as Land, Land as Story 

Discourses arrive after the singing, as both agents and actors

We make category errors all the time, not the least in distinguishing the singing from the sung.

Cultures are self organising systems, ways of being in the world 

Cultures produce artefacts and creative technologies which are perceived to have social-political and economic value. Nothing has intrinsic value.

We are simultaneously cultural producers and consumers, the authors and readers of our own lives

We concentrate the outcomes and behaviours of cultural...