(The Butcher) Earlier today we rolled out Version 0.00001 of our business learning platform (our Not A B-School). We posted the outline of a curriculum and some initial readings. Our bias and editorial slant is clear in the initial post, and the 4 content areas we have chosen to focus on—Finance, Marketing/Strategy, Design, and Sustainability—are intended to get the conversation started.
(Bandit) Check out the version number… Every time we update the content we’re going to remove a zero. That means the platform is going to get an order of magnitude better with each update. Woo hoo! How awesome is that, folks!
(The Butcher) We are now looking for input—in the form of reading suggestions, lectures, posts, etc.—from the community. For example, in NYC a few weeks ago, Tony Bacigalupo told us about The Starfish and the Spider, an awesome book that neither one of us had heard of. This drives home for us how much great stuff is out there that we miss. In particular, we want to add ‘Community / People / Teams’ to our discussion of business. To this end, we invite interested friends to become Professors at NotAnMBA, and to submit stuff that you think we and others need to know about business.
(Bandit) Regarding ‘People’, this is traditionally covered in B-School in subjects like Organizational Development and Human Resource Management. Vomitisation! We need a name 1) that better reflects the central role that people play in an organization and 2) that doesn’t carry any of the baggage of the little-people-as-cogs orientation that most managers and executives seem to embrace. Seth Godin suggested renaming “Human Resources” to “Talent”. Any better ideas…? “Community”…?
(The Butcher) Our hope is that Not A B-School becomes a user-generated learning platform that explores business as an instrument of good in society. And we know there is a ton of stuff out there that we don’t even know we need to know about… So tell us!
(Bandit) Let’s make this fun (and easy). If you twitter, hashtag your tweet about content with #notanmba and we’ll pick it up. Or, if you use del.icio.us, tag your bookmark with notanmba and we’ll pick it up. One way or the other, bring it to our attention.
The Editors
[2/23/2008] …i like “community” or “residents” to replace cog talk / @john_erik
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