I have always loved to innovate, to think of problems in a way that others hadn’t yet and come up with interesting solutions. However where I’ve always fallen short is in not just knowing how to drive those innovative ideas I’ve had into something concrete in the form of a business, but also to drive it to a success point I was happy with (in most cases simply making it a profitable business). This is why I was interested that the IMBDI that is now being offered at UWI’s Arthur Lok Jak School of Business. It just seemed one of those things that would fill a gap in knowledge I know I have, right now!
To give a taste of the new program ALJ hosted a two-day bootcamp featuring some of what students of the new International Master’s in Business Development and Innovation would expect to experience.
Day One
The first day focused on teaching the audience on what is known as the “Design-Thinking Approach” and was led by Professor Miguel Carillo, the Executive Director at ALJ . Not unexpected, I was pleased to see several former co-workers present from Medullan, one of the most innovative companies I have worked for, and also where I first learnt to hone my innovation and execution skills. Great minds think alike it would seem.
The Design-Thinking session was extremely exciting, energetic and amazingly fun. Traditional education makes us not believe learning as fun, but in this case it was definitely fun learning how to innovate with this approach, first realised by a company known for innovation worldwide, IDEO. Interestingly enough, the process of innovating with this approach was not totally unfamiliar to me as Medullan uses a variation of this style in many of its client workshops.
What surprised me is how well a randomly chosen group of people could adopt to the style within one day and actually produce a ‘new innovative idea’, build something concrete behind it and then present on it. “Making soca globally known, successful and profitable” was the sum of the problem looked at, and I must say I was impressed with my team’s design and delivery of our consensus-driven idea, which basically focused creating a ‘virtual world’ online that tied to an online music store and featuring cool mini-games like Soca-cise (think Tae-Bo is to Karate what Soca-cise is to wining).
Day Two
The second day was a similarly fun experience. Many folks from the first day also appeared, and it being a Sunday it was still surprising to see some 50 persons willing to give up their weekend for this. In this day, “Innovating Customer Experiences” we learnt from Angel Alvarado, the new Strategic Marketing Director at ALJ, to look at consumer experiences with new eyes. I must say I’ll never visit a SuperPharm and look at it the same way again, as part of the day was a ‘field trip’ to one to observe customer experiences in the dimensions the session guided us to. The workshop after this again went through the “Design Thinking Apprach” to generate some very cool innovative ideas of improving the customer experiences with the aim of driving increased traffic and sales per customer. Again, I was placed with a group, and again a cool new innovative concept was produced which was prototyped and presented. If Superpharm wants a superhero mascot that entertains and also sells some of the improvements we recommended, they should talk to some of the folks from that group.
Details of the IMBDI
Today, we got down to the nitty gritty details at their information session. I must commend Shivma and Risha for their continued smiles and attention to answering my questions, despite having worked 8 days straight to get all this content delivered to me and others like me. The basic cost, over 75,000 TTD (after GATE’s 50% coverage) for the two years, might be enough to scare off most folks, but after talking through with them the options of GATE, payment terms and schedules they had available, it still wasn’t a deal breaker. My concerns about the ILEA exam cost of $1000, which was non-refundable, and which one needs to do and pass before an offer can be made, were also addressed as I understood its purpose was only to ensure the caliber of your student peer group was at an exceptional standard since they expected graduates to go on to lead with great things afterwards. Having gone through working at companies and university programs where I felt like my peers weren’t as driven as me to succeed, I could respect this, and if this cost helps ensure it, I could respect that too.
One concern remained, which was that most of the grade for each course was driven by groupwork, and I’ve been stuck in some pretty poor groups before, and paid the cost for it. This was also addressed, as one of the first one-day workshops that are compulsory as part of the course gives you the chance to learn about your peers in the program, and choose your own group which will work with you throughout every course in the program. I’ve seen this approach used at top worldwide schools such as the London Business School in their MBA program, and I must say it’s a welcome relief to know if I choose the program, and they choose me, that I would have this level of control over my teams.
The bottom line
So frankly, is it a risk worth taking? Well, your mileage may vary. I’m very enthusiastic about the program, but I’ve also invested a year continuing my M.Sc. Computer Science at UWI, so to do this program I’d have to withdraw from it, without any recognition for the last year’s efforts. I know for other students engaged in the IMBA at ALJ they face a similar choice. So in short, for me, as well as for them, it’s not a decision I’d make overnight, although honestly I am leaning towards it given my underwhelming experience at UWI in the Computer Science program this last year.
For anyone else though with similar ambitions, I’d highly recommend learning more about the IMBDI. It’s what’s needed for me and others like me, Trinidad’s entrepreneurs, to not just become innovative, but to be armed with the tools and networks needed to build and lead globally competitive and successful organisations. The opportunity to interact directly with lecturers from multiple reputable international business schools, including ones I highly respect like Harvard Business School, only adds to the ten-fold value I see being delivered by this program when compared to the cost. The IMBDI is worth exploring, and to most with my type of thinking, worth applying to.
Dropbox authentication: insecure by design -
This article will really hit home with many of my colleagues as users of this service. I do not remain unscathed either, since I used this service too for personal use before Windows Live Mesh 2011 was launched and gained a client for Mac, and at one time I also encouraged use of Dropbox to my friends through the invitations that promised additional storage to me if I got others to sign up for ‘free’ Dropbox accounts as well.
Lesson learnt: “There’s more to consider about a cloud service than just the cool factor.”
This Dropbox exploit, as well as the recent GMail data loss and outage than spanned several days and affected both free and paying customers’ accounts, is revealing what I find to be a consistent theme as more service providers launch new cloud services and businesses want to jump on adoption for their enterprise without a proper evaluation.
This Microsoft-sponsored article has an excellent ‘Security Checklist’ page that includes some of the criteria to look at a cloud service provider more keenly with including:
Even with this list, my prediction is that, for many of us, how to judge the trustworthiness of a cloud service provider will continue to be a big topic for some time as more of the startup services are scrutinised!
CodeMash 2011: Drupal with Jim Taylor -
Good stuff! Full integration of Drupal 7 with SQL Server, and addition of Windows LiveId authentication and Bing Maps module…Microsoft’s really embraced Drupal!
Encourage your people to blog! -
In the age of Facebook and other social media outlets that are growing in usage by businesses looking to get our attention, some are really scared about allowing their employees a voice. Scoble offered some good advice on this post on Quora which addressed the misconception that employees of big companies cannot blog their opinions freely. There’s a difference between doing so freely, and doing so irresponsibly. Just to requote, here’s his lessons learnt for good blogging practices.
1. Don’t write ANYTHING you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow.
2. Understand your role in life. At Rackspace I’m not the CEO, so I don’t try to talk like the CEO. That said, I get around to places the CEO doesn’t, so if I have some advice for him, I’ll definitely post it.
3. Before you throw someone under the bus, put yourself in their shoes. I’ve thrown lots of people under the bus in my 10 years of blogging. Heck, just recently I told the CEO of GM that he should be fired. I posted that knowing that he just might know our CEO, which could cause us trouble. But, I put myself in his position and figured it was worth the risk to post that. It is something I’d say to his face, too. But, this is VERY risky in a public company, or, really, any company. If you ruin someone else’s reputation or product launch, for instance, expect blowback.
4. Know the law. You better know the law surrounding financial results, patents, and other things, before you really screw up royally. I once spent a weekend with a lawyer from Microsoft learning how they think and getting up to date on what pisses them off. That was invaluable.
5. Culture is NOT a line in the sand, it is a membrane that you can push on.You better know how taut that membrane is, and how many people will hold you in if you get resistance from that membrane. Each person will have a different membrane (a contractor at Microsoft got fired for breaking an NDA once, if I did the exact same thing my boss would have shrugged it off). Each company has a different membrane, too. What I was doing at Microsoft was NOT tolerated at Google or Apple, for instance.
This was the question a colleague asked me today. It suprised me, even though an urban myth in the non-IT community is that every “techie” person can or likes to write software. So when the question was asked of me, the first thing I did was ask more questions:
Why do you want to learn to program? To go into the profession? To add it to your resume? A quest for enlightenment? (The last one is a joke)
This had my colleague thinking, so I furthered with the most pressing question, that in hindsight, should have been my first:
What do you want to build?
Today, we have mobile applications, web applications, Windows applications, Cloud-driven applications and embedded applications, just to name a few. For each type of application, there’s usually a different language that preferably “fits” into the style a programmer wishes to adopt to maximise performance in building applications for each. And to compound things, each language usually has a preferred IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that makes rapid development of applications in that language that much quicker.
This is also where language frameworks start to matter. Just as different languages can each be optimal for building each type of application, each language usually carries its own language framework, sometimes called a system library, or simply a framework. The framework attached to a language usually provides a series of commonly used classes, methods, extension points and other useful “plumbing” that gives great power to a developer using that language. While this is definitely fun for the passionate programmer to learn, it definitely comes with an overhead cost for those of us trying to meet a deadline.
This is where the Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .Net Framework starts to make much more sense for those of us passionate about building all types of applications and not afraid of learning different programming languages but still concerned about losing the “experience advantage” gained by the investment in learning a framework attached to a programming language of choice, along with a preferred IDE.
This might be getting abstract, so let me bring it back to real experiences for a second. Pre-university I learnt QBasic, a DOS-based programming language that came with most versions of MS-DOS purchased at the time. Great, I was off an running as a programmer! And then my school’s computer lab got Windows 3.1, and subsequently Windows 95, there was Visual Basic ready for me to maximise some of those “Basic” skills in programming (pun intended) as I learnt about GUI development.
Then it got a bit tricky. At University I had to learn Pascal for the first year. While it was definitely a more structured programming language that built my discipline for the craft and prepared me for OOP challenges of later years, it was painful to have to learn this new Pascal library framework. In my final year at University, we were then introduced to Java. While not as painful as it could have been for me, since I had dabbled in OOP (Object Oriented Programming) with Java between breaks in Secondary School and University, I saw so much pain in my fellow students as they painfully, again, had to learn a new library framework, this time Java’s. I won’t get started on what happened when I had my Computer Graphics course, and got to know about tuples with much grief now understanding what the CPython libraries were. I wasn’t the only student who cried “Good Grief!” that year, or in subsequent years, I’m sure.
Would it not have been simpler, and more beneficial for me as a student, to have been able to maximise the investment I made in learning a standard framework that crossed multiple languages, and maximise it moving forward as I advanced in my degree, not to mention my subsequent professional career?
What would have happened if, on entering University, I had started with C# as an entry to learning proper OOP? The Microsoft .NET Framework would then be exposed to me as well, and moving forward provide a foundation for branching into the various application programming languages and the problems learning them would help me tackle: perhaps something like VB.Net for Windows GUI application development, Silverlight and ASP.Net for mobile, web and rich Internet application development, F# for functional programming etc.
With the advent of the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) even the dynamic languages could now be available to me. Life would be so much simpler if I did my degree today, since using IronPython for Computer Graphics I could rely on my previous years’ knowledge of the Microsoft .NET Framework experience to get right into the mysterious of tuples and image transformations and not get too tied up in the non-essential “plumbing”. And what’s more, each of these languages works within the same IDE provided by Visual Studio!
So the answer to the question that started it all? What programming language should I learn? Well, it still depends on what I want to build. But with Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, I now know that the effort I put into learning a language such as VB.Net, C#, F#, Visual C++, IronPython, IronRuby or any other language to come that utilises the Microsoft .Net Framework and compiles to the CLR (Common Language Framework), will be an investment bearing great fruit by minimising my own learning curve and overhead when I choose to learn a subsequent language for something else I wish to build.
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Interesting events around movietowne #trinidad, sadly not part of the #ttlug meetup
Happy Birthday Reeza (guy on right), our resident MSTT Software Architect, the dude’s probably as old as MS itself