your goals and your strategy must be simple. You must have passion and certainty in order to make a difference as a leader. Your tactics, on the other hand, should be layered, multi-dimensional and reflect the patience of someone who cares about reaching a goal.

When Howard Schultz talks about coffee or Jill Greenberg talks about lighting or Cory Booker talks about education, they can impatiently demand clear and simple results. At the same time, successful leaders see the nuance they'll need in executing to get there.

The paradox is that the simplicity we often seek in search of solutions rarely leads to the patient leadership we need to get them.

It's painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

...

The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.

Schools need to end their rearguard actions too...

sometimes we must risk the danger of this dark course over the safety and comfort of the present lightened way.

We must risk all to gain all. Because to stay where we are gets us nowhere.

Many of us make the mistake of choosing comfort over possibility.

The ability of institutions to adapt slowly while preserving continuity of mission and process is exactly what lets them last longer than a single leader or lifespan. When change in the outside world outstrips an institution’s adaptive capabilities, though, the ability to defend the internal organization from outside pressures can become a liability. Stability can turn into rigidity and even institutional blindness.

a true paradigm shift tends to take at least twenty years to become the new normal, even after the evidence has become overwhelming.  Why twenty years?  That’s the amount of time, Kuhn concluded, for the existing generation of practicing scientists to retire or die off.

The current generation, in other words, never make the shift to the new paradigm; it’s only when the next generation takes over the field that the old paradigm—encoded in textbooks, maps, experiments and training materials–can be discarded.

The Law of Disruption can be stated simply:  Social, political, and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.

...

After a decade of operating principally on business and economic system, the Law is now shifting its focus to law and government.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

new media literacy skills are expanding our definitions of literacy but must be cultivated from the foundation of traditional literacy. While traditional literacy is foundational, it is no longer solely sufficient. As media scholar Henry Jenkins has said: "Traditionally we wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write. And today we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media."

The literacy of the future rests on the ability to decode and construct meaning from one's constantly evolving environment -- whether it's coded orally, in text, images, simulations, or the biosphere itself. Therefore we must be adaptive to our social, economic and political landscape. Those of us living in this digital age are required to learn, unlearn and learn again and again.

Navigating times of great change is never an easy affair. But the results can be historic. In this regard, Abraham Lincoln provides wise council. Before signing the Emancipation Proclamation President Lincoln sent a message to Congress in which he said, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

Why is it that every generation panics about the next generation, and is wrong every single time?

A check in your wallet does you very little good. It represents opportunity, sure, but not action.

Most of us are carrying around a check, an opportunity to make an impact, to do the work we're capable of, to ship the art that would make a difference.

Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do.

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

It takes guts to be an insurgent, and even though the asymmetrical nature of challenging the status quo is in their favor, often we find we're short on guts. ... and then the incumbents prevail.

Relying on one’s past reputation is probably not the best approach for transforming an educational system to meet tomorrow’s needs and challenges.

Hat tip to http://twitter.com/#!/SchlFinance101/status/19461869651632128

Nearly every time this country has expanded its social safety net or tried to guarantee civil rights, passionate opposition has followed.

...

The federal income tax, a senator from New York said a century ago, might mean the end of “our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom.” Social Security was actually a plan “to Sovietize America,” a previous head of the Chamber of Commerce said in 1935. The minimum wage and mandated overtime pay were steps “in the direction of Communism, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism,” the National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1938.

After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954, 101 members of Congress signed a statement calling the ruling an instance of “naked judicial power” that would sow “chaos and confusion” and diminish American greatness. A decade later, The Wall Street Journal editorial board described civil rights marchers as “asking for trouble” and civil rights laws as being on “the outer edge of constitutionality, if not more.”

This year’s health care overhaul has now joined the list.

it would be nice if the world was complicated – like a puzzle where every piece has a right place. But it’s not. It’s complex – like a weather system where changes in one aspect of the system cascades and influences the entire system, often in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, complexity is not built into the educational system. We seek “general right answers” rather than “contextual right answers.”

I see (at least) two big transitions ahead of us. First, there is a tremendous need for us to move more of students’ day-to-day work up the cognitive ladder so that it more often encompasses higher-level thinking skills. Second, we need to recognize that we no longer live in an analog, notebook paper world and that schools should be pulling these digital technologies – which are radically transforming every other information-oriented societal segment – into our learning-teaching processes in ways that are authentic, meaningful, and (hopefully) powerful.

These transitions will be heroic journeys – epic changes – rather than ‘snap your fingers and they happen’ events.

The adoption rate of digital infrastructure is two to five times faster than that of previous infrastructure such as electricity, railroads and telephone networks. Changes currently manifest themselves as challenges rather than opportunities because our institutions and practices are still geared to earlier infrastructures.

It is in our everyday actions that revolution actually finds breath

The problem with putting it all on the line...

is that it might not work out.

The problem with not putting it all on the line is that it will never (ever) change things for the better.

if I was going to put so much personal energy into making something happen, it was a lot better to create the key to the future than to nurse along the dying past

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 — ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.