Monday 10 September, 2007

Interesting Videos at MIT World

Today I spent time in watching videos hosted by MIT World. The first one was an interview of Prof Henry Mintzberg by Ricardo Semler (President, Semco S/A). Prof Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and is considered to be one of the Gurus in the area of Strategy. This session was however related to Prof Mintzberg's latest book titled, Managers Not MBAs. In his interview, Prof Mintzberg made very strong point that MBAs don't make managers. Business schools such as Harvard do teach business skills such as marketing and financial analysis but do not make tomorrow's managers or leaders. He asserted that management is more of a craft and hence can be learn only by being on the job. He talked about the program he is running for practicing managers and how the approach is different there. It was quite interesting to listen to Prof Mintzberg's provocative opinions and also the thoughtful and relevant questions asked by Ricardo Semler.

Second video that I watched was a Q&A with Jack Welch in which questions were asked by Alex D’Arbeloff (Professor of Practice, MIT Sloan School of Management) and some time directly by audience. Jack Welch in his characteristic style answered all questions while offering his wisdom as shared in his book titled "Winning". His answers for questions related to firing of employees, work-life balance and telecommuting were quite interesting and provocative. While I have read Winning and knew most of what Jack Welch said in this session, watching him speaking was indeed a treat!

The third and last video that I saw was a speech of Tim Berners-Lee. He started with talking about emerging technologies and how standards are important for emerging technologies. Later he shared his vision about semantic web and talked about RDF. After his (fast-paced!) speech, Bob Metcalfe (Founder, 3Com) asked him very interesting questions. One of the interesting questions was which browser does Tim use!

There are few more interesting videos that I wish to watch now. But now it's time to go to bed!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Shrikant,

Good to know somebody does blog amongst my colleagues.

I blog on technology which includes Ajax, Java EE and SOA. The link to my blog is:

http://techtracer.com

I came to your blog through LinkedIn and have sent you a request too.

C ya soon.