The other day, somebody asked me what were the most influential ideas or business concepts that had a profound affect on my career and the development of my thinking.
Off the top of my head I came up with 8 influencers, listed approximately in chronological order:
My Toolbox of skills
- Kepner Tregoe's Executive Problem Analysis and Decision Making methodology that I learned when I worked for Canada Packer's in their Pharma division as a chemist
- Edward de Bono's concept of Lateral Thinking, and concept mapping applied to strategic thinking, business development and business models thanks to Ontario Hydro where I was a an analyst and manager of policy and program assessment.
- Technology Foresight , issues management and environmental (or horizon) scanning and Management Oversight and Risk Tree (MORT) methodologies, again thanks to Ontario Hydro
- Aultshuller's TRIZ methodology, the concept of Invention algorithms, that I first heard about at a CPS conference at Buffalo in the 1980's
- Marshal McLuhan's tetrad model, through the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, U of T
- Viable systems modeling (VSM)developed by my good late friend and colleague Stafford Beer, the father of Management Cybernetics circa 1986
- the idea of smart technologies, thanks to an emerging technology project that I worked on for Royal Bank, rbc.com
- Karl Weik's concepts of sensemaking, throughout the 1990s'
Who or what were your top influencers?
© 2005-2007
Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "
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.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"- old Japanese proverb
".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones
"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought." A. Einstein
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
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Alex
Just google each term above
Posted by: Walter Derzko | January 25, 2007 at 01:36 AM
How about adding links to these concepts?
Posted by: Alex | January 18, 2007 at 10:45 PM