"Come From the Heart"

By Curtis Ogden

Remember this old song? I don’t. But I heard Garnet Rogers doing a version the other day on WUMB. The timing was quite something, as I was in the car on my way to the office and my return from parental leave, trying to hold on to the reality of my situation. And it’s been on my mind as I get ready to embrace and ease into another transition (just remember, 40 is the new 30). Click here to listen to Guy Clark’s version.

When I was a young man my daddy told me
A lesson he learned, it was a long time ago
If you want to have someone to hold onto
You're gonna have to learn to let go

You got to sing like you don't need the money
Love like you'll never get hurt
You got to dance like nobody's watchin'
It's gotta come from the heart if you want it to work

Now here is the one thing that I keep forgetting
When everything is falling apart
In life as in love, what I need to remember
There's such a thing as trying too hard

You got to sing like you don't need the money
Love like you'll never get hurt
You got to dance like nobody's watchin'
It's gotta come from the heart if you want it to work

The words are simple, but their implications are profound. It seems so counter-intuitive to what may be a programmed survival instinct in our species, but letting go may be exactly where we need to go on many fronts. What about you, aspiring change agents? Anything you need to loosen your group on?

Democratized Creativity

By Melinda Weekes

“We have handed over the tools of creation.”

“We have democratized creativity to an extent that would have been unthinkable years ago.”

– James Boyle

Duke Law Professor and founder of Creative Commons, James Boyle, gives a talk at Google Zeitgeist 2008 on the subject of “Copyright and Openness”.

Boyle advocates that, given our penchant for closed, centralized, ways of handling content, we need re-wire ourselves towards open, decentralized forms and norms when dealing with creative content.

Gend Leonard takes this theoretical framework and makes it practical it in his talk, “Getting Attention 2.0”. Presented to the Scottish Audience Development Forum in October 2008, Leonard outlines several savvy tactics artists [and all content creators] can use to share their content for free, while cultivating big numbers of loyal listeners/followers....while still making money.

Artists And Audiences In A Connected World Gerd Leonhard Futurist

View more documents from Gerd Leonhard.

Viewing these presentations conjured in me a yearning for a past professional love: the fields of entertainment law and intellectual property. In fact, an urge overtook me that hadn’t felt in years: the urge to research case law. I found a recent copyright infringement suit brought by a training/consultant firm against some of its former trainers who had started their own training operation and had developed a training manual with content that is the subject of the suit. In a future post, I’ll break down the very interesting judicial analysis here and elsewhere that bring to bear directly on some of the issues we face as an organization, as creators, and as a sector, but for now, I ask:

• What are your fears as it relates to this push towards openness, opensource and creative common licenses?
• What do you think you (as an individual) or we (training orgs, NPOs) would actually be doing differently if copyright ownership, say, of our training materials, were not an issue in our work?

Im going out on a limb here to say that its my belief that I think our organizational perceptions of barriers we face (to product development, open source licensing, economic viability) exceed the reality. To sort this out, I’m motivated to put on my legal eagle hat in earnest to assess the gap been common perception and our business reality. In this way, your thoughts will provide me with a better sense of what we’re feeling, what we know, and what we want. I’ll use them as the starting points for my inquiry and adventure into an area of past (and just revived!) passion.

Prove of Improve?

By Curtis Ogden

Last week I had the privilege of co-delivering a workshop on collaboration and effective teams to this year’s crop of New Leaders for New Schools Residents as part of their Summer Foundations experience. These principals-to-be give one hope for the future of urban education in this country.

Prior to our two days of delivery, I heard Jeff Howard of the Efficacy Institute deliver a presentation to the Residents on the difference between what he called a “performance orientation” and a “learning orientation.” Howard’s claim is that schools often fail when they overemphasize student and staff performance at the expense of learning, and his message to the future school leaders was that they needed to think hard about what is most important as a long-term goal for the people in their building.

Among other things, shifting from a performance to a learning orientation means shifting from:

 a focus on the outcome to a focus on the process to an outcome;
 the belief that error indicates failure and limitation to seeing it as a valuable feedback mechanism for improvement;
 seeing uncertainty as threatening to welcoming it as a challenge;
 seeing the role of authority as that of judge to seeing it as one of being a guide.

Howard also suggests that a performance orientation can often be accompanied by the unfortunate tendency to see talent as given rather than ultimately developed.

I would dare say that it is not only our schools that suffer from an overemphasis on performance. Many organizations seem to fall victim (in practice) to the belief that leaders are born, success is purely predicated upon outcomes, and that tight control is the best way of operating. Not so surprising if this is the way we are being educated. What happens to learning and innovation under these conditions? If we are busy trying to prove ourselves, does this ultimately come at the expense of improving our communities and world?