Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Debate and difference of opinion, lightly salted with an appropriate amount of passion and tenacity, can help lead to significant breakthroughs. In the world of corporate correctness we are all living in, this should be highly encouraged. I really appreciated Bob Frisch’s response to my recent article on the importance of culture. Though I think he missed the point, the overwhelming number of people who embraced the notion that culture is imperative for sustained success is an indication of the importance of this issue and the opportunity culture offers for positive change.

People matter. More than machinery, products, and real estate. People invent and build. People support and serve customers. Your people either create or undermine value, cultivate or kill relationships, drive or reduce success. A well-conceived strategy living in the hands of unhappy, misdirected, misinformed people is a sure way to a slow and painful death. There is no comparison to being in the hearts and hands of energized, informed, and motivated people.

Companies are not linear, inert systems. They are ever-changing, organic communities that are dependent on the engagement, talent, and energy of their people to operate successfully. Ignore the mental well-being of your people and culture at your own peril. Step inside of any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and the culture is either driving the strategy or undermining it. To exist in the first place, a company must have a clear purpose, a deliberate intent, and a directive or set of ideas that it uses to pursue a clear goal, but it’s the people who have to execute it.

There is abundant evidence in every industry that the best-laid plans (or strategies) are derailed, suffocated, or eaten by cultures that either don’t understand or straight-out reject the intent. And this, in turn, slows, sucks the life out of, or sabotages the implementation or execution of the company’s strategy.

For the sake of debate, let’s assume there are two kinds of companies in the world: those driven by strategy, where culture is not a priority, and those guided by a clear strategy, where culture is highly valued and universally understood. To help clarify what’s important, let’s look at the relationship between culture and strategy.

Every company needs a clear strategy…really?

You don’t need to be told that a company must have a clear reason for being and a plan of action. But, you might be surprised by how many companies lack strategic clarity, and whose only purpose is to make a profit. To be clear, making money is absolutely imperative, but it is just one of the outcomes of a successful company.

Competitive differentiation and optimal financial performance do not come from strategy alone. To ignore the potential of a fully engaged and mobilized culture that understands, embraces, encourages, executes, and enhances strategy is negligent and a missed opportunity. It is imperative that today’s leaders not only understand and focus on the interdependence of strategy and culture, but also step back and examine their own role–it is one of the most important areas of their personal responsibility. The mental and physical health of the company in their care must be paramount for sustainable success.

Strategy is rational and culture is emotional. 

Strategy, at its core, is rational, logical, clear and simple. It should be easy to comprehend and to talk about. Without a clear strategy, a company is lost. Culture, on the other hand, means different things to different people. It is emotional, ever-changing, and complex. Culture is human, vulnerable, and as moody as the people who define it. It can be intimidating and frustrating, often leaving leaders dodging it, neglecting it, or discounting it. Because so many large companies are run by people whose expertise is heavily skewed to the rational, financial, and legal side of the equation, culture is often subordinated, misunderstood, or underappreciated.

Every company has a culture, but not every culture is healthy. 

Culture is the environment in which the intent of your company is nurtured, fueled, restricted, or suffocated. Every company has a culture and its health should be monitored and cared for. Cultures reach their full potential when the people in the trenches doing the day-to-day hard work understand the game and are fully informed and engaged. Healthy and vibrant cultures are directed, purposeful, vibrant, optimistic, and highly-successful because they are fueled by the company’s larger purpose and supported by the capability to follow through. A company with a healthy culture is able to operate at its fullest potential while one with an unhealthy culture operates far from its best.

Visionary leaders are required for successful culture. 

Like a great coach, a leader’s job is to clearly set the intent for the journey, model the correct behaviors, lead with an understood set of values, communicate clearly and with sincerity, and set clear expectations and guardrails for the culture to thrive within. It’s the team’s job to bring their best game every day and to execute the game plan to the very best of their ability. Like any great sports team, a culture is built by motivation, communication, training, encouragement, and celebrating both small and significant successes.

Culture is the field on which the strategy plays. A vibrant and functional culture is like a blanket that embraces, protects, and nurtures the strategy. A company without a strategy lacks direction. A strategy without a culture that understands or embraces it is like a sports team without spirit.

Understanding the relationship between culture and strategy. 

1. Strategy drives focus and direction while culture is the emotional, organic habitat in which a company’s strategy lives or dies.

2. Strategy is just the headline on the company’s story–culture needs a clearly understood common language to embrace and tell the story that includes mission, vision, values, and clear expectations.

3. Strategy is about intent and ingenuity and culture determines and measures desire, engagement, and execution.

4. Strategy lays down the rules for playing the game, and culture fuels the spirit for how the game will be played.

5. Strategy is imperative for differentiation but a vibrant culture delivers the strategic advantage.

6. Culture is built or eroded every day. How you climb the hill and whether it’s painful, fun, positive, or negative defines the journey.

7. When culture embraces strategy, execution is scalable, repeatable, and sustainable.

8. Culture is a clear competitive advantage.

9. Culture must be monitored to understand the health and engagement of your organization.

10. Strategy and culture both require the clarity and power of brand to bring them seamlessly together.

Image: Flickr user certifiable.nl

With the rumors churning about Google’s potential “heads-up display glasses” coming out at the end of the year, we thought it was important to look back at the history of this technlogy.

Heads-up displays allow users to receive data on a screen in front of them, so they don’t have to look somewhere else, thus disrupting what they’re concentrating on. Each HUD has three parts: the combiner, which is the surface the data is projected on — like a windshield or lens; the projector unit, which puts out the image; and a video generation computer, which creates the images.

Imagine a company catalyzing a new approach to student learning and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). And what if the company’s purpose were to prepare students around the world, from all corners and walks of life, to collaborate in solving social and environmental problems, beginning right now?

Imagine the power of the relationships these children will have when they are in their 20s and 30s as they continue to work with each other.

Sound ridiculous to you? Do you wonder: How is this possible, given that one billion children live in poverty, many in remote rural villages, others in densely populated urban slums? When so many children in developed countries aren’t even getting decent educations, much less children in the developing world?

What if I told you that middle school and high school students from some of the world’s most deprived communities are already working together on solutions for sustainable energy sources and to purify water? That 250,000 students are already collaborating on STEM projects through 60 schools, universities, and NGOs around the world? And that plans are well under way to scale such educational opportunities to reach millions?

What I just described is pilot program for Hewlett Packard’s Catalyst Initiative. Catalyst is part of HP’s Social Innovation program, which encompasses education, entrepreneurship, health, and community. Particularly distinctive about Catalyst is that “all the learning creates far-reaching results in problems facing humanity,” says Ajith Basu, chief program executive for the Agastya International Foundation, and head of the New Learner consortium of Catalyst.

While HP’s Social Innovation program can be considered a particularly evolved case of corporate social responsibility, I think it is much bigger. Corporate Global Vision (CGV), a concept that I have articulated, is a better descriptor: Envisioning and achieving the greater potential for both the company and the world by affirming the interdependence of corporate success with the health and prosperity of the planet and its people.

“We wanted to figure out how to create immersion learning experiences,” said Gabi Zedlmayer, vice president of HP’s Office of Global Social Innovation, when we got together at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting last fall. “We know that technology alone is not the solution. So we decided to build a network of schools and people across boundaries and frontiers to find a different way of learning.”

HP’s goal with Catalyst is to reimagine STEM education and the classroom, Jim Vanides, senior program manager for HP, said in an interview. He described how HP established “an international network of innovation sandboxes” to answer the question: “What does a powerful learning experience look like, and how does technology enable it?” Further, he explained, HP’s goal is “STEM plus”–not simply STEM, but also creativity, collaboration, and problem solving–“all that students will need to be valuable citizens of the world.”

According to Vanides, by raising STEM+ literacy and increasing the quality of the STEM pipeline, the next generation will be prepared to solve the large and seemingly intractable social global challenges.

“Breaking down all barriers is fundamental to success,” said Vanides. ”Barriers between countries, secondary and college education, universities and NGOs. At work, we solve problems through collaboration with people throughout the world. If young people learn to engage in learning and problem-solving without any silos, they will be prepared to have an enormous impact.”

HP had a vision of the true potential of children of all backgrounds throughout the world.

“This experience has transformed me,” said Basu. “My greatest learning has been that children have no problems anywhere. The problem is the system and the lack of resources.” Even in the poorest, most remote neighborhoods of India, Basu says, “the children are much smarter than we were. Much faster. We must create systems around that. We can create powerful learning communities.”

Re-imagining education is not a fantasy. It’s becoming a reality.

Consider a student in a classroom of 35 students that never had funds for lab equipment. Starting last year, via Catalyst, she can conduct experiments remotely by using laboratories at MIT and the University of Queensland in Australia. She can, for example, measure radiation emissions as a function of how far she holds her cell phone from her ear. She can design the experiments herself, and watch the Geiger counter in Australia via live media. She can run the experiments as many times as she likes at her own pace, produce a lab report, and then compare results and experiences in the classroom with her teacher and fellow students. The results are already in: Students who use the virtual instruments show significant increases in test scores.

I actually ran the experiment myself online while Skyping with Dr. Kemi Jona, Ph.D., director of the Office of STEM Education Projects at Northwestern University. Science was never so fun, and it stimulated my curiosity. “Here’s the vision: Remote labs can be transformative at a district, state, or national level because you can create a server function or cloud solution that can provide a centralized shared facility of science experiments,” says Jona. “A district no longer needs to buy lab equipment for each school as we do now in the current funding model…a model that is financially prohibitive for most communities.”

Next, imagine students in the remotest villages in India helping to find solutions to waste management by participating in science projects via mobile science labs, science fairs, and young instructor leader programs. This is already happening through the Agastya International Foundation.

Through 62 mobile science vans that take science education to the village doorstep, 28 rural science centers, and a 170-acre Creativity Lab campus, Agastya has reached over 4 million children and 150,000 teachers in several Indian states and is supported by scientists and educators from the Indian Institute of Science, Defense Research and Development Organization, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

And finally: Imagine a magnet middle school in Stamford, Conn., where 50% of the students are from educationally disadvantaged families, helping to solve local well water contamination problems through a partnership with middle school students in Shandong University Middle School in China. Throughout the process, the students from Stamford are learning Mandarin and the students from China are learning English. (Students are pictured, top, collecting water samples from Long Island Sound.)

“This began with our seeing water contamination in our local water wells as a teachable moment,” said Bryan Olkowski, assistant principal at Scofield Magnet Middle School. “Then, by engaging in Catalyst, the world has opened up to us.” Since 2010, Scofield students have worked in partnership with students at their sister school in China, remotely and through exchange visits. They are collaborating using geospatial information studies (GIS), technology, and systems with university faculty and resources provided by HP.

Scofield teachers traveled to New Dehli last spring to present at the international Catalyst Summit, attended by all of the consortium partners; a new group of Scofield teachers will participate in the follow-up Summit this spring in Beijing. And HP has introduced new funders to Scofield, including the International Society for Technlogy in Education.

According to Olkowski, one thousand students in Connecticut have already benefited from Catalyst, as well as 640 in China. He believes that the project is a contributing factor to increasing math and reading scores on state tests for kids in his school.

“This is what’s possible for public school education,” said Olkowski. And that key message from this project is spreading: U.S. Congressman Jim Himes visited Scofield, and Olkowski was asked to brief the U.S. Congress on the project.

Scaling the solution through further investment, collaboration, and advocacy.

Beyond the sharing among the Catalyst consortium partners, further collaboration occurs between HP and corporate, foundation, and government leaders.Jeannette Weisschuh, HP’s director of education initiatives, spoke with me last week from London, where she attended the Education World Forum, the largest global gathering of education ministers. “The focus here is on innovative concepts to jointly increase student performance, especially in STEM education and entrepreneurship and using technology to increase student outcomes and enhance learning experiences and achievement in all disciplines, for the purpose of building a better world.”

With the pilot phase just completed, HP is embarking on Phase II. This year, HP will determine which of its innovation sandboxes is yielding the best results, invest further resources accordingly, and engage additional funding partners in order to scale the best solutions.

A particularly important HP partner has been the World Economic Forum’s Global Education Initiative. Additionally, OECD is working with HP to study the best uses of technology to advance STEM education through innovative learning environments; together they will issue a report at the end of this year.

Corporate Global Vision: Envisioning and achieving the greater potential.

The field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been maturing for over two decades. Since the 1990s, many of us have been helping companies transition from philanthropy and service to CSR–an integrated strategy that advances social and environmental purposes while also enhancing corporate financial value.

Corporate Global Vision (CGV) takes the C-suite and boardroom view. With Catalyst, HP demonstrates the problem-solving capabilities of HP technology; expands markets by increasing education rates and wealth worldwide; and builds relationships and goodwill with customers, including businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals.

David Packard understood this when he said that “the real reason HP exists is to make a contribution, to improve the welfare of humanity.”

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Big January Apple events are becoming common–perhaps as a move to distract from the messy, drawn-out gadget orgy that is CES. Tomorrow’s big reveal has a distinctly educational flavor.

Several weeks ago we learned that Apple had something to do with textbooks waiting in the wings, and it came with the blessing of none other than Steve Jobs, himself. Jobs is said to have made a big effort on this plan, as it’s something that was close to his heart, even as his health was deteriorating. That alone makes the event significant.

But what, many folks have wondered, is Apple going to do, exactly? We know the iPad is a game changer in many ways for the publishing industry, and we know that many educational establishments are leaping to embrace the device to enable much more sophisticated teaching methods (and that it’s inspired other efforts to do the same for much less money). We’ve seen companies like Kno try to bring tablet computing to schools and universities with one main selling point, amid others like cleverer note-taking: To simplify the problem of hauling many heavy and expensive textbooks around. We also know that while a plain e-version of a textbook has many benefits over a dead trees edition, there’s much scope for adding rich media and interactivity, perhaps to better illustrate difficult math equations or mediate history pop quizzes, in order to really make the lessons stick in the mind.

So some rumors suggested Apple was going to squash the existing textbook publishing paradigm–perhaps “digitally destroy” it–by releasing a new platform for powerful interactive textbook design, along with all the necessary tools to enable authors to make iPad e-textbooks truly 21st century. The new package would be a “GarageBand for textbooks,” it’s been thought, leveraging the simple and amazingly potent skills of the iPad GarageBand app to attract all sorts of people, incuding those who’d otherwise never have been interested in making music.

These rumors may have been enough to push Kno to add new technology to its tablet education platform: Kno Flashcards which automatically turning key phrases in any Kno-format textbook into a flashcard to boost student revision, and Kno Me, which is an analytics platform to keep students abreast of their learning habits and targets. Meanwhile a firm called Chegg, which has done pretty well in shaking up the textbook paradigm with a novel book-rental scheme, has just released its first piece of software aimed at the e-textbook game. It’s an HTML5-based interface, meaning it’s platform agnostic, that lets students access their e-texts whether they’re using an iPad in class or in bed, or if they’re using a school PC in the library–including all their personal annotations and reminders, and other habits more usually associated with physical books.

These are great innovations, excellent for students.

Yet other rumors say Apple’s simply going to try to shake up the textbook sales market by promoting existing publisher partners and simplifying access to their content via a dedicated e-textbook (iTextbook?) marketplace. Rather than concentrating on tools for publishing–a move that some think will be met by great resistance, not least because of the way authors tend to use Adobe tools–Apple’s learned its lesson from upsetting the music industry and will try a more measured approach.

We’re not convinced by this. Sure working on two platforms (Adobe and Apple’s) may be a pain, but if the minds behind the better textbooks are offered a powerful and superbly easy-to-use interface by Apple to create truly next-generation books that convey their educational message more potently…then our money is on them leaping to embrace it. The softly softly idea also doesn’t feel very Steve Jobs–and we know he was passionate about this topic. 

The Wall Street Journal last night revealed that Apple’s put its iWork man, Roger Rosner, in control of the new educational system. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” in a manner we’ve come to suspect means the WSJ is an official leak channel for seeding Apple ideas, again mentions “tools for building digital textbooks” and suggests something new, too: The “service is expected to be a way for a broad range of schools, publishers and others to develop learning material in a digital format.” This strikes us as being a very Jobs-ian idea, and we can imagine he’d have taken the stage tomorrow and said something like: “It’s not just the textbook writers who have great ideas–teachers do too, and so do their students. So why not let everyone build some great interactive books that help their class, and perhaps other students elsewhere, understand a lesson?” iWork, you see, has both a clean interface and a cloud-storage aspect that would seem suited to an expansion into educational publishing, co-work and sharing. 

If this really is the thrust of Apple’s news tomorrow, then it’s a step to bring textbooks into the modern era that seems much bigger than the moves of Apple’s peers. We’ll only know more when the chalk dust starts flying at 10 a.m. EST tomorrow.

Chat about this article with Kit Eaton on Twitter (he’s seen his fair share of higher education, and would’ve loved more interactive and lighter textbooks!) and Fast Company too.