week 1:2

I have caught up with my journal and from today onward I will write the days as they occur.

Paul Campbell founded The Entrepreneurs’ Forum which is for CEO’s and company founders of companies that have been doing business for more than 2 years, have turnover of more than £250 000 and has a strong commitment to growth.  I understand the semantics, the words, what does it really mean in action and heart?

Maybe I should follow the fear. Fear. Last year it happened that we – my 2 boys and hubby and me – were going to visit my family in South Africa.  A week before we were due to fly – we had the tickets and so on and so on – we discovered that the boys’ South African passports had expired.  Utter panic yes, but panic brought adrenalin (or something like that) and adrenalin brought focus.  Researching. The only answer was to apply for emergency travel documents at the South African embassy in London. Then apply for new SA passports in SA.  All this time, four days of doing the forms and planning to go to London and getting there and waiting in line, until the precise moment that they handed me the forms that said that the boys could fly with us I was precise and fast and zinging – flooded by the chemicals of fear, chemicals that speeded me up.

It felt like I was doing a full day’s work in a quarter of a day.  I was a superman.

This feeling has returned to me around other events and FEAR led to hyper responses and polished crystal clear decisions and speed.  A gift, it seems, of fear is that it gives one super powers.  And facing the difficult, the challenging, the fear inducing gives off the very sorts of chemicals that lead to more drive.

The smart card – an RFID card activating an induction loop at each door, interrogated by central computer.  What happens if the power is down?  Can I lock door or open it?

Thorough library introduction by Louise Gordon. Lovely how my lifelong love and experience of libraries interleaves with all the new info.  Library sort of smells like the CSIR library from when I worked there.  Odd little flashback.  Maybe it’s the smell of journals loaded with the effort of many many humans, just bursting.  Louise understands the purchasing path of all the books, journals and how it works between them. Ebooks makes it more widely available.  Multiple copies can be accessed.  Something in there about the changes in publishing benefiting knowledge.  The maximising of the spread of good work.  Democratisation of the message.

Love love love what she told me about endnote.  Glory be and gush.  Who said the one world governance is bad.

Met with Gavin Clark this afternoon.  He answered one of my big questions.  The question was where do I find the profiles of companies that are involved in the pharma and bio field in the region?  First for pharma! http://firstforpharma.co.uk/ which he put together because when he started he had the same questions.  There are about 80 companies in the region he says and what they do ranges from formulation all the way through to synthesis and design.

Fiona McCusker does funded  placements within industry. KTP knowledge transfer partnerships.  I must meet with her to see what sorts of projects are funded.  How can I send people her way – either from the university or from industry looking for people?  Or even just to put new contacts on her distribution list. {Addendum: Joanna says that Fiona is on maternity leave – is blessed with twins! I hope to be speaking to Suzie Nestor-Robinson}

I will be available to do some training in the area of enterprise, to inspire entrepreneurship.  Gavin will pull me in.  Must speak to Michael about this as well, I think.

Apparently BBC Radio 4 had a talk at 09:00 today “Andrew Marr on creativity with Jonah Lehrer, Scanner, Rachel O’Reilly and Joanna REC. . .” which referenced business and writing and science and is a must listen http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gnq8y

Gavin advised me on a list of questions that I will ask Paul at Medtronic.  Maybe get them tweaked for any company who I talk to thus.  Of course Paul is in Switzerland and I can’t expect him to be involved in Newcastle but maybe that is to the good, maybe he will give me difficult news more clearly.  I mean, he is far away but he is dutch too.  Can’t get more reasons to be direct than that, can I?

what problems and challenges do you have the a uni could delve into? what would it take for you to be involved at the uni? do you need collaboration?

I must look into translational grants, if not for me then to be aware of them for researchers who I encounter.  Love that word {translation} because it works well for both people in the conversation.

minus 4 days

I attended the NE Business Awards Final the Thursday before I started work.  On the way to the awards dinner, we appointed Paul the Visiting Interim Professor of ambiguity.   Paul Campbell is an entrepreneur.  He is the founder and head honcho, the man who calls the shots as he sees them at digital radio station, http://amazingradio.co.uk/. They provide a platform for new music.  The music is uploaded by artists and then played.  It is also sold from their tunes store and when that happens, the artists get 100%.  His business makes money through other avenues and in this the business model is honouring of the creative impulse.  Amazing Radio is expanding to the US and South America and he said something that made perfect sense, one of those phrases that when I hear it I realise that it makes sense of many bits of my thinking.

He said it perfectly.  “In my business I am following the logic”. 

Business of this nature which probably would not have done well in terms of a “proper” business case at the start.  It seems to have benefited from passion, ability and then the willingness to follow the logic.  It must be said that he probably drives the logic ahead of himself a little just so that he can follow it.

The Challenge: When he discovered that I had been teaching knitting at my children’s school as a volunteer  – and my theories around it, how it encourages project thinking, personal capability, how it showed me many and varied ways of learning –  learning styles if you will –  in children and showed me that everybody can learn to knit – he set me a challenge.  Can I teach someone to knit using just audio?  Well can I?

minus 1 week

Tyrone Pitsis delivered his inaugural lecture, talking about speeding up a collaborative project by using the alliance model.  The case study was of the alliance that was formed to fix the sewage system in Sydney ahead of the Olympics.  Trust and openness and moving people along to other projects if they were resistant to this model of working.  Clear immovable goal.  All decision making judged against the project goal.  No blame culture – Kan ban posters that focus solutions not scape goats.  No lawsuits.  25 page contract as opposed to the usual 300 page contract.  And still no lawsuits.

This is truly inspiring and makes me want to go out and change the way we work, change the world.  Again.

I have seen that contracts are not worth anything if the person doing the work is dishonest or unwilling or simply uunable to do the work, but for the rest of us they are a means of formally laying down responsibilities where we want them laid out, for agreeing the purpose of the project

Besides the many personal examples of complex projects and how it was the relationships that were where the solutions were found, I was wondering about the following.

Big public projects are budgeted on quotes given and everyone on the inside knows that the quotes are going in low… and expect the actual cost to be higher.  No insider is surprised at budget over-runs.  Also I suppose then that the honest supplier i.e. who comes in with a higher (more correct) quote, will not actually get the job.  OK.  So everyone quotes low.  The project then “comes in over budget” and the managers outside of the process or the people asking for the work to be done (politicians?) are whacked, they take the stick for the awful job they have done and told they are incompetent.

What if one retrospectively analyses public projects over under and on budget and applies the measures – the kpi’s – that the olympics case study used – and see how the projects fared.  I am certain that many of them will do just fine on more than one measure (just… not budget or lawsuits or maybe time) and it occurs to me that these measures can give us all good news among the bad.  I mean… as a member of the public, using the new City Library in Newcastle (reopened in 2009 after a 3 year rebuild) I am affected by how fit for purpose the building is and the services delivered there… not whether the project ran under or over budget or any of those measures.

minus 4 weeks

A month before I started work at Newcastle University, at a talk organised by IPPR North http://www.ippr.org/ – the Ideas on the Third Floor series, Professor Chris Brink, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University, spoke about “A world class civic university”.   These are my notes on what he said.  His ideas have therefore been filtered through me.

He engaged us in a thought experiment.  In the knowledge economy, what is the supply chain?  Is the university simply supply i.e. knowledge production?  If so then how do we know that the market want what we suppl?. The big ticket societal challenges have been chosen for the university to engage with so that we understand the demand, respond to the demand.

Civic means the city i.e. place you meet when you walk out of the door of the university.  Going back in time we see that the universities were founded to address the issues that were alive in those newly industrialised cities.  The university should not be kept apart.

A classic question is “what is the value of going to university?” How do we balance public good and private benefit?  People like to have a sense of purpose.

Prof Brink asks for current case studies of engagement between the uni and the world, no matter how small.  These are lifted up.

A phrase that I wrote down but don’t understand.  A portfolio of Engagement with a stable exit.  Is that like opening the barn door so that the horse can stroll out or in as he needs to?

The taxi driver test.  If you ask the taxi driver “what is the university doing?”, will the taxi driver be able to tell you?  And my own added question would be “will the taxi driver be sending his son/daughter to university?”

Engagement is when the voice is heard – civil society’s voice is heard in the university and the university’s voice is heard out there.

Coherence deficit.  North East sees differences more than similarities, sub regional differences are stark.

Phrase self interest in a manner that fosters cohesion and collaboration.

Do what academics do well and do it with a purpose.