Global Strategy - blog

Despite that I mostly agree with evolutionary biologists, especially when it comes to the societal implications of their evolutionary views (such as eradicating religion from the affairs of state); one thing has bothered me for a while now. That is the ontological framework-the world-of these popularly bent natural scientists.

Manuel Castells gave his public lecture at LSE already some time ago. Nevertheless, his message was topical then, is today and will be in the coming year as well. He concentrated on the growth and importance of the Internet as the infrastructure of the information society and its implications to the personal freedom people that have the access to it enjoy. Only the emergence of mobile telecommunication has grown faster than the availability of the world-wide network. Despite the prevalence of the ‘net' (or because of), human fears are common in the every-day discussions of the matter. He pointed out some facts about it.

In November last year, I criticized the logic with which some people calculated the valuation of Facebook corporation to be 15 billion dollars (see an original article as well as a further comment and a related article). I suggested that perhaps the fundamental value of this corporation could more realistically lie between 3-5 billion. Now, an interesting new piece of analysis arrived today: Valleywag news site calculated Facebook's current value to be 2-3 billion.

Imperial College has far less exciting high profile speakers in the areas of business and social sciences than its UK peers. However, this week I had the opportunity to see a lecture by Daniel Goleman (of the emotional intelligence fame) who one of our professors had convinced to speak at the Imperial while traveling to London for some conference. By co-incidence, I had also taught half a session (60 minutes) on ethics in strategic management -- something the business school accreditation bodies are insisting on. These occasions provoked me to write my first blog post here.

An interesting question to GloStra is how firms can or should adapt their strategies according to the societies in which they operate.

On Monday, a workshop took place at the LSE CPNSS as a part of project called ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science'. The day was loaded with four speakers, all hovering around the topic matter. All the presenters provided interesting insights to the general matter; due to the limitations of this account, I am going to concentrate on one of them.