western university arts & humanities career week

Hi, I’m Jeff. My goal today:

Convince you that the Liberal Arts equips you with

a unique set of skills ideally suited to today’s world

Share the story of how I got where I am

And a bit of what I’ve learned along the way

And why it is that I’ve reached this conclusion

2nd year

(2006&7)

Media in Society*

Ancient Philosophy*

Early Modern Philosophy

Intro to Theory of Knowledge*

Intro to Philosophy of Mind*

Intro to Medieval Philosophy

Philosophy of Science*

Conceptual Development of Mathematics

Writing 101**applies directly to my job today

…meanwhile…

Some of my favourite classes:

Speculative Fiction:

Science Fiction & Fantasy*

Intro to Early Modern Philosophy

The Crucible of the Modern Age

Creative Non-Fiction*

Killer Culture

“Business strategy think tank”

“Syndicated research”

10-15 “internal resources”

+ many “external contractors”

Our job: Find cool ideas and sell them to big companies.

What I madeWrote, co-wrote, or ghostwrote

“Checking-in” to the future

Process mining

Life imitating art

Continuous strategy for a

networked world

Making strategy real

What’s measured counts

Marketing 2.0

Presented

Prediction markets

Gamers as customers and

employees

Mining everyone’s business

Overview of social media

The new who and the myth

of customer empowerment

Case studies

OkCupid

Valve Software

T4G in 30 seconds

We design, develop, and

implement technology

solutions that help our

customers run their

businesses better.

AnalyticsDigital

Marketing

Managed

ServicesOmnichannel

Custom

Development

Here comes the dialectic.

Most people just copy others

This also copies thinking

Thoughts include hidden assumptions

Old thoughts are from old times

And contain old assumptions

Change invalidates assumptions

This means you have a bunch of

assumptions about the world that

are both invisible and incorrect.

This problem is endemic.

Examples

Music industry

Video rentals

Fire alarms

Scarcity of education

The cost of starting a business

How failure works

How do we solve this?

1. Go back to the fundamentals

2. Solicit critical feedback

3. Pick absurd goals

1&2: Elon Musk, 3: Google

Who better to do this than those in the Liberal Arts?

1. Critical analysis

2. Communication

3. Creativity

4. Problem-solving

5. Thinking

What to do:

1. Give every document a goal.

2. Be incurably curious.

3. Always look for a better way.