I really don’t know how I heard about David Kord Murray’s book, Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others.  It could have been recommended to me by Amazon.com or I could have read a book review of it while traveling.  Nonetheless, I found the concept intriguing enough to purchase a copy.  The book stimulated so many ideas that I could not wait to pick it up again whenever I had the chance to read a few chapters.

Murray is one of those interesting people that few of us have the chance to meet.  He was educated as an engineer, graduating from the University of Vermont in 1982, and later obtained his MBA from Pepperdine University.  Early in his career, while at McDonnell Douglas, he had the opportunity to work on the Space Shuttle program as well as the MX missile.  Later, he went into the financial services business, founding several companies and later working at Intuit as its head of innovation.

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I placed a pre-publication order for Curtis Bonk’s latest book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, and was not disappointed when it arrived.  Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, identifies ten key trends in technology that are impacting education as we know it.  He has coined an acronym, WE-ALL-LEARN, for those trends that are identified as:

• Web Searching in the World of e-Books
• E-Learning and Blended Learning
• Availability of Open Source and Free Software
• Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning Object Repositories and Portals
• Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
• Electronic Collaboration
• Alternate Reality Learning
• Real-Time Mobility and Portability
• Networks of Personalized Learning

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Earlier this year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released a publication called Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change.  Written by Peter Bardaglio, senior fellow at Second Nature, and Andrea Putnam, Director of Sustainability Financing at Second Nature, the book provides a compelling argument for colleges and universities to fully explore the opportunities and business implications of pursuing sustainable business models and integrating the topic of sustainability as a core component of student curriculums.

The book begins by outlining sustainability initiatives to date including the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent discussions currently underway for the drafting of another version of that agreement as well as the history and efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) among others.  The authors contend that colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to make a significant impact in the global struggle to address climate change.  Quoting President John Adams’ statement that “’There are two types of education.  One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live,’” Bardaglio and Putnam argue that not only does the pursuit of sustainability in college curriculums and business practices make good financial sense, it is an imperative if institutions are to educate students for the social challenges they will certainly face upon graduation.

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