DigitalNow: Association Leadership in the Digital Age

Rita Gunther McGrath is a globally recognized expert on strategy in highly uncertain environments. She is a popular speaker and advisor to senior leadership teams. Her clients include General Electric, Microsoft, Alliance Boots, the Hearst Corporation and the World Economic Forum’s Annual meeting in Davos. Her new book is titled, Learning to Live with Complexity. In this latest work, Rita examines how the information technology revolution of the past few decades have created new levels of complexity in business.

"Complex systems have always existed, of course—and business life has always featured the unpredictable, the surprising, and the unexpected. But complexity has gone from something found mainly in large systems, such as cities, to something that affects almost everything we touch: the products we design, the jobs we do every day, and the organizations we oversee... Systems that used to be separate are now interconnected and interdependent, which means that they are, by definition, more complex.

"Complex organizations are far more difficult to manage than merely complicated ones. It’s harder to predict what will happen, because complex systems interact in unexpected ways. It’s harder to make sense of things, because the degree of complexity may lie beyond our cognitive limits."*

Rita will explore with the digitalNow community how complexity is manifesting itself in the association sector, and what can be done to manage and take advantage of the resulting interdependence and unpredictability. Rita is Professor at the Columbia School of Business. Prior to her role in academia, she was an IT director, worked in politics and founded two startups.

* Learning to Live with Complexity

Steven Rosenbaum is an entrepreneur, author, and curator. In the online world of overabundant data, the curator adds value by selecting and sharing the best content for others to consume, namely, the most relevant and useful information for the intended audiences and communities served. Steve calls curation the “New Magic” of the connected world – fixing the signal to noise problem, and making the world contextual and coherent again. His vision of curation is the subject of his recently released book, Curation Nation. The book engages more than 60 thoughts leaders and companies to explore and define the power of curation for brands, media and consumers.

As the CEO of the web's largest video curation platform, Magnify.net, Steve provides a real-time curation solution that powers more than 83,000 sites, including New York Magazine, Mediaite, and The Week.com.

Known as the father of user-generated video, he created MTV's groundbreaking UGC series MTV UNfiltered, a pre-web television project that handed cameras to young storytellers. Since that time he has built a career finding, organizing, and curating first-person storytelling. Steve's work in media includes filmmaking work as an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker. His film “7 Days In September” gathered more than 500 hours of video around 9/11 – creating a curated journey through the eyes of 28 filmmakers and citizen storytellers. His film work includes long form documentary projects for National Geographic, HBO, CNN, MSNBC, Discovery, A&E, and The History Channel.

As a blogger, Rosenbaum contributes to posts on technology, Internet video, and emerging digital lifestyle trends to Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable, TechCrunch, and MediaBizBloggers.

Steven will discuss the role of associations as curators and how they can use curation to restore order to a constituency inundated by information overload.

 For the latest digitalNow 2012 updates, join our mailing list: