David Sibbet

Tom Hood Uses Second Life for CPA Training

Tom Hood is an innovative leader in the CPA field who is now the CEO and executive director of the Maryland Association of CPAs. The Grove worked with him and other leaders to create a vision for the American Institute of CPAs several years ago, and have had a partnership offering our Strategic Visioning workshops on the East Coast through Tom's Business Learning Institute. He wrote me recently to share a link to a thoughtful piece he wrote in response to my Second Life Retrospective (see articles list to download it). It's a nice extension of those ideas. Click HERE to link to his reflections.

Brilliant Web 2.0 Video by Kansas State Cultural Anthropolgist

Watch this one and put on your seat belt. Who's Teaching Who?

Srategizing with Visual Metaphors

As the rain and winds ripped trees down in our backyard and beside the Grove in our first serious winter storm, I ended up my VizThink web-conference exhilarated, and thinking a lot about visual analogies and metaphors. (To hear the entire program click “Visualizing Change: Creating the Future One Vision at a Time” here). My reflection was sparked by a question moderator Tom Crawford passed along from one of the 53 people participating. “What role does the third dimension play in your Storymaps?” I illustrated my answer with the tablet sketch below, but let me elaborate.

Vizualizing Change: Creating The Future One Image at a Time

If you want to catch my free VizThink webcast on January 4 at 8:00am PST, on the topic above, register by clicking here. Register. I'll be answering some of these questions. How did National Semiconductor get 95% vision recognition worldwide during its turnaround in the 1990s? Why did HP train its engineering consultants worldwide to use Graphic Guides? Why did Adobe and Macromedia commission a graphic history when they merged two years ago? Why did Alias (now Autodesk) bring David in to teach their visual planners how to work the boards? How did he get 50 NGO and 8 foundations to collaborate in cleaning up the energy system in the upper midwest? What in the world is The Grove doing in Second Life? I'll be working on the tablet and sharing some graphics-- so come join in the fun. it's free.

Yang Ming and The Labyrinth

New Year’s Day is a special mirror for me of what could be in the next year. This one was quite special. It began having my first South Beach Diet meal with Susan – two little onion, pepper, cucumber and egg quiches with tomato juice and three cherry tomatoes. I’m not the cook in the family, and this change is big for my wife, Susan, but we has plunged into it and both of us are learning about what our body does in response to all the highly processed carbohydrates, we like many others, have become accustomed to eating. It felt like the right thing to begin the New Year with. So what goes with right eating I wondered?

“Can we walk to the labyrinth this morning?” I asked. After a moment hesitation, for that hadn’t been part of Susan’s thinking, a smile came and she said, “YES!”

Before long we were hiking out the coastal trail at Land’s End at the northwest tip of San Francisco. It was a spectacular, crisp day. The trail is being extensively improved by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with wide walks and stone-ringed cutouts. This first day of the year there were more people than we have ever seen, of all ages and ethnic groups it seemed.