Cross Roads

1. What are your names?   My name is Endre Vestvik. 2. Where did you go to school and what did you study?  My background is in film and TV production. I studied filmmaking and has been  working in the film and TV industry in Norway for 20 years, before moving to Uganda and  going into coffee. 3. Tell us about what you do? Having looked at your LinkedIn profile you seem to be  in the coffee sector?  That’s correct. I am the founder of Wild, a Ugandan coffee company. I left Norway  and my career there when I got involved in a coffee farm in Uganda and discovered the deep  structural unfairness of the coffee industry.  While the coffee-growing countries, like Uganda, grow this very valuable crop, they  seem not to benefit much from it. Most coffee-growing countries happen to be some of the  poorest countries in the world. Yet, coffee generates billions of dollars every year. I started wondering: Does it have to be this way? Or can the ...

Once again, the world finds itself at a crossroads Historical Underpinnings (Humans and Machines a Tricky Alliance) Several ideas are at play here. The first is a human vs. machine when we moved from subsistence farming to commercial. We have been here before in the sense that when we transitioned from very basic agriculture where we grew only what we needed to eat and planned for seasons based on these changes everything was quite basic. When however, we began to gather in communities and expand, our needs changed. We bought horses and introduced commerce and the exchange of money and currency. But something else also changed. We started depending less on humans and more on machines. Horses could do a lot more than men. For other larger measures, we expanded and began to trade in our fellow humans. That was between the industrialization and the major shifts that took place in agriculture.  The changes that were faced when industrialists brought in factories are the same changes we...

South Korea  Industrial machine to creative economy. John  Hawkins Media Consultant 2000  Written during the first dot com boom.  What do people do with data? TV and Film was also being done in other sectors.  An economy based on people's ideas.  100 years of manufacturing  1750 industrial revolution...transformed cities and changed the way people lived.  Post 1945 knowledge economy. Management was a skill and consisted on knowing things and how that knowledge is use. A new relationship between the individual and the work that they do.  Peter Drucker Creative versus Repetitive Economy.  Changes everything about business and the way it is done.  What they do  How they do it Company structure  Looser more organic relationships  Web 1.0 dot com boom. The first Iteration of the concept of the creative economy.  Volatility. Intense competitiveness. Potential for great failure. Moving at warp speed: because minds are c...