Eddie Obeng
Speaker Eddie Obeng is a British organizational theorist, educator, and author. He is a Professor at the School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Henley Business School and the founder and Learning Director of Pentacle (The Virtual Business School).
Born in Ghana, Speaker Eddie Obeng was educated at Cranleigh School, at University College London and at the Cass Business School. Shortly after the debut of his engineering career at Royal Dutch Shell, Obeng became the youngest Executive Director of a European Business School and moved to Ashridge in 1987.
In 1994, he established Pentacle (The Virtual Business School) in order to teach this philosophy and ensure that there was a "continuous link between learning and implementation". Additionally, Speaker Eddie Obeng pioneered the use of bespoke business simulation games to help vitalize the learning process. In 2010, he launched 'The Cube' (later rebranded to QUBE). Obeng's innovation with QUBE was to focus on learning and application by integrating all the business models, frameworks, and tools into the virtual reality enabled environment.
In 2011, Obeng won the Sir Monty Finniston Award for lifetime achievement by The Association for Project Management for his contributions to the study and practice of Project Management. Speaker Eddie Obeng has been given the title of 'leading revolutionary' and 'agent provocateur' by the Financial Times.
Speaker Eddie Obeng discovered his passion for research within the field of Project Management, where he developed the concept of 'New World Management', also referred to as 'World After Midnight', as a response to the rapidly accelerating pace of change. Obeng's concept of the New World proposes that we have moved (as a world) from an age when we could learn faster than our local environment (the 'Old World'), to a new age where the local environment of individuals, organisations, and governments changes faster than we can learn (the 'New World').
He argues that, as a result of this shift, most of the concepts, best practices, and assumptions that we commonly used to plan, manage, lead, organise, and govern are obsolete and damaging to the lives of individuals, society, and organisations. Speaker Eddie Obeng describes this as smart failure for a fast changing world and is perhaps best summarised by Eric Hoffer's reflection that "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists".
