Banksy Hacking Workshop For Creative Wonderment And Strategic Surprise

An official apology.

On behalf of The MBA School Of MBA Credentials, our faculty, and our students, I would like to formally apologise to University of South Australia for the hacking that took down their computer systems today.

We are champions of MBA Thinking and we do our best to champion innovation by bringing different disciplines together, just like former Virgin Australia head, Brett Godfrey espoused at the TiCSA annual conference in 2019. See this article: Ideas from outsiders are the bridge to tourism growth.

However, our idea of inviting the subversive artist, Banksy, to conduct a workshop entitled, Banksy Hacking Workshop For Creative Wonderment And Strategic Surprise, was naive.

We didn’t realise what surprises the artist had in store. And we certainly don’t see ourselves in competition with Uni SA or any other uni for that matter (University of Adelaide, Flinders University, Carnegie Mellon University in Australia, etc) because our brand of MBA risk-taking is unique.

Sadly, today’s exercise affected innocent by-typers, and we unreservedly apologise.

There were warning signs.

Just like the artwork featured in this story – the Escape Mural at Reading Gaol (LW4U, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) – today’s exercise turned heads and exploited a captive audience.

We should have seen it as a red flag when our guest lectured arrived, draped in a red flag, and used a megaphone in the classroom to implore students to call everybody they knew who’d been linked to Uni SA.

He then got the students to call these people, pretend they were in a room with a madman wearing a suicide vest, and demand they find out who the IT people are at the university, and demand to get their personal phone numbers.

Once on the line, there were terrible things done as performance art to persuade the alleged IT people to comply with demands. I have sought legal counsel and we’ve been told that to describe what Banksy had our students do would fall foul of Australia’s anti-terrorism laws, namely, Part 5.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995.

Tomorrow, we are reverting to a soft, comforting, and unchallenging topic, Cold Supply Chain Management (our selected text, Orchestrating Supply Chain Opportunities: Achieving Stretch Goals, Efficiently), in an attempt to soothe our students who have certainly endured the classic, MBA Stretch Goal. (Great book on stretch goals – The Big Stretch: 90 Days to Expand Your Dreams, Crush Your Goals, and Create Your Own Success).

As a final kicker, we typed up an apology to send to Uni SA but when it was fed into our fax machine, it came out the other side, shredded.

So, we have now sent a peace offering, a little red balloon, sent aloft by one of our professor’s daughters.

Our lesson has been learned, even if one is an art buff who wants to follow their dreams, remember that artists like Banksy are a game changer and the way they change games can backfire and leave you feeling like a gorilla in a pink mask who’s been caught bombing Middle England disguised as a parachuting rat.