Well I read it again in USA Today: contradicting views of whether the economy is making a comeback or will stay depressed a bit longer. Who knows? Hopefully we all see the many positive things that have come out of this down economy. Here are a few. 

From a Business Perspective

• Some of my clients have made difficult choices and let go the 10% of the people who were the lowest producers in the organization. While not pleasant, the recession forced long-overdue action.
• Belt-tightening companies may be more amenable to telework, allowing more people to work at home. Two benefits to the company: it saves money on real estate, utilities, and other overhead, and it encourages their best employees to stay during these tough times.
• It’s a great time to start a business. If you know you are going to start a business, start it now. Many people will not heed this advice, but if you do you will have a head start on your competition, and when the recession ends, your business will be that much farther along. Even though venture capital firms are holding cash now, they will be ready to invest as the recession winds down and you will be ready with your proposal.

From a Personal Perspective

• Service is better. Have you noticed that store clerks and restaurant servers seem to be more attentive, helpful, and polite the past couple of months?
• Great time to find bargains. With people second guessing purchases, stores have great prices on many things. And if you shop on the Internet, many offer free shipping.
• It’s a great time to make a large purchase as well, such as buying stock or real estate. As for stocks, some are so low the only direction is up. I am sure I don’t need to tell you about the bargains in real estate.
• It is teaching Americans to save again. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (here’s a visual) shows that while American savers were averaging 1% or less from late 2004 to early 2008, the average personal savings rate has more than quadrupled to over 4% in 2009. This is the highest in 10 years.
• It’s become chic to repurpose—you mean like saving the bows off birthday presents like my Grandmother always did?

I save and I waste. I like a bit of all of it. That’s why I decided not to participate in this recession.  I certainly don’t mean to sound frivolous about this serious situation, however, the mantra in the farming family in which I grew up was, “Ya gotta spend money to make money.” Not that there was ever any extra money to fritter away. There wasn’t. It did mean, however, that you need to continue to invest; you cannot hoard and make money at the same time. Hopefully you have found upside opportunities in this down economy, too.

Please tell us about your "upside" to this down economy . . . 

Thanks!

Thank you to Jenn and Stephen for your ideas. I used both of your ideas for the online session this week and it was a success. In addition, the small groups listed ideas that we compiled and emailed to them after the session. I found that once I wrapped my head around the idea that we still need to practice good adult learning principles, whether the group is in a classroom or online, I was free to think of new ways to implement good techniques.

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Categories: Celebrity Bloggers | e-Laine

There are well over 50 ways that can be organized in five categories, in which leaders can serve as teachers.  Each is important and contributes to the business as a whole and the success and value of the learning function.

• Identifying learning needs and learning solution design. Involving leader-teachers as subject matter, business and organizational experts to help identify needs and collaborate in the learning and performance solutions adds immeasurable value to the growth and success of an organization. In so doing, you can also reduce costs and build quality programming and learning services.

• Live teaching.  Whether teaching alone, in pairs, teams or working with an external partner, high octane teaching and learning by leaders has great impact on learners.  Many leaders love to teach and facilitate case studies and a variety of experiential learning sessions.  Active learning designs helps leaders to make learning come alive.  This increases learning retention and the likelihood that what is learned will be implemented successfully.

• Teaching through the use of media and technology.  Examples include podcasts, use of recorded interviews, applications of web 2.0 enabled social learning, communities of practice. These and many other approaches increase the cost-effective importing and exporting of ideas, expertise, best practices, course materials and faculty across organizational boundaries.

• Pre and post-program teaching and coaching to increase impact of learning. These are essential teaching and coaching roles for business and functional leaders in highly effective teaching-learning organizations. The effect can dramatically increase the application of personal and organizational learning.

• Recruiting, training, coaching and mentoring leader-teachers.  These are core talent management practices that are fundamental for the successful implementation of an organization’s leaders as teachers process.

Tags: leadership, talent management, coaching, mentoring, ed betof

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Organizations that effectively utilize a leaders as teachers approach can realize six key strategic benefits.

Helps drive business results

The first reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that it drives business and organizational results by ensuring strategic business alignment between senior business leaders and the programs and services provided by the learning function. A leaders-as-teachers program that is aligned with strategic business and organizational goals serves as a type of organizational insurance policy for leaders who teach.

Stimulates the learning and development of leaders and associates

The second reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that it serves as a catalyst for the learning and development of the leaders and associates who participate as students in leader-led programs. This dynamic occurs in three ways: role modeling, creating a safe environment for feedback, and building networks.

Improving the Leadership Skills of Those Who Teach

The third reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that it has inherent development qualities for those who teach.  Many leader-teachers say that they are not sure who learns more when they teach….the participants or themselves. They move out of their comfort zone. Job challenges of different types, sizes, shapes, and intensities are the “genetic material” that enables leaders to learn, grow, change, and develop. Teaching, for many leaders, is a very significant job challenge and one that also helps them to see new viewpoints.

Strengthening Organizational Culture and Communications

The fourth reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that leader-teachers have the opportunity to strengthen their organization’s culture and communications. Culture transmission and communications through leader-teachers occurs in numerous ways including role modeling, social networks, communities of practice, continuous learning and communication flow across geographies, businesses and functions.

Promoting Positive Business and Organizational Change

The fifth reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that it enables them to serve as catalysts for business and organizational change through their direct access to a wide range of learners.

Reducing Costs by Leveraging Top Talent

The sixth and final reason to implement a leaders-as-teachers approach is that it drives numerous cost efficiencies by leveraging top talent. The leaders-as-teachers approach affords opportunities to deliver programs for “pennies on the dollar” compared with many other forms of delivery.

Tags: leadership, talent management, coaching, mentoring, ed betof

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I hear the same excuse every time I talk to change resistant learning professionals: “There’s a bad cultural fit for new learning approaches here” (to which I say, if you’re not willing to challenge a stale culture, you’re in the wrong profession), “we don’t have time” (but you have time to waste people’s time with useless PowerPoint presentations?), “we don’t have the budget” (who said next gen learning costs more?), “our IT infrastructure can’t handle it” (that’s what your IT department said ten years ago about email too), “we have to crawl before we walk” (no you don’t, you can leapfrog to next gen learning from any position), “we don’t need to waste people’s time with frivolous Tweets about what Demi Moore had for breakfast” (Twitter is also used in Iran to protest one of the most oppressive regimes in history, I guess that’s frivolous too?), virtual worlds is just a game (yes, most new technologies start as games before turning into tools).

One of the most prevailing and misguided excuses for inertia: “We have mature employees who wouldn’t embrace new learning approaches.” Why have I NEVER heard someone from a company that actually uses social networking and virtual worlds express this concern? The reality is that older workers are usually the most enthusiastic users of social media, virtual worlds and podcasting. Join our weekly Train for Success meetings in Second Life and the average age is probably around 50. Here are my top-three theories why mature workers embrace next gen learning:

1. Mature workers have a greater network of colleagues to draw insights from. Social networks are designed for those of us who need to stay in touch with our college friends and professionals colleges from years past. The fastest growing demographic of Facebook is  women over 55.
2. Older people enjoy being a young avatar in Second Life with a full set of hair and the body of a 19-year old.
3. Older people have spent decades in asbestos homes gulping Aspartame sodas, and it’s beginning to take its toll. They can’t concentrate on boring  lectures, they need learning that is fun and engaging!

Kidding aside, the notion that older workers will not use social media, games and mobile learning flies in the face of every client we’ve worked with, it’s just an excuse for status quo.

Tags: learning, elearning, virtual world, social media, second life, social media, gronstedt group, webinar, simulation, podcasting

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Let’s be honest, our profession is full of control freaks, people who are not half as concerned about sharing data as they are about protecting their data. The first question I get when I give presentations at ASTD conferences is usually not “great, how can we leverage social media, games and virtual worlds to improve performance?” Instead, I get inane questions about: “How can I be assured that our data is safe on an iPod?” or “How do you know that no one is eaves-dropping on your conversation in Second Life?” or “How can we keep people from wasting their time on a social network?” Since when did the learning profession become an extension of the IT security department? 

Tags: learning, elearning, virtual world, social media, second life, social media, gronstedt group, webinar, simulation, podcasting

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One of the phoniest ideas coming out of the learning profession has to be the idea  of the “corporate university.” I’m OK with “academy,” “Institute,” “Center of excellence”, but “University”? Give me a break! Are you awarding degrees and conducting research? No, you’re teaching employees to use Office 2007 and improve their project management skills. The corporate learning function is about professional skills development.  It has more in common with training auto mechanics or piano players, than with awarding Ph.D. degrees in sociology. But I guess a “corporate community college” or “corporate trade school” didn’t sound sexy enough? 

Besides, do you really want to model your organization on a university? I worked for one. I was on the faculty of University of Colorado for three years. I couldn’t stand it. It was a place full of self-aggrandizing professors working in the most vicious backstabbing culture, mired in 1600 century conventions (“it’s May, so we must send the students back to their farms for four months”). In fact, smart universities are trying to become more like companies, recognizing that their students and their future employers are indeed their customers. So why on earth would any clear thinking company want to go the opposite direction and model themselves on a university?                

“Corporate universities” are typically accompanied by expensive bricks and mortar conference centers, class rooms, sometimes even hotels, faculty, courses, classes and curriculum. All of which are a throwback to failed practices of separating learning from work and wasting money and carbon footprint on herding people away from work into the dreaded class rooms where information is thrown at them out of context. Let’s blow up that little red school house and begin developing learning that is embedded into actual work process instead.

Tags: corporate university, learning, elearning, virtual world, social media, gronstedt group

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The latest rage in the learning community is webinars. The Adobe Connect, WebEx and LiveMeetings of the words are sweeping the learning industry and leaving a path of Death-by-PowerPoint destruction behind it. Most webinars wind up mimicking the worst of the 1000-year old university model's tactics, reproducing slides, lectures and quizzes on a flat screen, with predictably abysmal results. We see this pattern with all breakthrough technologies. The first cars looked like horse carriages, the first movies were filmed stage shows, the first printing press was used to print the bible only, etc. It takes time for a new medium to develop its own character and unique vernacular. 

Here’s why webinars are the “motorized horse carriage” of our time:

How do we know 3D virtual worlds works better than webinars? Because hard evidence suggests that virtual worlds can be even more effective than a live class room. Loyalist College found that Second Life role playing improved the number of border agent students who passed a final evaluation from 56% to 93% when they moved it from the class room. Try to do that in a webinar if you can!

You’re still not convinced? Join our weekly Train for Success meetings in Second Life and experience the future of learning. You will never look at a webinar the same way.

Tags: learning, elearning, virtual world, social media, second life, social media, gronstedt group, webinar, simulation

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Let’s stop pretending that you have a “partnership” with your IT department. Case in point:  At one Fortune 100 company, a learning leader has to ask someone to unlock a hot, nosy and a cramped server closet every Thursday morning to get outside of the firewall and attend our Train for Success meetings in Second Life. Other learning professionals aren’t so lucky, they find refugee working from home or at hotel lobbies and coffee shops to join our meetings.  It’s a funny and sad state of affairs. People who are charged with being change agents in their learning organizations are not allowed to explore the world outside of their own organization!

Our Second Life speaking series features corporate leaders like Nokia, IBM, Intel and J&J who share their experiences of using 3D virtual worlds for learning, collaboration and communication. We frequently go on virtual “field trips.” This week will feature a tour of IBM’s Green Data Center. Our meetings draw over 50 learning leaders every week, frequently from four continents. Yet, we could easily triple attendance of our meetings if corporate IT departments had any interest whatsoever in improving the state of learning. But instead, they are holding most learning leaders hostage behind a Berlin Wall.  

How did your IT department become the Revolutionary Guard and your employees the Twittering protesters on the street? It’s not a new conflict. Your IT department didn’t want employees to be on the web or have their own email 12 years ago. They didn’t want people to instant message each other just a few years ago. These were just “toys,” in their view. But what becomes robust business applications usually start off as consumer toys. Twitter was about Demi Moore’s breakfast before it helped propel a candidate to the White House and protest a brutal regime in Tehran. We go through the same battles over and over. IT resists the change driven by innovators in your organization. Any learning department worth its salt need to be out on the barricades with their people instead of hunkering down in the bunker with the IT bureaucrats. You need to be Twittering, meeting in virtual worlds, YouTubing and podcasting. If you let IT intimidate you from piloting and testing next generation learning, you’re not doing your job. A growing cadre of learning professionals is heeding this call. From hot server rooms in Sweden and Australia, to Panera Bread restaurants on the American East and West coast, they are joining our weekly Second Life meetings, and they are running their own skunk work programs.  

In fairness, IT has legitimate security concerns. Opening up the ports to access Second Life is not unproblematic (which is why we’ll begin to deliver stand-alone, behind the firewall versions of Second Life to our clients this fall). But you have legitimate “obscurity” concerns if people can’t access social networks and virtual worlds like these. If you’re not able to attract, retain and empower he next generation workers, they will go across the street to companies like IBM that already has 20,000 employees in virtual worlds like Second Life. As my friend Peter Quirk put it, Second Life is just the canary in the coalmine. If your enterprise can’t manage connections to the Second Life grid, how are you going to connect to the sprawling cloud services of other social networks where all the the real learning is happening these days? The refusal of your IT department to join the 21^st century will be taken as arrogance, technophobia, stupidity, or all of the above by your young workers. Learning professionals of the world need to unite against your IT oppressors; you have nothing to lose but your virtual chains! 

Tags: learning, elearning, virtual world, social media, second life, social media, gronstedt group

Categories: Celebrity Bloggers

I’ve been asked to guest blog for a week about next generation learning. By way of introduction, I’m the founder and president of the Gronstedt Group, an international firm that helps companies like Volvo, Dell, American  Eagle Outfitters, Ericsson and Jama Juice make smart use of emerging social media, virtual worlds, online games, podcasting and Twitter, all of which are changing the face of workplace learning. In Second LIfe, I'm Anders Wildcat, where I'm the host of a weekly speaking series called Train for Success.

Here’s how I draw the distinction between tired old instructional design dogma and next gen learning:

From watching and reading, to doing and engaging.

From telling and testing, to conversation and reflection

From sage-on-a-stage, to guide-on-the-side

From command and control, to guide and nurture

From top-down, “father knows best,” to harnessing collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds

From cautious and safe, to wacky and rebellious

From instructional design to game design

From people going to training, to training going to people

From captives in classrooms, to learning in context

From boring to fun

From classes and curriculum, to application and simulation.

From replication the class room in each new medium, to reinventing learning with each new medium.

The result of this learning revolution: information and service workers now have a chance to learn the skills they need in a context that's actually energizing. But, there are powerful forces at work against this learning revolution. The bureaucratic class in your company at IT, legal, HR and the training function itself are frequently vested in the status quo instead of change, in the past rather than the future, in preventing mistakes instead of creating opportunities. If left unchecked, they can suck out the lifeblood of a company and scare a generation of digital natives out of the door. My posts this week will focus on these internal barriers, because we have to discuss them openly and find ways to overcome them before we can make any real progress.  Please join in the conversations with your comments, I would love to get your feedback.

Tags: learning, elearning, virtual world, second life, social media, gronstedt group

Categories: Celebrity Bloggers

Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas for this blog. I will cover them over the next couple of months. I hope each of your received your bundle of books.

As trainers we all know how important it is to keep participants involved and engaged. Most of you can list dozens of ways to increase participation in the classroom. All of us should increase participation—or why are they called participants?  

Yet this past week as I prepared to facilitate an ASTD Online Learning event for which 250 participants had registered, I couldn’t imagine how to obtain ample participation. I created a practical handout and an accompanying PowerPoint presentation. ASTD was helpful, as were the In Sync Training producers: “Use the ‘Raise-your-hand’ feature.” “Take a poll.” “Vote using a green check for “yes” and a red “x” for no.” “Have participants use their individual pointer to select an answer.” “Use the whiteboard.” “Try the ‘chat’ feature.” 

I used all the features, but still felt inadequate in obtaining the participation I desired. I wanted to get everyone in the game. I wanted participation. 

This past year we saw a new level of participation coming from Apple. Getting everyone in the game is what Apple did when it opened its phenomenally popular App Store. The App Store opened early in the morning on July 10, 2008 and in less than a year has had in excess of one billion downloads of over 56,000 applications according to 148Apps, which keeps an independent running count. Developers (read participants) like this platform: it’s easy to work with, provides a comfortable development environment, and offers a friction-free payment system where Apple handles all the accounting drudgery for a 30/70 revenue split. Apple has raised the participation bar. 

What can we as trainers learn from Apple about participation? Make it easy to participate. Make it comfortable to participate. Make it pay off to participate. 

No one likes to sit on the sidelines and that appears to be doubly so for Gen Ys. So how do you as a Workplace Learning and Performance Professional get everyone in the game? What can you do to make it easy, make it comfortable, and make it pay off—especially during online training sessions? 

Get in the Game Yourself! How do you encourage participation and involvement in an online learning situation? Share your ideas with everyone here. 

P.S. I’ll be facilitating the same online session again in August. I would love to have your ideas to enhance participation for that event!

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Categories: Celebrity Bloggers | e-Laine