Jay Cross asks the question:
Here is Jay’s website with more on informal learning
Blog Page
Musen er død…
[lang_da]Det er ikke alt, hvad Alexander Kjærulf siger, jeg er helt enig i, men i hans pointe om den dødssyge mussamtale, har vi gjort mange af de samme observationer.
Den er for mig en forfærdelig sutteklud, som i bedste fald ikke gør nogen skade, men i værste fald er voldsomt demotiverende. Det er en sutteklud, fordi den giver mange ledere en illusion om, at de gør det de skal i form af feedback.
Men forestil dig at du var tenniscoach og du har fået opgave at coache et supertalent
– ville du gøre det ved at holde årlig MUS-samtale?
Masser af lederer bruger MUS-samtalen som undskyldning for ikke at bruge tid i dagligdagen på at give løbende feedback: “Vi tager det til MUS’en”…
Feedback is the breakfeast of champions – det er ingen tvivl om, at der er en tæt sammenhæng mellem performance og feedback. Det er derfor, at tenniscoachen står på sidelinjen og giver sin spiller feedback under træningen. Masser af feedback – hele tiden.
Det der virkelig giver arbejdsglæde er at vide, at man bidrager, at det ikke er ligegyldigt om man er der – at gå hjem og føle, at man har gjort en forskel er helt afgørende. Måden man bliver klar over det på er gennem feedback – masser af feedback.
Men læs selv Alexanders indlæg her
[/lang_da]
Our NPS is 83% as of today…
We often use the net promoter score in our trainings – it is a great tool to show participants the value and power of customer loyalty.
So why not practice what we preach?
We always ask our participants the final key question before they leave us:
“On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely is it that you would recommend this training to a friend or colleague?
We have added up the evaluations for trainings that we have done during the first 6 months of 2009. And I am both happy and proud to say that our NPS score is running at 83% – not bad ! ( If you are wondering how one calculates the NPS score you can see more here
We have previously written about NPS on this blog here
Getting to grips with the Big Shift
[lang_en]For a while now I have been talking to friends and colleagues about this gut feeling that I have, that what we talk about as the economic crisis or downturn is possibly not a traditional crisis and/or downturn in the sense that once it is over things will return to normal.
I have this very clear feeling that a fundamental shift in many of the ways that we have been used to conducting business and interacting with each other is underway. (see also my previous post are you a frog in the pot) And that when the dust settles things will not return to what we have known previously as normal but will have undergone a clear shift. This is not a passing storm but fundamental climate change.
In pursuit of that theme I have been hunting for signs that would support this gut feeling.
This has led me to The 2009 Shift Index published by Deloite and presented on the Harvard publishing website.
Her you will find the following resume of key findings:
The 2009 Shift Index reveals a disquieting performance paradox in the US corporate sector. On the one hand, labor productivity has nearly doubled since 1965. During those same years, however, US companies’ Return on Assets (ROA) progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 level.
How can firms be getting lower returns even as they’re becoming more efficient? The answer resides in the heightened competition among firms. Competitive intensity nearly doubled between 1965 and 2008, forcing firms to compete away the benefits of productivity gains, which were instead captured by creative talent in the form of higher compensation and numbers of consumers through increasing performance/price ratios and wider choice.
It’s little surprise to find also that the highest-performing companies are struggling to maintain their ROA rates and are increasingly losing market leadership positions. Taken as a whole, the findings portray a U.S. corporate sector in which long-term forces of change are undercutting normal sources of economic value. “Normal” may in fact be a thing of the past: even after the economy resumes growing, companies’ returns will remain under pressure.
To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial- era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift.
Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era’s fast-moving digital infrastructure.
So what does this Big Shift entail in pratical terms?
John Hagel one of the co-authors of the 2009 Big Shift index does a superb job summarizing what he essentially sees as a shift from push to pull on his blog Edge Perspectives
What obviously caught my atention was this:
From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation
Most companies today will acknowledge the importance of knowledge flows, but they tend to focus on transferring knowledge more efficiently, especially within corporate boundaries. While useful, this is ultimately a diminishing returns game on multiple levels. The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge. They do this best by addressing challenging performance requirements that motivate them to get out of their comfort zone and come up with creative new approaches that generate more value with fewer resources.
This correlates well with the experiences that we have using action learning as our primary developmental tool in helping managers and organizations tackle the changes that they are in. It is not our job to teach but to help them learn – and that is a very different story.
But I urge you to read the full unfolding of this thinking here under the following headlines:
From knowledge stocks to knowledge flows.
From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation.
From explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge.
From transactions to relationships.
From zero sum to positive sum mindsets.
From push programs to pull platforms.
From stable environments to dynamic environments.
Lots of food for thought, and now I realize that my gut was telling me something important and I shall continue to pursue this investigation.[/lang_en]
Are you the frog in the pot?
During summer, a period notoriously known for its lack of news, the media seem to have been very busy reporting and analysing a steady news stream predicting their own demise. We have seen headlines such as ‘Not dead yet’ or ‘Thinking the unthinkable’ the latter referring to a possible scenario in a not too distant future where the New York Times is no longer published — not on paper at least.
If you have not followed the discussion the crux of the matter is very well summed up in the following video clip:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| End Times | ||||
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My point here is not so much to enter into the discussion — to me the conclusion is inevitable — but to point out the fact that once again an industry has been caught out by the famous frog syndrome.
( if you drop a frog into a very hot water it will do its very best to scramble and get out, if however you put it in a pot of cold water and heat the pot slowly, the frog will not try to get out before it’s too late ) i.e. not responding to gradual changes in your environment. The situation in which print media finds itself today was predicted five if not 10 years ago. They just all hoped that the pot would not get too hot. In 10 years time this will be a classic business school case in line with the one about the buggy whip manufacturers, typesetting and landline telephones.
So how does that relate to the world of hotels, travel and conference centres? Well – I think there is a similar shift taking place in our environment. Well possibly not directly in our own environment but in the environment that provides us with our business.
There are three key drivers of this shift: The financial crisis, energy/co2 awareness and Web 2.0 together they have inspired a growing number of business leaders to rethink the need for travel and face-to-face meetings.
IKEA a trendsetting company is running an internal campaign under the banner of: Meet more – travel less. Encouraging the use of interactive web technology for meeting purposes while at the same time reducing travel costs and CO2 emissions. The target for 2009 is to reduce travel by 50 percent and CO2 emission as a consequence by 25 percent. And they are not the only ones, they are just very visible in the way they do it.
It makes sense. Cramming 20, 50 or 500 people into a conference room and feeding them an endless parade of PowerPoint slides, be they ever so pretty and well-designed is not efficient knowledge transfer, (let alone learning) We know that.
Ah but wait – I hear you say – what about the networking? That is the truly important part of meetings – it may be important, but traveling 4 or 6 hours, spending 2 days away from the job and then taking a chance on who you share the stand-up coffee table with during a 10 minute break is not efficient networking.
You could spend an hour systematically working LinkdIn, Facebook or even Twitter and you would probably produce some far more interesting connections and possibilities. So lets not kid ourselves about the networking.
And there is a fourth driver adding to this:
“During the next 5-10 years, the Millennium generation will become a signi?cant proportion of meeting participants. This is perhaps the largest generation gap in history and the consequences for meetings will be fundamental. If meetings for the older generations serve the purposes of information and networking, this means online communities, such as Facebook and MySpace to the younger generations, and they learn from Google, Wikipedia and online peers more than parents, teachers
and conference speakers. They don’t see the difference between virtual and real any more than they see why work and play should not happen at the same time. ” From The Meeting Manifesto
But it is not just meeting planers who are shifting their focus to ROI – the other sector where we can see a shift is taking place as well is within the training industry. Traditional training companies are also in the hot pot if they still believe in classrooms and PowerPoint’.
“Learning budgets are decreasing. Spending on external services are decreasing even more. And learning departments need to do more with fewer resources.
If you are inside a corporate learning department, assuming you still have your job, then you feel this by being more busy. In many ways, that’s not a bad feeling compared to either the person who lost their job. Or the people who have seen their learning business crushed by this”
Read more here
So two major purchasers of hotel rooms, F&B and meeting space, the meeting organizers and the training companies are in this shifting paradigm. Looking for new solutions and ways to connect but with out the travel. What was once a considered a perk – is now almost a curse.
Meetings and tourism are now two different worlds.
Tourism is all about pleasure and experiences which is fine, but meetings/training are business and business means somebody is looking for a return on investment. If there is no ROI or if it is too low, meetings (gatherings/trainings etc) in their current form will be cut.
That is what is happening in the market just now.
And if you think that once the so-called crisis is over then everything will be back to normal and we can do business as usual then and you have just joined all those very uncomfortable newspapermen in their very hot pot.
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If you would like to pursue this subject here are a few links that you may find interesting:
European Event ROI Making Meetings and Events More Profitable.
The Meeting Architecture Manifesto
It's all about value
From www.4hoteliers.com
Travel is changing. There’s a lot of talk about average rates dropping in many markets, but don’t kid yourself, it’s all about value. Packaging is a wonderful way to add to perceived value without sacrificing your rate positioning in the marketplace. Getting more for less is pretty much a human concept. There is still a lot of business out there; we’ll just have to work smarter to get it.
Keeping up will require a greater emphasis on the hotel’s location and perceived value. Hoteliers will finally realize that people travel to get to a particular location and then, with few exceptions, choose a hotel based upon the best-value deal within that location. Hoteliers will ultimately understand that rate alone doesn’t sell rooms, no matter how low; what one gets for that rate is how we determine “value”. Perceived value sells rooms, not rates.
Read the full article here
Creative Foodies… in the USA
The 10 Most Creative People in Food
The Magazine FastCompnay has launched a series on the 100 most creative business profiles. Here is their take on who are the top 10 creative Foodies.
1. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Jean-Georges Management
The Alsace-born celebrity chef has built a multimillion-dollar, multi-Michelin-starred empire without slapping his face on a frying pan or frozen pizza. Vongerichten’s unprecedented partnership with Starwood Hotels has given him license to unleash his creativity — and his take on Asian flavors — in 50 new restaurants over the next five years. “If I could have my dream,” he has said, “I would open a new restaurant every month.”
2. Dan Barber, Blue Hill restaurants
Barber is foodies’ latest locavore darling, the driving spirit behind the two acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants, and a passionate advocate for regional farm networks. The winner of the 2009 Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation, he practices what he preaches at his family’s farm and at the nonprofit Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.
3. Will Allen, Growing Power
Since he used his life savings to buy the last working farm in Milwaukee, Allen has been dedicated to creating a more just food system. Growing Power’s network of urban teaching farms raises vegetables, fish, livestock, and honeybees; supplies local restaurants; creates sustainable cafeteria programs for corporations; and distributes food to more than 100,000 families. “We’re not just growing food, we’re growing people too,” he says.
4. Dan Cutforth and Jane Lispitz, Magical Elves Productions
Top Chef creators and executive producers Cutforth and Lispitz –”the elves,” as they’re known – have used reality television, of all things, to lift up serious cooking rather than reduce it to farce (we’re looking at you, Gordon Ramsey). In the process, Top Chef has become a pillar of the Bravo network’s urban-sophisticate strategy, spawning a popular Web site, cookbooks, and merchandise — making it an example of the 21st century integrated media brand.
5. Floyd Zaiger, Zaiger Genetics
The father of the pluot, 83-year-old Zaiger, has developed — by hand pollination, not genetic manipulation — some 200 new and improved fruits, from low-acid peaches to cherries that grow in warm climates to the golden red apricot-plum cross known as an aprium. “Developing a new cross takes 12 to 15 years,” says Zaiger’s daughter, Leith Gardner. “You need a little patience.” Coming next: a blue-skinned aprium.
6. Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft
Pay for an ad? Only if it’s extra cheesy. Director of innovation Kaczmarek’s Kraft iFood Assistant, which offers Kraft devotees with iPhones, thousands of recipes and more, proves not only that brands can create meaningful mobile experiences but also that customers will pay for them. Kraft’s cooking app ($0.99) cracked the iPhone’s top 100 apps list, rising at one point to the No. 2 slot in the lifestyle section, and helped the $42 billion company better understand its customers and what they’re shopping for.
7. Temple Grandin, Associate professor, Colorado State University
“There are similarities between my autistic mind and animal thinking,” Grandin says. The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, the title of her video bio on YouTube, has relied on that understanding to develop more humane ways of treating cattle destined for slaughter. She has no fans in the animal-rights blogosphere, but the walled, curved chutes she has designed and the handling standards she has set up for companies like Swift and McDonald’s — no flapping objects, no shadows, no spraying in the face — reduce stress in the animals and improve the efficiency of the operation as well as the quality of the meat.
8. Becky Frankiewicz, VP of portfolio marketing for Frito-Lay North America
Who says good for you has to mean “tastes like cardboard”? Frankiewicz is leading the shift for Frito-Lay’s Smartfood and Baked Lays brands to appeal to women, using design and taste to communicate that healthy snacking isn’t an oxymoron. New packaging is more elegant, appealing, and signals health benefits, and new technology lets flavor be baked into each crisp.
9. Jeff Jordan, CEO of OpenTable
Jordan, an eBay vet, has helped make restaurant reservations fun, adding features such as detailed users reviews and clever lists to help restaurant fans make better decisions in the same place they make their reservations. Perhaps his neatest trick has been to take OpenTable public in the current market climate — and get a 1999-style response. OpenTable stock hit a high of $35.50 on its opening day in late May, a nice bump from its initial price of $20 a share.
10. David Chang, Momofuku
The intense, award-winning chef launched his quirky downtown Manhattan mini-kingdom with inventive takes on Asian noodles and pork buns. Besides producing great food, Chang hits all the stylish notes — local produce, cool staff, lots and lots of pork. Plus, his latest (and priciest) venture, Ko, is the only restaurant we know that takes reservations only online.
Read more about the 100 Most Creative People in Business
The IACC Global Meeting Aug 2009
Navigating the Perfect Storm
We are co-hosting this event together with Toke Paludan Moeller, Interchange
There will be no transfer of ‘wisdom’ from experts to you the participants. Instead we will explore the unknown together – in a structure guided by experienced facilitators – at the end of the three-day session you will have a much better idea what you as a leader need to go home and do to manage the changes that are taking place. Changes that are going to challenge your current way of doing business.
If you have not signed up already now is the time – more information here