Since about March, maybe a little later, we’ve been busy helping clients convert their in-person training to either remote instructor-led training or self-contained web-based training. It’s a challenge because it seems simple on the surface, and it may actually be simple…but based on our observations, it is apparently easy to get wrong.   First of all, if you are thinking about this now, you are probably too late and probably […]

Training program design and development can be similar to programming…at least if this programmers tirade is somewhat accurate if exaggerated (which I have no reason to doubt). Warning: The language can be abrasive and inappropriate but if you get past that, the humor is undeniable. Example line “Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old […]

Years ago (more than five) I remember going into a meeting carrying a large easel, a large roll of paper, a box or two of handouts, and two briefcases loaded with a laptop, misc folders, paper tablets, and other stuff. My client started laughing as I struggled to drag everything to the front of the […]

I just read an article that seems to indicate that “lean” may be starting to suffer the same type of fate as “TQM” and “re-engineering” and pretty much every other approach or solution that gets lots of attention, then gets widely implemented because everyone is doing it. Fads always die out. Great ideas become lame […]

I can’t believe Google is discontinuing Google Wave. They claim people weren’t using it and didn’t know what to do with it. I’ll tell you what…it is really a pretty good work and team coordination tool. We use(d) it all the time to post and edit to do’s, issues, status updates for a small team […]

In his book “The New Brain,” Richard Restak describes a study where scientists first taught a monkey how to move a cursor (to get food). Then, they implanted an electrode in such a way that, after some practice, allowed him to move the cursor only by thinking about it! He controlled a cursor on a […]

Originalily posted on November 1st, 2007 by Pete | Edit Well actually, GTD is great. (GTD is a personal productivity system by David Allen…sort of like time management for the internet age.) I bought the book on CD and have listened to it multiple times. (Partly because one hearing was not enough–it is hard to grasp […]

Posted on October 12th, 2007 by Pete | Edit Ok…I am all for quality improvement and a systematic approach to in. So in a way, I am actually a fan of Six Sigma…but sometimes it just gets annoying. 1. For one thing, they get all the cool projects. Before there was Six Sigma, you could […]

Originally posted on March 30th, 2007 by Pete If you think ideas and change are happening more quickly than they used to, you are probably right. On the Conference Board’s website is an article describing how the rate of change is impacting the business of managing organizations.  “Ideas are circulating faster,” Clark says, “with the consequence […]