As many of you know, Seth’s Blog, by Seth Godin, is one of our favorite blogs. Seth Godin has put together a thought-provoking and inspiring collection of brief essays as an ebook entitled What Matters Now. Some seventy “big thinkers” contributed their thoughts, which are more than relevant for the New year.
This ebook is a free download (Adobe Acrobat required). We’re more than pleased to be one of many websites to make it available.
Here’s a brief excerpt that I—as a professional tech person—especially appreciated:
There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven’t ever heard of twitter, blogs or facebook. Are they all wrong?Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They do business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it’s working for them.They’re more successful than most of those businesses who spend hours pontificating about how others lose out by missing social media and the latest wave. And yet they’re doing business. Great business. Not writing about it. Doing it…
We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before. Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why. (1)
For more thought-provoking and insightful essays, download the entire book. And have a happy and insightful New Year too!
—Joel Kleinbaum
Blogger-in-Chief
(1) “Connected” by Howard Mann from What Matters Now
The Barnes & Conti Holiday Newsletter is available online. If you’ve never received the holiday newsletter, please check it out, at least for the recipes. The holiday newsletter features our ninth Annual “Virtual Feast” of recipes. The current feast features a recipe for eggnog just full of holiday cheer.
The newsletter also has tips for a harmonious season by our conflict prevention and resolution expert (as well as Barnes & Conti Vice President, CFO, and master trainer) Eric Beckman. Also included are “Lessons in Giving from Scrooge” by Barnes & Conti CEO and President Kim Barnes, plus reports and first hand accounts of some of the unique volunteer and community activities that Barnes & Conti staffers get involved in.
One of our trainers at Barnes & Conti—and this is someone who has trained in all kinds of companies and industries—has told me repeatedly that just about every department, organization, and/or company is beset with problems. Yet in so many cases, as my trainer friend has observed, the element that holds these organizations together, the thing that keeps them going is the people. That is to say that at each and every level, there are competent, conscientious folk who hold the organization together. My Thanksgiving challenge to you is to find some of these people in your organization, and show them some gratitude.
“Gratitude? In times of economic recession? What am I going to talk about next, happiness in the workplace? You bet! Gratitude is one of the “Five Steps to Happiness at Work” identified by Timothy Sharp, Ph.D. Dr. Sharp writes (1):
Employees want to be valued as members of a team and organization. But they also want to be told, frequently and appropriately, that they are valued, as people. They want to be thanked and appreciated for their accomplishments. When managers and colleagues openly congratulate employees for their wins or efforts, it makes everyone happier.
This is entirely consistent with a great deal of research into the social and emotional benefits of gratitude. As psychologist Robert Emmons argues in his book THANKS!, gratitude enhances our sense of self-worth, while at the same time strengthening social ties. Expressing gratitude, he found in his studies, increases the happiness of both giver and receiver.
Lest you think I’ve gone all touchy-feely on you, I have long been convinced that satisfied—if not happy—employees benefit the organization and affect the bottom line. Here’s what Charles Kerns says in Graziadio Business Report of Pepperdine University (2): Read the rest of this entry »
I was directed to a web page listing the “15 Stupidest Products of All Time”(1), with the option to rank them from “really stupid” (low) to “No hope for the species” (high). Disclaimer: some of these products are not necessarily for polite company. However, most of them are good for a laugh.
Bald spots? No problem, there’s “spray on hair”; if you don’t like it, just shampoo it off. Carbonated soft drink not sweet enough? Soda Pop Top is a hard candy screw on top for your favorite sweet bubbly beverage. It adds even more sweetener and another layer of “flavor…” Two of the whackiest—for polite company, at least—are the Hawaii Hula Chair and the mobile treadmill.
The “Hawaii Hula Chair” looks something like an office chair. It has a unique (?) hula motor that rotates the seat cushion in a hula-like motion. It claims to tone your abs and middle section “while you sit.”
The mobile treadmill must be seen. It is a treadmill with wheels; you walk or jog on the treadmill and it moves down the road. Really. Truly. I’m not making this up…
Okay, now that you’re finished laughing… What happened? How did innovation—if I can even call it such—go awry? Let’s look first at the Hawaii Hula Chair. This chair is made by a company called Perfect USA. They specialize in what I call “passive fitness gadgets.” They make gizmos that wiggle your ankles, jiggle your wrists, and wriggle your midsection (a fitness belt). I’m just guessing here, but I dare say that innovation went awry primarily because of too few ideas or two narrow a focus. I visited their website to find that eight of their fifteen products on the website are wiggler-jigglers! They are all variations on a theme, and not a good theme at that.
The mobile treadmill or “SpeedFit SpeedMobile” is a different story altogether. The SpeedMobile is the brain-child of one Alex Astilean, a fitness trainer and inventor living in New York State. I researched the SpeedMobile enough to find out that Astilean is dead serious about developing it for alternative transportation. The SpeedMobile makes us laugh because, well, if we want to run or walk to our destination, let’s just run or walk. And if we want more speed, how about a bicycle? The more thoughtful among us might also shudder; what about the brakes? Are there brakes? What about uphill? Downhill? Steering? It looks like Astilean had input from one person: himself. Otherwise, he would have/should have/could have addressed some of these questions.
One of our favorite blogs is Seth’s Blog, by Seth Godin. Seth Godin is an author and speaker who writes for the business world. A recent blog article by Seth Godin dealt with risk, both apparent risk and actual risk. Godin spoke mostly about apparent risk:
The concierge at a fancy hotel spends her time helping tourists and business travelers avoid apparent risk. She’ll book the boring, defensible, consistent tour, not the crazy guy who’s actually a trained architect and a dissident. She’ll recommend the restaurant from Zagats, not from Chowhound…(1)
In this case, the apparent risk is the unfamiliar versus the tried and true. The “the tourists in New York who seek out the familiar Olive Garden instead of walking down the street to Pure (a cutting-edge raw-foods and vegetarian restaurant featuring “Caper Lemon Roasted Chanterelle Mushroom with Truffle Creamed Broccoli” and “White Corn Tamales with Raw Cacao Mole”).*
Seth goes on to say that “Apparent risk is avoiding the chance that people will laugh at you and instead backing yourself into the very real possibility that you’re going to become obsolete or irrelevant.” The apparent risk is embarrassment; the actual risk is obsolescence. Many people would choose the former.
At Barnes & Conti, we’ve identified a third type of risk which we call an “intelligent-risk.” An intelligent risk is not easy to define, but it does meet certain criteria: Read the rest of this entry »
The global marketplace is upon us, and I won’t dispute that. What I would like to dispute, at least a little bit, is the place that technology in general and the internet in particular has in this market place. Somehow, the internet is supposed to connect this global marketplace and break down barriers. If my recent experience is any indicator, the internet still has a very long way to go.
We recently had the Exercising Influence Pre-Course Assessment Tool—which collects a self-assessment and several assessments from colleagues based on the Exercising Influence model—translated into French(1). My job was to implement the translation online so as to co-exist with our English version.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am something of a Francophile. I’ve never been to France and never took French in a classroom setting. I love to cook French food, drink French wine, and eat French cheese. The language also fascinates me, but my own French is barely good enough to get me through a few chansons by Debussy and Fauré.
I know enough about French to know about those all-important accent marks. Would those little accent marks present a programming challenge in this globally connected world? Already I knew of several “encoding” systems for Mac, for Windows, for Unix, and more. One of those was emerging as a “standard” for the web and it ought to work, no?
Earlier this fall, Nicole O’Hay joined Barnes & Conti as an intern. Nicole was born and raised in Berkeley, California. She graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz with a degree in literature. After a stint as a travel writer, Nicole taught elementary school in the San Francisco Bay Area for several years. Nicole then combined her passions for travel and teaching by taking a teaching position in Trieste, Italy. She spent five years teaching abroad, not only in Trieste, but also in Rome and Paris.
Upon moving back to the Bay Area, Nicole began pursuing a career as an organization development practitioner. Her teaching experience showed her how organizations could be run successfully or mismanaged. Nicole also saw the importance of leadership, intercultural communications, and social responsibility to healthy business environments.
This fall, Nicole began her studies in the M.S.O.D program at Pepperdine University. She will be learning about change management, coaching skills, and best practices in leadership and strategic planning. Part of the program also includes travel to France, Costa Rica, and China to work as practitioners.
Nicole met Kim Barnes this past March, and Kim offered her an internship. Says Nicole, “I am looking forward to participating in and learning the different workshops Barnes & Conti offers, as well as becoming involved in building an on-line community for the trainers. I look forward to meeting you all and getting involved in the B&C community!”
We look forward to hearing more from Nicole, either on this blog, or in the Barnes & Conti Newsletter.
This month Natalie Turner, founder and CEO of entheo, our “sister company” located in the U.K. was interviewed in Training Journal, one of the U.K.’s leading learning and development publications. entheo specializes in one of our favorite areas, innovation and change consultancy. Not surprisingly, Natalie had some great—as well as greatly relevant—things to say about innovation.
“The best chance any organization has of surviving in the short-term, and thriving in the longer, is to continuously innovate and differentiate itself, pre-empting both consumers and competitors, and leveraging what makes it distinctive: its people…”
“Most businesses still operate within paradigms of management thinking that were designed for an earlier age. Over the last century, there’s been unparalleled growth in innovative products, services and technologies, but innovation in management and leadership has been scarce…”
“The status quo is based on established models and structures, on conventional wisdom, on a factory mindset, in which people are treated as machinery.”
Our CEO, Kim Barnes co-wrote an excellent article on training programs for Professionally Speaking, the blog for the Executive Communications website. Kim co-wrote the article with John Castaldi, formerly a trainer with Sun Microsystems. John is currently in a similar capacity with Symantec.
Kim and John tackled the subject of training programs with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. The title of the article is “How to Kill a Training Program: Eight Easy Steps to Make Your Training Programs Irrelevant.” Kim and John have a combined 50 years of training experience; they certainly would know what works and what doesn’t!
Below is a brief excerpt from the article (1):
1. Call any required pre-class study “pre-work.” First and foremost, if you call any pre-class assignment “pre-work” you will discount its importance. This will convey that the “pre-work” is not part of the “real work” that happens in the workshop. Besides, who enjoys studying in their free time, anyway?
Bonus: During the actual class, be sure to ignore the pre-work and avoid all references to the “pre-work” assignment.
2. Ignore lessons from media or game producers. Television newscasts utilize many techniques to keep their audiences from switching channels. Video and computer game producers have mastered ways to keep their users engaged. In these media, viewers observe a change of pace, variation in tone, and a range of activities and movement. We are not in the entertainment business, so these techniques do not apply to the classroom. By staying frozen in both position and voice, you can be sure that more important work, such as answering emails and sending text messages, will occur during class. These days we need not worry about keeping our audience engaged. They probably will be engaged—just not with us.
The rest of the eight steps are listed below:
3. Make sure slides emphasize quantity, not quality.
4. Remember that the devil is in the details.
5. Celebrate training for training’s sake.
6. Keep leaders out of the way.
7. Lecture for 100 percent of the classroom time.
8. Bury online learning resources.
If you are a trainer, facilitator, and/or presenter, do yourself a favor and read the entire article.
–Joel Kleinbaum
(1) “How to Kill a Training Program” by B. Kim Barnes and John Castaldi, published on Executive Communications website, September 19, 2009
Last week, a friend of mine handed me an article from the current issue of Psychology Today Magazine; this is an article that I wish would be in all the major business journals. The article, entitled, “Paid to Smile,” is about internet retailer Zappos.com. Zappos.com specializes in shoes, but the real innovation—and I’m almost embarrassed to call it an innovation—is the culture. According to Psychology Today (1):
Cultivating happiness is (Zappos.com CEO Tony) Hsieh’s ultimate business goal. Back when he started and sold a tech firm in the ’90s, he formed a theory: If you create a work culture that fosters well-being, good practices and (eventually) good profits will naturally flow out of the operation…
When Hsieh was put in charge of the fledgling Zappos in 1999, he vowed to organize the business around ten “core values”—by which every single employee would be hired and fired…
