“How many of you were told when you were young that you could grow up to be anything you set your mind on?” A professor-friend recently opened his graduate management course with this question. Fewer than half the people in
You Can Do Anything
May I Borrow Your Job?
Use job exchange programs to improve organizational productivity, improve your business culture, and help everyone learn.
Baseball, Big Data, And Learnings From Advanced Analytics
Analyzing the massive explosion of baseball information capitalizes on a growing trend toward “big data,” the tools and processes to harness insights found in gigantic data sets. A project to uncover Twitter sentiment around the 2011 post-season play provided an example of how the sheer amount of information need not outstrip our capacity to manage or access it in useful ways.
People Power
…This vantage point will guide my keynote at the 2012 HR Tech conference entitled, “How HR Can Drive the New Social Business.” This is a conference I’ve participated in for years because human resources stereotypes blow out quickly. People pump ideas, practices, and extraordinary energy. No single event I’ve attended has as much fuel.
Learn by Doing: Get Faster Every Lap
Automobile racing draws more spectators than any other sport. It’s not because of the danger, although the prospect of a crash certainly holds the crowd’s interest. What brings people out, time and again, is the simple demonstration that “he who learns fastest wins, but winning once does not guarantee winning again.” The spectators as well as the drivers understand that principle intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. Although most spectators do not apply that rule in their own lives after they leave the track, the winners do, 24 hours a day, until the next race. They exemplify the difference between learning by watching, learning by miming, and learning by doing.
At The Water Cooler of Learning
We have become obsessed with formal learning in the workplace. In our zeal to learn, we have transferred the formal model of learning into the collective mind of our corporations. Even e-learning is simply less-expensive formal learning at a distance.
Get Some Perspective
Periodically I see something on a social network site that’s so compelling I want to share it with everyone — and hope everyone I share it with actually reads it. That seems unlikely but still worth every bit of effort.