Who don’t we want to work smarter?

Next month I’ll be conducting several onsite workshops to inject informal/social learning practices into hidebound organizations that are anxious to ramp up to the future. My intent is to challenge a couple of dozen managers to each come up with a major change project and shape up a pitch to sell the idea to their organization. I intend to coax them to plant dozens of seeds. If one or two  take root, it may ignite the process of organizational transformation. This has me thinking about where companies should be placing their bets.

Employees

In the old days, corporate training departments focused solely on workers on the payroll. Most of the effort went into getting novices up to speed and grooming fast-trackers as future leaders. Training departments largely overlooked improving the skills of  seasoned employees, despite the fact that these were the people whose efforts were paying the bills.

This myopia is the result of looking at training as a cure for cluelessness rather than the route to ever-greater levels of performance. The logic was it’s broke fix it, but don’t waste time converting adequate performers into a knock-the-ball-out-of-the-park stars. Let them figure it out on their own. The world’s become too competitive to let this neglect continue.

An organization that is committed to working smarter needs to assess the impact of helping employees learn at every step in their career cycle with the company. What’s it worth, for example, to offer learning opportunities to potential recruits before they come on board? These “pre-hires” can become familiar with the company before signing on. This can cut hiring mistakes that hurt both the organization and the new hire.

Seasoned employees are not going to flock to classes and workshops; they have work to do. But making it easier for them to learn through collaboration, self-service learning, and skill bites helps sharp people become sharper. Making a producer just a little bit more productive returns giant rewards at the bottom line, more than anything you could do to beef up what the novices are doing.

Old hands may have known it all in yesterday’s world but can only remain productive by keeping up with changes. Furthermore, the company that doesn’t tap its community elders as coaches, mentors, and guides are missing an important trick. IBM and others generate leads and harvest insider knowledge by keeping former employees in the community and hence in the loop.

The expanded organization

Increasingly, the people who work for an organization are not on the payroll. They are contract workers and people called in for a particular project. They work for an outsource provider. They are temps, specialists, consultants, and service providers.

As companies focus on core and delegate overhead activities to others, more people are paid on company invoices and fewer individuals receiver paychecks. This does not mean the workers who don’t receive paychecks are exempt from needing to know what is going on and to continuously get better at what they do. It’s the logic of the supply chain: the inefficiencies of bad links gets passed along to the customer eventually; companies must optimize the performance of the chain. That means considering the merits of improving the brainpower of everyone who works for the company, not just those who receive paychecks drawn on the company’s bank.

Everything’s connected

From the Muppets
“What’s noman?”
“No man is an island.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto just turned ten year old. I can’t wait to dig into my anniversary copy. The original is online, free, and still fresh as a daisy. This book has the pole position in my online library of seminal works on how things work. My review rates Cluetrain most important book written in the last half of the 20th century.

Here’s the clue: markets are conversations. Doc Searles amended that to “markets are relationships.” Exactly. That’s today’s world. Companies can’t exist in isolation; they prosper through relationships. Value has moved from the nodes to the connections. No business can survive without good ties to a healthy ecosystem. Learning together builds strong relationships. And a smarter customer is a better customer.

Take me, for example. I recently purchased a snazzy video camera for $800. I’m still trying to figure out the myriad options. I try to RTFM (“read the fine manual”) which reads like handiwork of an engineer with a dictionary and little in the way of English language skills. No matter how hard I try to decipher it, I can’t figure it out. The online website has one-way pdf pages from the manual and a place to download software updates. No help.

Developing an amazing piece of machinery like this camera must cost tens of millions. For another $100K, they could have set up a discussion site for customers to swap information, opened a customer hotline, hired one of Allison Rossett’s grad students to write a coherent self-study manual and courselets, get feedback for new product development, and provided a list of links to useful sites for new HD videocam owners. To attract prospective buyers, they could open up video lessons for all videotographers. Were I greeted with a useful resource like that, I’d be a better bet to buy from the same supplier again. As it is now, I have learned nothing from the cam maker, they have learned nothing from me, and we have no relationship at all. Ask your marketing department the value of repeat customers.

I’m going to stop here. I’m not going to give you the punchline because I am still working on it. And a publishing deal. And if you’re really interested, get in touch with me about a working together to put ideas like these into practice. Let’s learn from one another.

Nothing is ever finished, is it?

Until next time…