|
Letter from the Editor
This will be a longer-than-usual letter because I’m excited. Actually goose-bumpy thrilled. And to get you there, I have to give a bit of background.
One: We’re completing a marketing piece that outlines the benefits of customizing training. It’s a Flash file that visitors to our website will be able to access. The company doing the storyboarding and coding is in India. The guy doing the voiceover is in Kentucky. I’ve never met (or talked to) either.
Two: We’re finishing a sales training project in Minneapolis. Chris was key to the success of this project; I’ve never met Chris although he WAS Entelechy to the client (and a good representation of Entelechy).
Three: I sold some engine parts from my 69 Roadrunner on eBay (headquarters in California) to someone in
Oregon. The money was deposited into my PayPal account, which was subsequently “spent” when I purchased some CDs from a grandmother in Iowa who shares my passion for heavy metal.
If you’re like me a couple weeks ago, you’re saying to yourself, “Big deal. We’re connected. What’s new?” What’s new is the realization of what’s been happening. It’s not that we’re more connected than ever before (although we are), it’s that we’re
working together more than ever before; we’re collaborating in ways and with people we had never thought of before.
Connecting is one thing. Working together is something else completely… and it’s HUGE!
I project that “the big thing” that history will hold up as a significant milestone in the annals of human achievement – right along side the Gutenberg press, the telephone, and the computer – is happening right now. It’s the collaboration of individuals and small groups across the world. People getting together to buy and sell things, to work on a project together, to rally around a cause.
What sparked this “epiphany”, this excitement? As many readers know, Entelechy supports the leadership broadcasts offered by Linkage, Inc. Every month as part of their Excellence in Management & Leadership Series, Linkage features a speaker whose live presentation is broadcast to hundreds of companies throughout the world. The live presentation is preceded with a Backgrounder that
we write, and supported with a Facilitator Guide and Participant Guide that
we write. Developing these instructional materials puts us in direct contact with the presenters, some of the biggest names in management and leadership today: Tom Peters, Warren Bennis, General Tommy Franks, Sherron Watkins, Sir Richard Branson, and many others.
This month’s presenter is Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist for the New York Times who wrote the best-seller,
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. He states that many of us have been sleeping while this evolution in global collaboration has taken place. Some of us have been distracted by the war and international politics. Others – still soaking from the bursting of the dot.com bubble and now wary of anything Internet – fail to see that the infusion of capital and the laying of millions of miles of fiber optic cable paved the way for the cheap, ubiquitous connections. Everyone’s connected!
Connection is old hat. What people are doing together – enabled by that connection – IS new.
Here’s one example: Firefox® is a web browser that was developed by thousands of independent developers across the world working together with open source code to create an alternative to Microsoft Explorer®. In its first year, Firefox captured 9% of the browser market. Not bad for a version 1.0 competing against a browser that is pre-installed on most PCs!
Here’s another example: Last year, a client asked Entelechy to create a web-based training program for a proprietary financial software application that was used by managers for forecasting and managing budgets. Normally, we don’t take on this work because the cost of coding is prohibitive. Partnering with a development company in India to provide the graphics and coding for
¼ the cost we normally incurred allowed Entelechy to win the project
and meet the customer’s budget requirements. To the customer’s delight, the project was completed in far less time than anticipated. Entelechy met with the client in the morning to discuss content and create storyboards. We would then return to the office to solidify the storyboards. Before we left for the day, we would email the storyboards to our Indian development partner (who was just waking up). By the time we woke up the next morning, the new code was in our mailbox. Imagine the client’s reaction seeing the previous day’s work already coded and ready for review!
Imagine my delight in being able to provide a valuable service to one of Entelechy’s best customers!
Being connected allows for more collaboration in more and different ways with more people in more places.
The opportunities are there. Share YOUR story of collaboration and I’ll include it in the next newsletter!
Terry
A Flat World – Entelechy Connects with Thomas Friedman
 Every month as part of their Excellence in Management & Leadership Series, Linkage, Inc. features a speaker whose live presentation is broadcast to thousands of managers and leaders at companies throughout the world. Entelechy works with Linkage and the presenter to create instructional materials that will help participants make the most of the presentation. Developing these instructional materials puts
us in direct contact with people such as Tom Peters, Michael Abrashoff, Warren Bennis, General Tommy Franks, Sherron Watkins, Sir Richard Branson, and many others.
Most recently, we’ve had the pleasure to create the support materials for Thomas Friedman. Friedman has traveled throughout the world for The New York Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, foreign and domestic policies, economics, and terrorism. Along with being a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, in 1989 Mr. Friedman won The National Book Award and The Overseas Press Club Award for his book
From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for 12 months. After writing
The Lexus and The Olive Tree he won The National Book Award in 2000.
In his latest book, The World is Flat, he explains how technology and globalization have rapidly converged to change our world from a size small to a size tiny. Friedman argues that since November 9, 1989 ten events led to the flattening of our world:
- The fall of the Berlin Wall (the same year that a common user interface, Windows®, shipped)
- Netscape going public (bringing to the public’s attention that “there’s gold in them there Internet companies”, which eventually triggered the dot.com bubble and huge investments in fiber optic cabling)
- Work flow enabling software, protocols, standards, and programming (the revolution in software and transmission protocols enabling people to work together – to collaborate – regardless of personal applications)
- Open-sourcing (a new form of collaboration, a group of people working together on a common passion – such as the programmers who created LINUX or the Firefox web browser)
- Outsourcing (leveraging others for specific tasks)
- Offshoring (leveraging another country’s resources to duplicate or replace an entire operation)
- Supply-chaining (designing a global supply chain that automatically links demand – a consumer purchasing a radio at the Wal-Mart in Canton, Ohio – with supply – the transistor board fabricator in Canton, China building another board to go into another radio to be shipped to the Wal-Mart to replenish the shelf)
- Insourcing (taking over tasks done by other companies because you can do it better, cheaper, faster)
- In-forming (leveraging limitless data made accessible through the Internet; using Yahoo!®, Google®)
- The “steroids” (ever-increasing advances in technology including storage, wireless connectivity, voice over Internet)
According to Friedman, after 9/11/2001, America became occupied with terrorism and Iraq. The world flatteners, however, converged and ingested steroids, leading to radical change in how we interact in business, the world, and with each other.
The net result of this convergence was the creation of a global, web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration - the sharing of knowledge and work - in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language. No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, this playing field, but it is open today to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it ever before in the history of the world.
Friedman convincingly argues that this world flattening is more than technological advances, although a connected world certainly enables doctors in Australia to immediately download and interpret your X-rays taken at a hospital in Aimes, Iowa at midnight, or a retiree to make your plane reservation from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, or a tax preparer in Bangalore, India, to prepare your tax return (and a half million other tax returns in 2005)! Friedman sees this flattening as a much more fundamental – and life-altering – change in how we view the world, our access to resources throughout the world, and our role in the world.
As leaders, our competition just became global, and personal. People in other parts of the world can do what we do – from tracking lost luggage to making medical diagnoses – just as easily (and more cheaply) than we can. At the same time, our resource pool just became limitless; we have the ability to tap into expertise, capability, and capacity in virtually any corner of the world and deliver that capability to any other point on this planet.
Friedman suggests, therefore, that as leaders, we must explore our new value add in this flattened world. We can retrench and protect our assets or we can take charge and take advantage of this opportunity.
For more information on Friedman, visit his website at http://www.thomaslfriedman.com.
The New York Times has a page devoted to Friedman and the Discovery Channel video, The Other Side of Outsourcing. Check out the following link to the video:
http://www.nytimes.com/videopages/2004/05/26/opinion/20040526_INDIA_VIDEO.html
Check Linkage’s website (http://www.linkageinc.com) for programming, details, and dates for upcoming broadcasts for its
Excellence in Management & Leadership Series.
Entelechy’s Evaluating Training eGuide Now on eBay
Most readers of The Key know that they can purchase Entelechy’s valuable eGuides at our website
(http://unlockit.com/eGuide-Intro.htm). These eGuides are immediately downloadable references that contain tips, techniques, and tools to make you more effective as a manager and as a trainer. Unlike textbooks, Entelechy’s eGuides are filled with practical, usable examples that you can apply immediately.
We’re exploring the use of eBay to reach a wider audience for our eGuide,
Evaluating Training. Entelechy's
Evaluating Training is the eGuide for effective and practical training evaluation. In this 137-page guide are tips and techniques for developing, administering, and leveraging training evaluations. Using Donald Kirkpatrick's model of training evaluation, this guide expands and illustrates Kirkpatrick's four levels with real-world examples and discussions.
If you purchase the eGuide off of eBay (http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=evaluating+training), write to me at
ttraut@unlockit.com and I’ll send a complimentary copy of your choice of any one of our other
eGuides:
- Entelechy's Approach to Performance
- Designing Training Based on Five Content Types
- Practical Design and Development Tips
- Famous Icebreakers, Energizers, and Activity Ideas
- Famous Meeting and Facilitation Tips
- Time Mastery for Managers and Other Leaders
As always, if you are not completely delighted with your purchase, write me within 30 days and we will refund 100% of your investment!
Mailing and Privacy Information
You have received this email because you are in Entelechy's database of people that we've interacted with directly or indirectly or you've signed up for The Key. If you've received this email in error, please click on
http://unlockit.com/newsletter.htm
to be removed immediately from our mailing database with our apologies. (If you have trouble with the opt out link, please reply to this email directly and I'll personally remove your name.)
Send this email to your friends and colleagues who may be involved in training and the performance of others and could benefit from FREE performance tips, tools, and techniques.
Entelechy will not sell, rent, or otherwise provide anyone else your membership information for any reason. Period.
Terence Traut, President of Entelechy "unlocking potential"
ttraut@unlockit.com
phone: 603-424-1237
fax: 603-424-6361
http://www.unlockit.com
|
 |
