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What Everyone Ought to Know About Training

January 16, 2017 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

Everyone wants effective training. The trainees. The trainers. The business.

The problem is most doesn’t know the most important thing about typical business “training.”

It doesn’t work.

And it doesn’t provide the hoped-for ROI. Training spending was almost $71 billion in the United States alone in 2015, according to Training magazine. Standard lecture-based training has an effectiveness – at best – of 20-25%. That means about $53-57 billion wasted. In a single year.

Why?

Don’t let business change be like New Year’s resolutions

December 17, 2016 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

Diet, exercise, and other common themes dominate most New Year’s resolutions. Resolutions are fundamentally about change.

Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions are like a coin. On one side are the plans to make personal or business changes for the next year. On the other side are the many jokes about failed resolutions.

Planning is good. But why do so many plans that involve change, especially New Year’s resolutions, fail?

Why Do Agile Transformations (Continue to) Fail?

November 26, 2016 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

From a Version One email: “Why Agile Transformations Fail – Learn why culture is the key to agile failure and success in this video with insights into the trends from the 10th annual State of Agile Report.”

That culture is the key is not surprising. I have evangelized this for more than a decade, with clients and at Agile 2008 among other conferences. Here is a related article: Face Culture or Face Failure.

One of the most common issues? Changing from control-oriented processes to those that increase individual and team autonomy is pretty much guaranteed to cause a culture clash.

There is, however, an even better question.

Get an innovation jump-start

September 27, 2016 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

Considering new product or service development? Responsible in any way for innovation? Are you working with less than complete knowledge of the market? Developing and innovating amid change and uncertainty needs the “Wrong Until Right” mindset.

A good introduction in conference form is the Lean Startup Week. The next one is coming up during the week of October 30th in San Francisco.

DO NOT let the words “lean” or “startup” stop you from going. The conference is really about smart innovation amid uncertainty. The conference is relevant if you have anything to do with that.

How to Accelerate Business Change

July 16, 2016 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

Change is ever present in an adaptive business. Adaptation is necessary to respond to external change and to innovate.

Adaptation can bring new or modified business models – strategy – of how the business sustainably delivers value. New business models bring new or modified systems and processes to implement the models. Adaptability requires continual learning to achieve and maintain mastery for the updated systems and processes. Culture may also need to adapt.

In short, we must focus on and work with the total business model:

Leverage the total business success model for change - Mike Russell and Dr. Michael O'Connor — Total Business Performance^® model elements by Dr. Michael O’Connor

The difficulty is achieving and accelerating adaptability without a lot of overhead. Overhead both adds cost and reduces adaptability and responsiveness.

There is a simple solution.

A Simple Secret to Highly Effective Organizations

July 9, 2016 by Mike Russell Leave a Comment

We know a lot about how individuals can be effective based on motivation and productivity. For example, Dan Pink’s book Drive demonstrates why purpose, mastery, and autonomy are key to individual motivation. Focus is key to individual productivity.

But what about a business, government, or other organization? What makes them effective?

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