Flat World Economics

If anyone has any doubts about how quickly the world is flattening and what the implications are, two recent news items demonstrate the point well. First is the laying off 14,500 HP employees, after the thousands that were already laid off under Carly. This is a new CEO’s desperate response to dealing with a flat world and the implications for the company, the employees, and the industry are devastating (and this is after the announcement of IBM selling its ThinkPad business to China’s Lenovo...). Not sure there is a viable role for the venerable HP in the flattened world, and, if so, it surely won’t look anything like the respected industry leader of the past.

The other article in the San Jose Mercury News today was about “Our society’s middle is shrinking from view.” In the last three years, the number of families in Santa Clara County (read Silicon Valley) earning below $15K rose 30% and the number earning $15-35K has grown by 25%. The number of families earning $35-50K has stagnated and the number earning $50-100K has declined by 9%--while the number earning over $100K increased by 4%. The economic implications are pretty clear—low wage, low skill service jobs are on the rise, middle class jobs are on the decline (through outsourcing, off-shoring, reductions in force due to increases in productivity, etc.), and those at the top will continue to do better.

As Friedman warns in Chapter 8 of The World Is Flat, “This is not a test.”

If Only We Knew What We Know

To reiterate a principle that underlies this entire blog, I believe the essential knowledge that can create competitive advantage for companies (at least in a round world!) is proprietary. I suspect that Seely and Hagel (in The Only Sustainable Edge) would say that it may not be wholly proprietary—it’s the ability to turn knowledge from inside and outside the company into new, distinctive capabilities. And the most important proprietary knowledge is locked in people’s heads, usually inaccessible and certainly not effectively shared and leveraged throughout most organizations.

If I sound disdainful of courseware from time to time (OK, always), it is not because I don’t think it has an important role in workplace learning—it does. But critical corporate IP usually doesn’t make it’s way into courses and mining that corporate gold should be our primary objective.

What brought this to mind again vividly was the opening chapter or two in a must read book (not new but very insightful) titled, If We Only Knew What We Know, by O’Dell and Grayson of the American Productivity & Quality Center. I’m still reading, but I wanted to share this great paragraph:

“Only those organizations that methodically, passionately, and proactively find out and transfer what they know, and use it to increase efficiency, sharpen their product-development edge, and get closer to their customers, will not only survive, but thrive.”

More later...

Informal Learning Momentum

Is it just me, or is it true that informal leaning is finally getting much more attention from a variety of quarters in the learning business communities? I know I am biased, or should I say a bigot, about the importance of informal learning, so maybe I’m just drinking too much of my own Kool-Aid. But, it’s in the air and everywhere these days. Here are two more references I stumbled on this afternoon (even Microsoft is getting involved and it's a hot topic in Europe!):

• The Power of Informal Learning in CLO magazine by Bob Mosher, Director of Learning and Strategic Evangelism for Microsoft Learning.
• Informal learning cited top challenge for educators at London and Amsterdam events.

So, what's the relationship between Informal Learning and Rapid eLearning? If it's not perfectly clear from my previous posts, I apologize. I see Rapid eLearning (as I have selectively defined it here and implemented with our clients) as a primary tool for capturing elusive corporate IP and facilitating even more effective (search-driven) informal learning.

Masie on Podcasting for Learning

I have been planning on digging into the uses and benefits of "podcasting" for enterprise learning, especially after my company's recent successful pilot project with Cisco--podcasting the latest product and competitive info to their thousands of technical sales reps. More on that later.

But it is very interesting to see the godfather of eLearning, Elliott Masie, get on the informal learning content bandwagon and his recent podcast on podcasting is worth a listen. According to his site:

"Informal Content & Conversations in Learning: A 15 minute audio streamed or PodCast program from Elliott Masie focusing on how our organizations will start to leverage informal and colleagues based content as part of our training and development programs. How do organizations prepare for PodCasts as part of Executive Leadership Development, for example?"

Weblink and RSS feed available.

Natural Knowledge Flows

I need to take a quick time out from world flatness to discuss a recent article in CLO Mag entitled Making Rapid E-Learning Work, by Josh Bersin.

Let me start by reiterating my previous comments about Josh—he gets it. Josh has a solid understanding of Rapid eLearning—the business imperatives that drive it, the adoption trends, growth projections, and where it fits in the full spectrum of learning from informal to formal. Josh understand that different methods are appropriate to address different circumstances, objectives, learners, and subjects. His description and analysis of where it fits in the spectrum is on target. The article is a must read if you haven’t read his paper on the subject (for sale) on his website.

But even Josh may have fallen into the trap of thinking about learning and courses as being the same. He states: “The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for virtually any professional to quickly create a meaningful course.” Rapid eLearning does not generally serve the same purpose as courseware with all the bells and whistles of instructional design, testing, tracking, etc. We don’t need SMEs to create more “courses”—we need them to share their knowledge, quickly and easily.

Since the most common way for SMEs to share their knowledge one to many in organizations is by giving presentations (not by building courses), the key to successful Rapid eLearning is capturing those presentations, whenever and wherever they occur—and making them quickly and easily accessible to those who need them. Relying on every SME in a large company record their own individual presentations whenever they feel the need to communicate, using one of a growing number of self-production tools, is certainly one way to do it. But the more practical and effective way, used by Cisco Systems and a number of other leading companies, is to identify the “natural knowledge flows” in the organization and capture the knowledge as it is already being transferred. Examples of mission-critical, pre-established knowledge flows include: new product introduction seminars, sales meetings, technical transfers of information, web-conferences, etc.

The key knowledge in any organization has got to already be flowing somewhere, more or less effectively, or the organization could not function. The trick is to identify those flows and be there to capture them. Some companies have designated meeting or conference rooms they routinely use to transfer knowledge. Some use whatever meeting facilitates are available. Some companies use web conferencing and conference calls, and most use all of the above. In a Rapid eLearning world, the secret is knowing where and when the knowledge is flowing and be there to record it one way or another.

Enabling SMEs to create their own learning content is a great thing, no doubt about it, and Josh is a great cheer leader for this important development. This trend will continue to grow in this era of the “democratization” of content and learning, where everyone can be a publisher, collaborator, and a learner. But self-production is usually not sufficient to ensure that the critical IP is systematically captured and made available to the many audiences that nee it. A robust Rapid eLearning strategy and infrastructure must be focused on a company’s critical knowledge flows and designed to accommodate the variety of ways knowledge is transferred on a daily basis.

The Key Skill in a Flattened World

One of Friedman’s ten “flatteners” is “in-forming,” and he recommends a strategy for workers to become “untouchables” by waking up every morning wondering how to become: “special, specialized, highly adaptable, or more securely anchored.” In this brave new world of learning, every person is in charge of their own IP and “learning how to learn” becomes a [the] core skill of the survivors of global flattening.

What does workplace learning look like in a flattened, time-shifted world of global collaboration? How should corporate training departments cope and adapt when the skills that are most difficult to train (such as innovation, invention, and customer intimacy) become the most vital skills in a flattened world? And what strategy must we in the learning profession adopt to help our organizations and learners thrive in the ever-flattening world?

As Ross Perot used to say, "I'm all ears" if anyone has answers to these questions...

If It Can Be Trained...

Friedman urges us to quickly abandon any illusions that America will naturally maintain an unassailable position of superiority in the global marketplace for products and ideas. As we stumble into this frightening new economic order, America faces hungrier and better educated global competitors who have the ambition, resources, and strategy to eat our lunch. We have helped turn the global economic tables—only to find out that they are no longer tilted in our favor. The only question now is what we are individually and collectively going to do about it. And specifically, what are the implications for workplace learning?

One implication seems ver clear: What can be trained, by definition, can be outsourced or off-shored—unless it involves a geographically “anchored” service, to use Friedman’s term. Food preparation, craft work, and nursing care come to mind. But what about the rest of us? Friedman suggests that America must collaborate to more rapidly invent new technologies and create new markets that we can exploit to our advantage—or risk falling further behind. So what and how must we learn in order to create ever-newer heights to the economic food chain?

The World Is Flat--Now What?

Having recently read Tom Friedman’s latest book, I’ve been wrestling with the potential implications for workplace learning from a “flattened world.” Still wrestling, no overarching theory in response yet. But the book does kind of take the wind out of your sails when confronted by the full magnitude of the global shift that is taking place much more quickly than most of us would like to acknowledge. Reading the book, while intermittently reflecting on the enterprise learning profession, brought to mind the analogy of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. While we debate the merits of instructional design methodology and the demerits of hyper-PowerPoint, we risk becoming irrelevant and unemployed in a flattened world. I have been absent from the blogisphere recently contemplating the implications—it’s going to be a longer-term process…

But, a couple of quotes from Friedman and others he quotes seem apt in support of the basic philosophy of Rapid eLearning I have been laboring to develop lo these last few months:

• “Informing is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain—a supply chain of information, knowledge, and entertainment. Informing is about self-collaboration—becoming your own self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment, without having to go to the library or the movie theater or through network television. Informing is searching for knowledge. It is seeking like-minded people and communities.” Thomas Friedman
• “The democratization of information is having a profound impact on society… And people have the ability to be better connected to things that interest them, to quickly and easily become experts in given subjects and to connect with others who share their interests.” Jerry Yang, Yahoo! cofounder.
• “Search is so highly personal that searching is empowering for humans like nothing else. It is the antithesis of being told or taught. It is about self-empowerment; it is empowering individuals to do what they think best with the information they want… Search is the ultimate expression of the power of the individual, using a computer, looking at the world, and finding exactly what they want—and everyone is different when it comes to that.” Eric Schmidt, Google CEO.

More from Friedman and workplace learning implications coming--this is going to take a while, so please join the conversation…