One trend that caught my eye was Bridging Divides;  people of different cultures, geographies, and organizations working together as a cohesive unit. As multinational corporations seek growth in new geographies, many try to standardize practices in regions overseas that are derived from, and are successful in, their own culture.  A 2007 Conference Board study, “Painting with Two Brushes,” revealed why this is a risky approach:

97.2 percent of Western leaders, as compared to 70.6 percent of leaders from Asia-based Asian companies, find leadership skills transferable between different geographies. Similarly, 68 percent of Western leaders, compared to 91 percent of leaders of Asia-based Asian companies, feel global business leadership differs from business leadership due to managing culturally diverse people and operations.

This naturally begs the question, “What do good global leaders do?”   Two Swedish professors answered the call.  In their recent Harvard Business Review article, they illustrated qualities successful global leaders must possess, based on discussions with 30 CEOs. The overarching principles the professors discovered included establishing a higher purpose to make employees feel emotionally engaged and inspire them to work hard and respond to local communities to become a valued insider. They also found creating an internal social fabric enabling good collaboration across borders and levels contributed to leaders’ success. Additionally, from their discussions with the CEOs, the professors outlined common characteristics such as reliability, having high expectations, communication and team building that drove success.

While leaders themselves enrich their global skills, the U.S. remains the leading country in global innovation. The GE Global Innovation Barometer, which surveys nearly 3,000 U.S. and foreign business executives about innovation, published its most recently rankings last week and put the U.S. as a top country in innovation. Experts, however, wondered how long the U.S. would remain at the top. According to survey findings, factors such as continued deterioration of education, federal cutbacks in R&D funding and the ongoing loss off high-tech manufacturing jobs to nations with lower cost structures prompted concerns that the high honors might not remain for long.

Even as the U.S. continues to set the pace for innovation, one of the world’s top photography brands succumbed last week. New York-based Kodak Jan. 19 filed for bankruptcy, but experts say a new strategic trend called “convergences” could have saved the company. As a FORTUNE piece details, convergences “gives leaders a deeper sense of the interdependencies that connect firms, products, systems and services in new ecosystems.” It tests old notions to generate new ideas and uses visualization technologies to reveal emergences of new opportunities. Perhaps an offshoot of the ‘bridging divides’ trend, this seems to have the potential to show companies their next big growth opportunity.

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1. Focus on the organizational mission (Kirkpatrick Level 4: Results)
2. Identify leading indicators
3. Determine required drivers (Kirkpatrick Level 3: Behavior)
4. Design learning (Kirkpatrick Level 2: Learning)
5. Monitor and adjust

According to James and Wendy Kirkpatrick, clarifying this sequence of actions with stakeholders—and then taking the actions in implementing training and systems that support behavior change—“cannot fail,” because it “is built on a platform of business partnership and agreement from start to finish.”  And, while the influence of training versus that of other factors (support systems, removing barriers) cannot be isolated, stakeholders are likely to rate the overall initiative as successful because it meets their expectations.

So far, so good.

Then I picked up the November/December 2011 issue of Training and read an editorial by Jack and Patti Phillips called “The Myths of Return on Expectation.”  The Phillipses (the leaders in developing return on investment models) argue that introducing a term like ROE is confusing and unnecessary.  They point out that it is unclear whether ROE is a number (say ROE=85.2), a concept (stakeholder satisfaction), or an objective (any of the four Kirkpatrick levels).   ROE has the additional disadvantage, they say, of being confused with actual financial metrics (think return on equity).  The Phillipses recommend sticking to the original (Donald) Kirkpatrick framework and quantifying results at the four levels, versus introducing a new term.

I think the Phillipses make a good point about introducing unnecessary terminology.  But I also think James and Wendy Kirkpatrick’ systems approach is a powerful way to engage stakeholders in achieving business results.

The key points I take from all these thinkers:

• Begin by identifying your stakeholders and their expectations
• Make sure you have a clear “line of sight” between the training initiative and the company’s most important results
• Identify and address factors beyond training that influence performance (such as management support)
• Collect evidence (not necessarily “proof”) of impact at each step
• Use data to engage stakeholders in a dialogue about how training drives results

In addition, while a lot of training value is “backward looking”—that is, demonstrating the value of prior investments—I think learning professionals can add more value by being “forward-looking”—helping their stakeholders to make decisions that increase value.  In the words of one executive, “Don’t tell me how much value I got from my last million dollar investment.  Help me decide how to invest the next million!”

For more on measurement, check out our piece on the six critical measurement mistakes, and how to avoid them.

In his article for Harvard Business Review, Michael Schrage observes that large organizations are handing greater responsibilities and resources to smaller innovation teams – some as small as five individuals.  Building on the “less is more” theme, Schrage says that the “key performance indicator here is, ironically, slow growth. A fast-growing innovation team means either the wrong people were hired or that the wrong challenge was picked. The team delivers measurably impressive results with only marginally more members.”  Schrage cites several large organizations making this shift, including GlaxoSmithKline, who is betting that “smaller size assures faster velocity and greater agility for innovation decision.”

Indeed, the challenges facing GSK and the entire pharmaceutical industry require an innovative response.   Building on themes he shared with us in a 2011 interview, Scrip’s Christopher Bowe explores in this HBR blog post the common innovative thread between Lipitor and Apple’s 4S: Disintermediation.

While Pfizer and Apple plant seeds at the of a product life cycle to prepare the way for the future, it is also important to nurture those seeds going forward.  In a recent interview with the New York Times, Geoffrey Canada, president and C.E.O. of the nonprofit Harlem Children’s Zone, explains that a truly innovative company focuses on keeping old ideas fresh while generating new ideas. Having a great idea isn’t enough to keep it alive, and Canada believes the innovation will stick for about 18 months. “If you don’t come back and do anything with it for 18 months, that program is half as good as when you started it,” he said. If you don’t regularly check back with the program, it will decay, and the teams will be constantly working at reinventing something that has been done already.

It is only natural that innovators want to move forward, to come up with the next great innovation. John B. Rogers recently wrote about the fickle innovation process and the notion that making something in order to innovate should not be a new revelation. In his article for Inc. Magazine, he invokes the adage, “we don’t make ‘em like we used to,” because America is facing a skilled-labor shortage. Until the American workforce is able to make “stuff” and “make the people that make stuff,” they could be facing an innovation crisis.

Recently, the senior leadership team of a large hospitality and entertainment company engaged us to ‘climb under the hood’ and diagnose the things that were slowing their team down.  In this post on SmartBrief on Leadership, I share the traps into which this team fell (many of which may sound familiar to you), as well as the tactics we took to identify and overcome those traps.

From all of us at Forum, here’s to a successful 2012 for you and your team.

Acknowledge others.

Flash forward to this 2011 holiday season.  Last week, as a senior leadership team of a hospital celebrated their holiday dinner, the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) stood up and tapped her glass with her knife.  All eyes shifted to her. As a business-minded woman and tough negotiator with a ‘hard shell,’ her team expected her to talk about the strategic objectives of 2012. They were completely unprepared for what came next.

She opened up. She spoke about an emotionally difficult case for which the hospital had recently cared. This particular patient touched the nurses in a way that very few do. The aftermath required several tear-filled debriefs and meetings with the chaplain.

Because the CNO had not been involved in this case, a nurse manager gave her a list of each nurse and nurse’s aide who had cared for this patient. The nurse manager explained to the CNO how much it would mean to those people to hear from her, personally, about the case. Though this was very unusual for her, she could tell this was important. So, the CNO set out to write each nurse and aide a thank you note. Somewhat sheepishly, she realized that she didn’t know many of them. But she did it anyway.

Days later, the CNO had a knock on her door. It was a nurse’s aide, whom she had never met. With a shaky voice, the aide told her how much her note had meant to her. And she left.

As the CNO continued her speech to the group at the holiday dinner, the room was silent. The team was stunned (and delighted) to hear her speak so authentically in such a public setting. She thanked the nurse manager for suggesting the expression of gratitude to her staff, saying, “This has changed me not only as a leader, but as a person.”

Then, she handed out presents to her team. They were bundles of thank you notes on fine stationary, wrapped in gold ribbon. She explained, “My hope is that you will pass along the gift of gratitude with your own teams.”

This holiday season, if you are struggling with the ever-difficult question of what to get your team, consider this inspiring approach. Every employee, in every industry, is stretched to the point of exhaustion. With budgets tight, you might be surprised how far a simple letter of acknowledgment and gratitude would go. Warren Bennis would be proud.

This topic was discussed by a panel sponsored by the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Association. Panelists David Eaton of Global Novations, Diane Hessan of Communispace, Steve Lishansky of Optimize International  and I conversed about strategies and tactics leaders can use to accelerate execution. The panel was a great opportunity to highlight Forum’s Strategic Speed research, and the HBS people said it was one of the best events they’ve organized. (Benson Shapiro, a renowned HBS professor, attended and left with a copy of Strategic Speed.)

What makes rapid execution such a challenge? One reason is that leaders often seek to drive speed by improving processes or installing new technologies. Instead, they should focus on three people factors:

• Clarity (understanding goals)
• Unity (collaborating across work groups)
• Agility (adapting quickly)

Some examples from the discussion include the following scenarios:

• I shared Forum’s case study about Häagen-Dazs and how its brave COO decided to “go slow to go fast” with a global customer service initiative. He recognized that true speed isn’t about just moving quickly from Point A to Point B, but rather about reducing time to value and increasing value over time. With this approach, the COO secured the participation of more than 500 stakeholders, exceeded all financial goals for the initiative, and achieved the goals a year sooner than expected.
• Diane Hessan talked about how she has sent a “weekend voicemail” to her entire company every weekend since she founded her business in 1999. It takes just 3 minutes, but it’s an opportunity for her to connect with every employee and provide information and guidance about everything from long-term strategies and client engagements to upcoming initiatives. These days, her senior team will often ask her to “include this in the weekend voicemail” as a way to reinforce a message. Spending as little as 3 minutes once a week can help advance strategies.
• David Eaton spoke about “high context” versus “low context” cultures. Most Western societies, including the U.S., are low context, meaning that there are not as many unspoken, rich, shared assumptions about what things mean and how to behave as there are in high-context cultures. Achieving clarity and alignment in low-context cultures requires a lot of explanation and discussion. In high-context cultures, people typically don’t need as much explicit talk about plans and ideas because a common understanding is already there. Being aware of whether you’re working in a low-context or high-context culture helps you avoid making execution missteps and drive higher levels of clarity and unity, said Eaton.

Steve Lishansky summed up our collective point of view with a story about a strategy consulting firm whose executives finally figured out why their brilliant strategy advice, laid out in 4-inch binders, wasn’t being followed in their clients’ companies. Their realization: “It’s the people that are the problem!” Of course what we four panelists believe is the opposite: when it comes to strategy execution, the people are the answer.

For more on how to achieve strategic speed, see my post on the seven actions that accelerate execution and www.forum.com/strategicspeed.

You all know the standard consultative response:  Ask about the business problems that have led customers to consider sales training as a solution.  Help customers see that training may not be the best solution to developing sales competence and capacity.  In fact, other developmental approaches (one-on-one coaching, mentoring salespeople) may be more cost effective and may produce more sustainable results than a training course.

But the standard response is passé; there is a new response.  As I explained to the HR executive, we often miss an opportunity that we ought to seize as soon as the customer opens the door: “Let’s elevate the conversation.  Let’s explore how training can not only develop the individual’s competence, but also impact the company’s performance through innovation, technology, and process change.”  I might have suggested that the head of sales develop a training course *so that* we might evaluate sales processes, systems, people needs, and obstacles.  Training might then be considered as a vehicle for developing, communicating, and implementing needed changes to align sales with business goals.

As I think back on my 15 years designing, developing, and delivering training, I wonder where we lost track of using training as more than training?  When I first started out in the field, we would develop training to drive and communicate change.  For example, I led a project that transitioned a company from a product focus to a service focus as part of its new strategy.  We got the go-ahead to implement training for sales, so we worked backwards.  We used the training as an opportunity to analyze the current situation, develop a new selling process, capture executives’ key messages and business goals, and identify organizational obstacles to making the transition.  The end result was a training program that not only developed skills in selling services but also developed a new sales process, responsibility matrix, executive communication plan, and other tools to support both individuals and the organization in executing the strategy.

The training profession is facing the same challenges as other business functions today:  limited budget; reductions in staff; global scope; constant change; and technology innovations.

To create real business value, training needs to be re-positioned as a business opportunity to develop and implement change; processes, and tools—and aid organizational communication.  Without this new focus, the training function runs the risk of failing to realize its true potential impact on business today.

Some folks are even asking her, “What is the meaning of life?” Undaunted, Siri answers:

Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

It’s a pleasant, brief response that one might argue does provide a few key pointers for living a meaningful life. But, of course, if you were really striving to make your life more meaningful (or perhaps simply to eat less fat), hearing Siri speak these words—even if they were accompanied by an intriguing infographic—would do very little to help you.

That observation leads me to the following thoughts on mobile learning—that is, delivering learning content via apps on mobile phones or tablets.

I believe that much of the talk about mobile learning amongst learning and education professionals today reflects an unspoken (and mistaken) assumption that we are in the information business rather than the behavior-change business. “Learning” can mean many things: It can mean “taking in and using information,” “acquiring skills,” “transforming perspective,” and so on. We rarely take care to define what we mean when we say “We’re helping people learn.”

In reality, most of us are mostly in the behavior-change business. Our customers (executives and line managers) expect us to bring about behavior change in their employees—not to provide their employees with information. This is equally true for those of us who work in K-12 or higher education: Parents and students aren’t paying us primarily to provide information, but rather to build capabilities that are manifested in behaviors, skills, and attitudes.

Many thousands of companies and individuals specialize in the business of providing information. Think of McGraw-Hill, the London Times, Random House, NBC, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, Google, Yahoo, BNET, Harvard Business Publishing, a million bloggers, and a million apps in the Apple store.

If we learning professionals fling ourselves into that vast sea of information providers and dedicate ourselves to creating mobile apps, we will be as plankton to whales. Do we want to be seen as fourth-rate information providers or first-rate behavior-change creators?

In all the excitement about apps and tablets, we may lose sight of a truth we’ve known for a long time: Behavior change comes from challenging experiences, spread over time, that people engage in with other human beings, including facilitators, teachers, and coaches. It is these interactive human journeys that develop the tacit knowledge and the motivation to develop new habits, beliefs, and skills.

Okay, you say, but apps are useful for reinforcement, aren’t they? Not really. Learning reinforcement is about making behavior change stick. That’s a tall order: It requires even more motivation, interaction, support, practice, and challenge than the classroom does.

Now, none of this is an argument for sticking with face-to-face learning and avoiding virtual learning. Motivation, interaction, support, practice, and challenge can all be created virtually. But they must be designed into the experience. They don’t arise solely (or even mainly) from nuggets of information on a screen, no matter how cleverly or amusingly they are presented. (For some interesting thoughts on what it really takes to help children learn online, check out this Wall Street Journal article: My Teacher Is an App.)

Is Siri a font of useful information? Absolutely. Will the world ever thank her for helping us learn—even a little bit—to live in greater peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations? I don’t think so.

What do you think about mobile learning?

Regarding Theo Epstein’s departure from the Red Sox: The fundamental questions circulating on Boston talk radio have been, “Did he abandon the Sox?”  and “What is the GM’s responsibility to clean up the mess he made?”

Those are really the wrong questions.  It’s not about Theo.

In our business research of turn-around situations, or a jump to new strategy or growth curve, success often occurs when the “old guard” leaves and a new leader is brought in.  With leaders who have been at an organization for a long time, people have history with them.   So, you either accept or do not accept their direction.  With new leaders, you don’t have history with them and you trust them and get on board.    Often, if a regime is in place so long, established privileges, relationships, and ways of doing things would take a long time to change. If at all.

As Theo himself said, he is ultimately responsible for the historic September collapse of the Red Sox.  Perhaps by abandoning the team he loved since childhood, he knew he was doing the right thing for the Sox.  And himself.  He knew that his responsibility was to leave.

Ben Cherington has the opportunity to accelerate change for the Red Sox, and restore the trust of the fan base.  Cherington has been realistic in acknowledging the truth of the situation, and has not downplayed its urgency.  This is a good start.  He should not stop communicating, even when he has little to communicate.  Red Sox Nation is watching him closely.

As for the players there is a phrase that we use in our own organization:  “We are They.”   It’s about taking ownership for the problems within an organization, and not complaining about what “they” are doing.  Because we ARE they.  Step up – leadership is a choice.  There are opportunities for everyone in the Red Sox organization to lead.  Who will emerge?

While we are sad to see Theo go, this change is good for Boston – and Chicago.

Although we used this baseball organization as the topic, there are many parallels to organizational leadership.  Have you seen these dynamics play out in your organization? 

Although the economy is still relatively slow, there are several ways to keep customers engaged and obtain new sales leads. In this week’s Forum Focus, we’ll take a look at three tricks to getting sales referrals, how empowering employees will win customers, and why keeping customer engagement (beyond mere customer service) is crucial.

Last week, Inc. magazine posted a great piece from writer Geoffrey James about the right and wrong ways to get sales referrals.  James’s three tips to getting new referrals from your latest recommendations include asking after delivery instead of after closing; giving your customer a referral first; and encouraging your customer to contact the prospective referral first. We’ve found that these three tips can really help build a customer’s trust and open up new doors.

Sometimes in order to secure new customers, you have to get out of your own way. In a Harvard Business Review article, Hawaiian Airlines senior vice president of Operations Charles Nardello, encourages leaders to empower their employees to handle sticky customer situations. Why? With social media making it easier for customers to vocalize to businesses about their feelings, it’s even easier for employees to address their concerns. Nardello wrote that he finds his employees perform best when they are encouraged “to improvise and bring unmatched service to their customers in a sincere, personal way.” In these scenarios, a level of trust between employer and employee is created, allowing the employee to show customers that they will always be taken care of.

Rick Jensen, chief sales and marketing officer for Constant Contact, also acknowledged the social media explosion, saying that the customer service bar has been raised. In his latest piece for AMEX Open Forum, Jensen says that social media merely makes obvious the necessity of personalized service and in-depth expertise. Businesses should be able to go beyond the initial transaction by suggesting services or tools for future projects. Customers want to know that you are sincerely interested in helping them make the right purchasing decisions based on their needs.