Insights

Rewiring Corporate Learning 1: Workout Where You Need to Go

LearnPatch has them all: A new year requires new ideas! So this series of short think pieces focusses on rewiring corporate learning. But we should start by asking why? Not simply for the sake of learning, not to amuse the learning staff or give them new challenges but for something more fundamental and substantial: keeping
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Working From Home

When Marissa Mayer the CEO of Yahoo! got her HR Head to issue the memo on home working to staff, she cannot have had any idea of the storm she would cause around the world. The memo is headed CONFIDENTIAL and DO NOT FORWARD but millions of people have read every word, including the 12,500
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Ten Alternatives to Happy Sheets

1. Ask what performance changes you want to see and then measure them. 2. Use the staff survey as an indicator of change. 3. Measure increases in activity following on from the training 4. Interview a sample of participants and ask for their views 5. Interview a sample of line managers and ask what changes
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Things I learned from the Paralympics

A very different experience to the Olympics really and a whole set of different conclusions for me. Here are 10 that struck me forcibly. 1. The resilience of the human spirit. Many of the athletes had their lives turned upside down in a second quite literally. And from that moment they had an extraordinary struggle
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Getting into Innovation

I have a picture of an elephant! But it is no ordinary elephant. For a start it is 45 feet tall and about 30 people are dancing and waving and playing music from a platform on top of the elephant, and a sultan sits on a throne perched on a veranda on one side. It
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Social Networking: The Benefits Outweigh the Constraints

If you sit in the average conference room with, say 40, executives from both the public and private sector and enthuse them about the power, speed and, indeed, empowerment of social networking, you have all the heads nodding in seconds. There are few people out there who think this is all a flash in the
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Learning and the Olympics

I am on Olympic come down. Suddenly that micro-universe is no more and I am sad and wistful. It was such a special experience and one I will never have again. I am glad that I made the effort to be there and be part of it. The outstanding moment of all those hours of
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Great Workplaces Need Great Learning

I am so concerned with making workplaces better places that Henry Stewart and I have built a ‘great workplaces’ programme where we will work with participants to make a difference; and guarantee that.  That is putting our money where our mouth is! You can find out more here  In Ernst and Young’s latest edition of
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What Does Verdi’s Otello Tell Us About Leadership?

Verdi’s sensational opera is based on Shakespeare’s play Othello. And we all know the story of Othello even if we have never seen the play.  Othello, the Moor of Venice, marries the beautiful Desdemona and ends up fighting, on behalf of the government of Venice, in the far from civilised island of Cyprus.  There his
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Beyond the Course

I was asked to speak at a conference in Edinburgh organised by a smart British e-learning company called Brightwave  and jointly run with Sky. What intrigued me, initially, was the title:  Beyond the Course.  Particularly as Brightwave is at the epi-centre of e-learning course development.  It is their lifeblood.  But it, like many other developers,
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