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I’ve been a tremendous fan of Flipcams, the $150 pocket-sized video cameras with an interface even a first grader can figure out. The one downside was sound. Audio is more important than picture when shooting video. Flipcams have no jack for an external microphone.

Charles Jennings showed me an awesome Kodak mini-cam that solves the problem. Check the specs of the $180 KODAK Zi8 Pocket Video Camera:

• Capture HD quality 1080p video with 16:9 aspect ratio
• Plenty of room for more—record up to 10 hours of HD video with the expandable SD/SDHC card slot that can hold up to 32 GB[1]
• Make audio awesome—the external microphone jack lets you record in stereo
• Get a new perspective—take amazing 5 MP 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures

File formats

1. video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC
2. still: JPEG

Capture modes

1. 1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps)
2. 720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps)
3. 720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps)
4. WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps)
5. Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)

Anyone want to buy a couple of used Flipcams?

CLO magazine

Published June 2010

When you talk to businesspeople, you must speak as they do. Executives only care about training as it relates to execution. Their interest is in moving the corporation forward. You should share that interest. That is what they pay you for.

A sponsor is the person who pays those bills. Sponsors are responsible for championing the case for change (i.e., the vision), visibly representing the change (i.e., walking the talk), and providing reassurance and confidence (i.e., the implementation plan).

Someone once interrupted me during a webinar when I was talking about how trainers need to be aware of corporate objectives and rate their contributions by their impact on the business. “Wouldn’t that require us to understand how the business worked?” he asked. Yes, of course. How could you do your job right without knowing how the corporation worked? Several others jumped in, essentially saying that organizational success and helping to meet strategic objectives was “not my job.”

The days when corporations were larded with layer upon layer of management whose job was to translate strategic imperatives from above into job descriptions and projects down below are long gone. Now all of us are supposed to sing from the same hymnal without the intermediaries.

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.

Measure results throughout your program, not just before and after. Keep your sponsor informed. Frequency is sometimes more important than quantity. Monitoring things early on may enable you to make mid-course corrections.

The Responsibilities You Share

Peter Drucker, hailed as the father of management, is a business guru’s guru. Drucker singled out eight characteristics of effective executives:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”
• They asked, ‘‘What is right for the enterprise?”
• They developed action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions.
• They took responsibility for communicating.
• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said “we” rather than “I.”

The Metrics Cycle

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.

Generally, you’ll follow these five steps to identify, agree upon, assess and use metrics. This is not rocket science. It’s the same process you already use to accomplish a lot of things in life.

Let’s briefly consider each step.

1. State the desired outcome. Results do not exist inside the training department. In fact, results do not exist within the business. Results come from outside the business. Imagine a no-nonsense businessperson, such as Jack Welch, GE’s former boss. If you can explain yourself to Jack, you’ve mastered this step.

2. Agree on how to measure. The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. Examples are increased sales, shorter time to market, fewer rejects and lower costs. How do you decide what measures to apply? You don’t. That’s the responsibility of your business sponsor, the person who signs the checks. Together you agree on what’s to be done and how you’ll measure success or failure. Once you’ve settled on the project and its metrics, get it in writing.

3. Execute projects. The projects could be training, an incentive bonus plan or more advertising. Training programs are often part of a larger scheme, and it’s fruitless to try to isolate them. In fact, savvy training directors look for major corporate initiatives they can hitch a ride on.

4. Assess the results. You must evaluate the impact of your efforts with the measures you set up back in the second step. In other words, you are not allowed to mimic Charlie Brown, who would shoot an arrow and then paint the target around it. Why stick with the measures you came up with before? Because that’s how you maintain credibility with your sponsor. You can bring up unforeseen outcomes or anecdotal evidence, so long as you follow up on those original methods first.

5. Begin anew. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Your post-mortem on the completed project should include a section titled “What to do better next time.”<

is hosting the European Premier of

The Working Smarter Fieldbook | June 2010 Edition

Authors Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, & Jay Cross will sign books
2:00 – 3:00 pm, Thursday, July 22, 2010 at the Guiness Storehouse

Bob Morris pointed me toward this article that appeared in Strategy+Business last November:

What’s So Special about Special Ops?

by Andrew Sobel

The article describes how Green Berets, SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics units learn to do their extraordinary jobs. The story contains invaluable lessons for corporations.

The training that SOF personnel go through is a key to their success in real missions. Their training is in-depth, realistic, and repetitive, and it is run by the most experienced SOF operators — not classroom-schooled educators. This type of training puts true meaning into the overused term total immersion. If you add up the different phases of training that SOF candidates must go through, including specialized courses (such as high-altitude free-fall parachuting) and advanced training in their units, it may take two or three years at minimum to produce a fully developed SOF operator.

Five important aspects of SOF training reveal why it’s so effective, and also why much of the one-off, classroom-based training conducted by private-sector companies is of limited value.

1. Only the best of the best complete the rigorous training. Few candidates are accepted. Many wash out. It’s an honor to make the grade — or even to get part way through.

2. Practice, practice, and practice again. These guys will practice a particular mission hundreds of times. (How many times do you practice a sales presentation?)

3. Make training lifelike. In role play, Green Berets “bleed;” make-up artists make the enemy look like the real thing.

4. Feedback is constant. Instructors, experts, and peers continually assess performance and are blunt in feeding it back.

5. Stress, like staying active for 100 hours, simulates real-life situations. Shared hardships bond participants.

Some special operations training is highly formal. (Of course, like all training, it’s part formal and part informal.)

The author correctly concludes that:

Companies in the United States spend more than US$100 billion on training each year. Much of it is little more than a one-time classroom experience punctuated by PowerPoint presentations. At the same time, it is well established that the skill improvement and behavioral changes that would truly affect on-the-job performance require a sustained program of interventions consistent with the concept of deliberate practice. Corporate training needs to become more realistic and sustained.

Two weeks hence, I’ll be enjoying the west coast of Ireland, just me and my iPad for the better part of a week at the Dolphin Beach House on the Lower Sky Road, Clifden.

The iPad aspect will be interesting. I have many ideas and doodles I want to capture. Will the iPad help or hinder? Will it free me or hold me back? Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream had this to say today:

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.

from The Technium, by Kevin Kelly

P.S. I’m taking along a Bluetooth keyboard. On a virtual keyboard, my thoughts always come faster than my fingers .

FOR SALE: Professional Library of Jay Cross

Buy them all. I will throw in an afternoon on my back deck in Berkeley going over what I thought were the major messages of as many volumes as you wish.

Shelves of inspiring books. Strong on instructional design, management, learning, eLearning, marketing & sales, and psychology.  Some travel, humor, web 2.0, last 25 issues of Harvard Business Review. Lots more. These best-of-breed books are what remain after many trips to the recycling center to clear out the duds.

Why? Having consumed a diet of letters and words since childhood, I’m switching to feasting on images. I’m moving my thinking from left-brain dominance to right.

Acquire an instant library! Buy them all and receive a fantastic deal. Make me an offer.

Management books with legs. Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, HBR, Art Kleiner

Classic marketing and sales library. The Robert Collier Letter Book (best thing ever written on direct marketing), Caples on advertising, Ted Levitt, Geoffrey Moore & the Chasm, Strategic Selling, Don Tapscot on the digital era.

ROI. Go way beyond Jack Philips (although several of his are here too.)

Time. An incredible collection on the meaning of time. Einstein’s Dreams, Henri Bergson, Stan Davis, more.

eLearning. Best of the best.

Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s two-day intensive for geeks, takes place August 19-21 in Seattle. I’ve been to the last five — and I’ll be there again this year. Every time, I meet people who become movers and shakers in tech and move ahead of the curve for a while. Join me — it costs only $300 including parties and meals.

Chris’s single-track semi-unconference is described in Informal Learning. Last year was my first Pecha-Kucha:

The performance of workers used to have bounds. The fastest bricklayer was maybe 20% faster than the average bricklayer.

In conceptual work, the sky’s the limit. A superstar may generate $50 million in value while the average employee brings in a meager $50 thousand.

Several things are going on here. For one, rates of production are no longer limited by physical factors. A bricklayer can only lay so many bricks per hour before his heart gives out. There’s no such limit on ideas. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, thought up Google when they were in graduate school; it was a $100 billion idea.

In today’s complex world, small events often make giant impacts.  A popular example is “the butterfly effect.” A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and the reverberation helps create a tornado in Texas.

Back to Google. They have found that a great hire, a super-engineer, will generate two hundred times the value of her middle-of-the-road peer. Recalling the butterfly effect, let’s call the super-engineer a “butterfly person.”

What proportion of your organization’s development resources should be invested in butterfly people?

I am moving the My Documents folders from all of my computers to one Dropbox.

Dropbox is the equivalent of a hard drive in the cloud. I’ve been using the free version (2 GB) for months without any hassles.

Dropbox lets me work on files offline; it syncs when I’m back on the net. It provides a shareable folder to make files available to others. You can share folders selectively (Internet Time Alliance has a shared DropBox repository.) Dropbox backs everything up, including 30 days of un-do history. Upload and download are drag-and-drop. Transmission is encrypted. Dropbox works with my iPad, essentially giving me a My Documents folder there, too. Dropbox can be reached by iPhones and Android devices, too. And I can search all my files from one place.

I just upgraded to 50 GB of storage for $99/year.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before on a Pro account of anything:

This is like having a private, omniscient wiki.

Sign up here

Canon PowerShot S90

10MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD

$349.95
$362.42 with extra battery (which you will want to have)

I continue to be impressed with the Canon S90. Great in low-light conditions. (I never use the flash.) Fast lens. Vibrant colors.

While no camera is idiot-proof, I took all these in automatic (program) mode.

• New 10-megapixel High Sensitivity System; DIGIC 4 Image Processor
• Improved low-light image performance, plus a Low Light scene mode for ISO settings up to 12,800
• Customizable control ring for easy access and operation of manual or other creative shooting settings
• Wide-angle 3.8x optical zoom with Canon’s Optical Image Stabilizer
• Bright f/2.0 lens
• Dimensions: 3.9 x 2.3 x 1.2 inches ; 6.2 ounces
• RAW + JPEG shooting and recording modes; capture images to SD/SDHC memory cards
• Dimensions: 3.9 x 2.3 x 1.2 inches ; 6.2 ounces (fits in shirt pocket)

The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone in the Op/Ed section of today’s New York Time is a case study of Push learning vs Pull learning.

In 1955, Bell Telephone was concerned about leadership development:

“A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.

Drawing by Dave Gray

The Institute was deemed a success overall but Bell was disappointed its graduates tipped the scale of work/life balance more to the “life” side:

One man [said] that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

Over the following five years, Bell phased out the Institute of Humanistic Studies. Old ways die hard and once again, control preempted autonomy.

Today’s companies are grappling with the same issues Bell faced a half century ago. Are we confident our organization is preparing leaders who will be able to deal effectively with the challenges of the future?

• Do we have the right balance of generalists and specialists?
• Are we focused on the short-term or the long?
• Should we teach what we know or inspire people to discover what we don’t know?
• Isn’t the “soft stuff” as important or more so than the “hard stuff”?
• Are our programs developing people we can trust to make the right decisions down the road?

I fear the training community is on the wrong side of these questions. The world is open-ended; it’s not assembled from black and white answers. Real life is painted in shades of gray.

You can’t measure discovery learning with an LMS but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. This does it mean you shouldn’t use an LMS to monitor compliance and formal learning either. In a healthy learning ecosystem, “Pull learning” and “Push learning” are symbiotic; you need a bit of both.

We need fewer drifting straws on the stream of American business, and more discontented thinkers who listen thoughtfully to both sides of our national debates.

People learn socially and informally.

Research usually finds that around 80% of workplace learning is informal. This is of course an average; the value depends on the context and the individual learner.

Note that the studies that came up with the 80% were conducted before we had social networks or Google or YouTube or Facebook or ubiquitous email or blogs or smart phones.

What proportion would you think Informal Learning accounts for in today’s connected world?

I am pleased to note that I have been named a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board of HRExaminer. Check out our weekly magazine for a brilliant take on talent management and HR. Here’s a self-serving article from HRExaminer – written before I joined the Advisory Board.

Working Smarter

Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, web 2.0, and systems thinking. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.

Do you remember the first time a boss implored you to work smarter and not harder? Unfortunately, the next thing you heard was probably something akin to “know what I mean?”.
No, as a matter of fact we don’t always know what working smarter means.

Jay’s new un-book Working Smarter (available in on-demand paperback or PDF download) examines how to boost an organization’s collective brainpower. You’ll find an excerpt of his book below that might strike a chord with you in the ongoing conversation that we’re having here at HRExaminer.com on the effective and perceived value of HR.

Cross mashes up his considerable experience in training, business consulting and web 2.0 thinking to put forth a straight forward book designed for managers who want a natural way to improve performance – without the typical management consulting crapola. When Cross does delve into charts, models and mind maps you can rest assured he does so with an aim to clarify, not to earn his business book writing chops. While I’m not done with the book yet I will say what stands out to me so far; Cross does a nice job of balancing the theoretical with the practical – and that’s really useful to us as people who want fresh ideas we can use to improve our team’s results.

I hope you try the book – I’m finding it a worthwhile investment of time. Don’t forget that you can buy the online copy, save some money, kill one less tree and convert the PDF into an online book reader for your iPhone, Android phone and many others.

- Julian Seery Gude, HRExaminer Collaborator and Editorial Advisory Board Member.

Article continues here.

The current edition of Working Smarter dates from January 2010. Paperback copies cost $16; downloads are $10. (Buy here.)

I think of un-books as more of a subscription that a purchase. A major update is in the works. More than half will be new material. It’s a collaborative effort. Publication is a month or more in the future.  The price has not been set as yet. I suggest you buy both, but if you’re only buying one, I suggest you wait a while.

Today I arrived back in Berkeley after a marvelous month in Europe. My wife and I were celebrating an anniversary by retracing part of our honeymoon trip. Slideshow

These dairy cows are in the southern Black Forest, about 20 miles north of the Swiss border and 30 miles east of France.

Barcelona, Malaga, Heidelberg, the Black Forest, Alsace, Marrakech, the English countryside, Paris. I am spoiled.

Internet Time Alliance directors Jane Hart and Charles Jennings with new company car. Salisbury, Wiltshire, U.K.