Annual Survey of the Training Industry

The Annual Survey highlights the Training Industry status. We need to create Rainbow Creators but budgets have been cut. How do we exceed retrun on expectations as Jim Kirkpatrick calls or provide greater value to the end user. Some key points from the Bersin survey.
The Bersin & Associates Annual Training Industry Survey is interesting; visit their website for more details. Some salient points:
In 2009, the faltering U.S. economy continued to take its toll on training organizations. Companies cut their L&D budgets by another 11 percent from 2008 levels, with median spending falling to $714 per learner. Combined with the budget reductions that occurred in 2008, training budgets have fallen a total of 21 percent over the past two years. Spending was down across all company size categories. Small companies cut their L&D spending by 10 percent; midsize companies cut 11 percent and large companies cut 12 percent of their L&D spending.

Many L&D organizations also shed jobs in 2009. The median L&D staff fell from 7.0 staff per 1,000 learners in 2008 to 6.2 in 2009. Small businesses reduced their training staffs by four percent, while midsize firms cut five percent and large companies cut eight percent of their L&D headcount.

These budget and staffing figures show that large businesses have taken the hardest hit in 2009. Large companies generally have more “fat” to cut, with more L&D program offerings and more L&D staff playing specialized roles. Although they are often slower to respond to economic changes, they are assessing – and cutting now. As part of these cost-cutting efforts, many large companies are centralizing their training operations and moving toward a shared services model.

Appointment

I have been honoured with the appointment as a Director of the Human Reources Development Corporation by the Honourable Minister of HR, Government of Malaysia. It gives me an opportunity to contribute to the development of human capital.

The Human Resources Development Council manages the Human Resources Development Fund and aims to support human capital development. For more details visit their web site.

A quote to remember

Do not let others perceptions of you become true for you

Leadership

If you can inspire someone to aspire to do, to be and to become great, you are a leader. Quincy Adams

A Smile means a lot

Rainbow Creators make a huge difference, they touch people.

In service language, Mr. Sim Kay Wee, former Chairman of Service Quality and Senior VP of Singapore Airlines used to say more service does not equal to better service.
I have enjoyed travelling Emirates Airlines in the past but today was a nightmare.
They did everything to ensure I had a nightmare experience. I travelled with them London Dubai KL. Obviously I chose not to fly business but economy given the current economic climate. I realised that economy passengers are punished severely.

What they did were a few simple things?
• Forgot my lunch for 4 hours
• Served me a quarter glass of mango juice and the follow on never came
• Too busy to serve coffee
• Gave me a bag - this was meant to be service recovery - sewing kit, comb, razor, opened box of chocolates
• They had great make up and looked real pretty

What they did not do?

All the things a Rainbow Creator would have done:

• Smile
• Say Sorry
I wish they had just smiled and said sorry. That would have gone a long way.
Guess life is challenging. Customers have fw rights. Starve and then get out at the airport and buy a decent meal at Burger King.
Emirates Airlines would do wll to learn from the fast food restauarants on customer service.
I real hope they learn well and look after customers well. Otherwise they may not have many of them left.

Saudi Arabia

I have been with Dr Abdul Hai and Omar, my delightful companions in Riyadh. I have learned so much about the local culture from them.

I happened to read the Gulf News - the article Blue Sky Thinking was all about the Rainbow Creators who are introducing low cast airlines and changing the way airlines operate here.

Inclusiveness

I happened to work with a CEO of a major Insurance company in Malaysia, who happens to be a good friend too. 

His Secretary looked Chinese but the name sounded Malay. My colleague and I asked her if she was Malay and her answer shamed us. 

She responded: I am a Malaysian and a human being.

Her ability to look beyond race and at how we can promote the value of the human spirit stumped me. While she was an ethnic Malay, my colleague was Chinese and I was Indian, her ability to reflect human values even though she was young thrilled me. There is still goodness left in this world. 

She is a Rainbow Creator.

Sense of Urgency

Professor John Kotter from the Harvard Business School says while most may know that their organisations need to change, what is likely to be missing and most needed in most organisations is a real sense of urgency.

Rainbow Creators demonstarte a sense of urgency.

The change guru and author of the book Leading Change talks about the first step in his very successful eight step framework. Kotter illustrates in simple language, increasing the sense of urgency is the toughest of the eight steps. This is a book for anyone who wants to navigate the turbulent world of today. Visit www.johnkotter.com for more details.

Legacy

My friend Datuk J. L. Solomon is a great humorist. He will be speaking at the Asia HRDCongress May 11 to 13, 2009. The subject he will be speaking on "Personal Branding" is close to his heart. When I met him on Friday he said his subject will revolve around the idea: Personal Branding is about legacy not currency. Sure makes sense.

Getting right your emotional states

I am sure you have experienced days when everything went right and days when nothing went right. One day you are superb and another day you feel terrible. Research reveals that the one difference between successful people and others is the ability to summon the most suitable states of mind on command.
Rainbow Creators are able to motivate themselves and inspired whenever they want to and need to. They get focused in minutes. Fit and healthy people have disciplined thought and disciplined action. They do it; they don’t talk about it. Rainbow Chasers talk about how good they are and what they are going to do but never do.
Why does this difference take place?
Rainbow Creators control their emotional states. They are able to summon their emotions that create their ability for excellence.

It is often attributed to two steps:

1. State Generation - the process where you intentionally put yourself into a specific emotional state so that you can do what needs to be done well

2. Anchoring is what happens naturally when you are in an intense emotional state and something unique happens over and over while you are in that state. Eventually, the state and that unique "something" get linked up with each other in your mind and your body.

In the next blog we will look at these two concepts and the programmes available to develop these two steps.

Begin with the End in Mind

Begin with the end in mind. 

What is your life plan? 

Let us not get into the great New Year resolutions and then do nothing about them. 

Let us develop into Rainbow Creators.  

There is a famous saying - plan your work and work your plan.

Happy New Year

Palan’s thoughts for the month: BLINK

 

I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.  It was all about three simple facts: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately, when should we trust our instincts and when should we be wary of them, the power of knowing the first two seconds is not the preserve of a chosen few; it is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

Momentary autism is a term Gladwell introduces when describing what happens when our ability to read people's intentions is paralyzed in high-stress situations. You may remember we discussed this last time. 

He explains the situation when the cops misread a "terrified" black man for a "terrifying" black man, they didn't correctly understand his intentions in that moment, and as a result they completely misinterpreted what that social situation was all about.  It's only one of many neatly packaged catchphrases Gladwell sprinkles throughout his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (Little, Brown, January 2005).

There's "rapid cognition," "thin-slicing," and the "Warren Harding error," but "momentary autism" is the one that you can quickly relate to like when you froze during the new presentation pitch.

Mention his impact, though, and Malcolm Gladwell modestly tries to brush it off -- leaning, like any good journalist, on data points to support his argument. "Remember," he points out, "even a book that's a best-seller still is only read by less than 1% of the American public."But as the expert in social epidemics knows better than anyone, it's not how many people you reach, it's whom you reach.

Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own, and evidence of his impact can now be found in all corners of our culture, from politics (Donald Rumsfeld used "tipping point" to describe the war in Iraq.