Here is a question I often get from both decision makers and people off the street: "If the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in games such as Call of Duty looks so good, why can’t we copy this for real world training systems?" First, let’s be clear. Games are designed to be fun. Training is designed to [...]

A lot of people ask me, "What’s the difference between leadership, management, and supervision?"  Most people think it’s about where you are in the hierarchy—if you’re at the top, you’re a leader; if you’re in the middle, you’re a manager; and if you are closest to the people who are actually dealing with the customers, you’re in supervision. I’d like to break the mold and forget about those labels. I believe all three are leadership roles. No matter whether you’re at the top, in the middle, or supervising people on the front lines, as a leader you first need to make sure that everybody is clear on goals. The first secret of The One Minute Manager is One Minute Goal Setting. All good performance starts with clear goals, which is the vision and direction part of leadership. The next thing you need to do is to help people accomplish those goals. That brings to mind the second and third secrets of The One Minute Manager. The second secret is One Minute Praising. After people are clear on what they are being asked to do, you need to wander around and see if you can catch them doing something right. Accent the positive and praise them. If someone does something wrong, but is a learner, don’t punish the person. Just say, "Maybe it wasn’t clear about what we were working on," and redirect. However, if you are dealing with an experienced person who for some reason has a lousy attitude, give the person a One Minute Reprimand, which is the third secret of The One Minute Manager. That’s where you make clear what the person did wrong: "You didn’t get your report in on Friday, and I really needed it. Let me tell you how I feel - I’m really upset about it."  Be sure, though, that you always end with a reaffirmation: "The reason I’m upset is that you’re one of my best people and I always count on you for that." Every level of leadership starts with clear vision and direction and then moves to implementation. Remember that managers, supervisors, and CEOs are all leaders. Don’t let yourself get hung up on labels.

Are your current methods for knowledge management, knowledge sharing and training scalable? Or do you feel like your pivotal performers are continuously putting out fires? Do you think knowledge harvesting doesn’t scale? Why? Let’s start with talking about two dimensions of scalability:  horizontal and vertical. Horizontal:  Administrative      scalability: The ability for an increasing number [...]

Can a person with no technical or computer software background become a "knowledge engineer" in less than a year? If you asked me this question over a year ago, I would have said no. That was until it happened to me. In this day and age it’s important to be flexible and adaptable in the [...]

There’s an important difference between delegating and abdicating. When you delegate to someone, you give them responsibility for something, but you stay in the information loop. Abdicating is when you give somebody responsibility and then you disappear and you’re not in the information loop. Then what happens? All of a sudden someone says, "Do you know what’s happening?" Now you have become the classic manager of all time; what I call the Seagull Manager. You fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everybody, and fly out. Why do you do that? Because you didn’t know what was happening in the first place. If you’re delegating, you’re turning over responsibility to someone else, but you’re still in the loop so you know at what point you might need to get involved again and maybe help in some way. But if you turn your back on the situation, you have abdicated and you are helpless. You become a seagull manager. And remember—people don’t like to be dumped on when you haven’t been around. So delegate, don’t abdicate. People don’t mind you being in the information loop because then they can get your help when they need it.

"As the pace of technological change increases, many jobs will require constant adaptation creating less distinction between learning and work." (O’ Discroll, 1999). This is especially true for today’s workforce if you ask me. In many workforce arenas, people are becoming more and more accustomed to learning in an increasingly dynamic environment using tools such [...]

It’s just a fact of human nature - Not everyone has the same set of values. But what should you do if you discover that one of your high performers is a values mismatch with your organization? There are two aspects to evaluating people: One is performance and the other is citizenship—whether people are operating closely in relation to your values. If a person is a lousy performer and also not a good values match, that’s an easy decision. The tough decision is what to do if you have a high performer who’s just not a good citizen—this person is not following your values. What do you do?  Well, if your values are important, you have to deal with it. A few years ago we fired our top salesperson. That really sent a message out. He was a great performer, but our number one value is ethics, our number two value is relationships, number three is success, and number four is learning. He was focusing all his energy on the success value. He was doing stuff that really wasn’t right and he was stepping on other people’s toes. We talked to him and tried to work with him, but finally decided we needed to share him with our  competition. Remember: If you don’t deal with a values mismatch and you just let it go, pretty soon your people will say, "Those values are on the wall but they don’t mean anything." Don’t let that happen in your organization.

For many years it seemed as if the term Artificial Intelligence was a dirty word.   It had the connotation of great promise with little commercial applicability.   Today it seems that AI has not only found its cache’, it has been co-opted.   The blockbuster games released all promise new AI and talk about it as a [...]

Over the past several months, Discovery Machine has been developing executable cognitive behavior models of Navy crew members. As it stands, a full complement of human crew members is needed for training, making training both difficult and expensive to schedule. Using our behavior models in place of human crew members, students would have the ability [...]

To have a successful business, you don’t want satisfied customers—you want Raving Fans. I wrote a book with the title Raving Fans along with Sheldon Bowles from Winnipeg, Canada. Our belief is that you don’t want to simply satisfy your customers. You want to treat them so well that they are blown away—that they brag about you. The way to do that is to think about the customer service experience you want them to have. In the 1970s when all the gas stations were switching to self-service gasoline, Sheldon started a chain of full-service stations called Domo Gas. Sheldon said, "Most people don’t want to go to the gas station unless they have to, so I want to give them the best service, the quickest service, and the friendliest service." So his vision was that if you came to one of his stations, it would be like going to an Indianapolis 500 race pit stop. He hired housewives and retirees and had them all wear red jumpsuits. When a customer came in, several attendants would race out. Someone checked under the hood. Someone pumped the gas. Someone washed the windshield. Someone opened the car door, handed the customer a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and asked the customer to step out so they could give the car a quick vacuum. Do you think Sheldon made a difference across Canada? You’d better believe it! Because he didn’t just have satisfied customers, he had Raving Fans. Everybody talked about the experience of going to one of his gas stations and how they were treated. So don’t just satisfy customers—think of how you can really blow them away and turn them into Raving Fans.