Jet Blue University Uses Own Faculty To Test Social Media Tools

I have been giving seminars this past month on how companies are experimenting with social media to maximize knowledge sharing and collaboration and one theme is consistent across companies of various sizes and locations: they are turning to their training departments to be the test beds for using new social media tools like blogs and wiki’s.

This is the case with Jet Blue University (JBU), the corporate university of Jet Blue Airlines. Jet Blue University has 200 faculty spread across three locations, in Orlando, Florida (where they train flight crews), in Queens, NY (where they train operations and technical crews) and in Salt Lake City ( the training arm for reservations and customer services representatives).

Early in 2008, Jet Blue University powered its training faculty with a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs and wiki’s as a way for them to share best practices and be the pioneers for social media tools. Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at Jet Blue University, says that the main driver to experimenting with these new technologies is to capture process improvements and “next” practices that are working among faculty across the country.

It really makes a lot of sense for companies to use their “learning organization” to test out new ways to collaborate and share best practices. First, for employees in the learning department of an organization, part of their job is to share best practices around the enterprise. However, often they have been frustrated with their company’s attempts at knowledge management systems. So now they can become blogger champions and learn first-hand the power of social media while using the tools to do their job—share lessons learned across their community of peers..

Secondly, while the training faculty may have good intentions about sharing best practices, they often lack an easy tool that allows them to collaborate with their peers. So, I can see how empowering the training faculty to be a community of blogger and wiki champions can create excitement and even be a vehicle to re-invent and re-brand an entire learning organization. Some topic areas to think about having your faculty share best practices using blogs and wikis’ include, new-hire employee on-boarding, leadership development of high potentials and even company-wide blogging guidelines, assuming the company then decides to expand this initiative enterprise-wide.

Finally, professionals in a company’s learning organization want to “role model” what is expected across the organization. What better way to be a role model business unit than to be the first to use these new social media tools.

The Jet Blue University’s social platform, which went live early this year, was provided by Awareness, a company that focuses on delivering enterprise-wide blogs and wiki’s to both internal and external communities.

In fact, the folks at Jet Blue University are so enamored with their “experiment” that they went ahead and made a series of videos describing why they did this. Tune in to hear what they say below:

So, is your learning department taking the lead to “test out” new social media tools for the enterprise? What has been your experience to date?

Building Talent Internally Through Innovative Corporate/College Partnerships

Last week, I was interviewed at length by News & Observer, a regional newspaper operating in North Carolina for an article entitled “The New Work Study: Companies Invite Degree Programs, Employees Benefit.” The essence of the article was the growing trend among corporations to bring degree granting courses on-site at the company location. Actually, I have been following this trend since 1994 when my first book on corporate universities, entitled Corporate Quality Universities was published. But now I can see that this is the moment for companies and universities to truly enter a new period in creating innovative and customized partnerships bringing accredited learning to the masses.

As they say, “timing is everything.” What we are experiencing now is a global talent shortage. This is finally fueling the demand for companies and universities to re-think how they do business with each other.

The importance of retaining talent is highlighted in the following headlines taken from across the globe:

United States
• Every 10 minutes someone in the Baby Boomer Generation (born between 1946 and 1964) turns 60 years old.

Europe
• 38% of UK employers are struggling to fill positions due to a lack of staff with the right skills

India
• By 2010 India will experience a shortfall of nearly half a million qualified IT workers.

Companies spend millions of dollars on tuition reimbursement and now they are demanding to become true “customers” of the higher education system by creating flexible and innovative programs for their employees. And the results as profiled in the News & Observer article are worthy to take note:

• 25% of Blue University “graduates” (i.e Blue University is the corporate university of Blue Cross Blue Shield and is the entity that partners with universities) have experienced lateral or upward mobility in their careers within a year of graduating from one of the on-site university programs
• Company turnover was 16% in 2007, but was just 9% among Blue University graduates

So why has it taken so long to create these on-site and, often times, customized corporate/college programs?

These programs require a new mindset among both heads of human resources and learning as well as deans of universities. Corporations must realize that the days of passively funding tuition assistance programs are ending. Instead, in its place, companies must manage a global network of universities that meet specific criteria just as they manage a network of healthcare providers.

And for universities, there exists a new set of challenges—new ways of delivering curriculum, new mandates to “customize” curriculum that is aligned to strategic business priorities and importantly, new ways to communicate the business outcomes associated with investing in talent.

So, as companies look to “retain” and grow talent internally, they will focus on re-writing the playbook in working with universities. Perhaps the day has finally come for Customized Corporate-College Partnerships.

What do you think?

Wearable Learning Via Your Blackberry

I am always on the “hunt” for interesting dialogues happening on the Web and the following one about Blackberry caught my eye. It starts out with a request for using a Blackberry for purposes of training a population of Attorneys and focuses on the tools that will allow this to happen seamlessly.

I am looking for the ability to send an email to all our Attorneys via 
BlackBerry (1000+) that contains a link. Upon clicking the link a multimedia 
file will either download and play or stream. This multimedia file 
can be actual video or a PowerPoint-type stack that contains audio and automatic slide change. The critical 
factor is that the population of Attorneys do not have to open up a separate application on 
the BB thus making using the BB for learning as easy and seamless as possible.

So far, one leading suggestion is to try Blackberry Video Generator. Now, let’s say you are trying to build a case to your management on why you should be exploring “Wearable Learning For Senior Executives.” Here are some examples to refer to:

There Have Been Record Shipments for PDA’s
According to Gartner, the PDA market (Personal Digital Assistants) showed record shipments of 17.7 million devices, an increase of 18.4% from the previous year. Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than 1 pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands (collectively known as “BlackBerry’s,” or “CrackBerry’s” for the addicted). Examples include the RIM BlackBerry 8707v, HP iPAQ 69xx, Nokia E61, Motorola Q, T-Mobile Dash and Sidekick. So there is a huge installed base of senior executives who “wear” a potential training device.

Some companies are already piloting using Blackberry for Training
There are a number of on-going pilots of companies already exploring using the Blackberry for training. Often the target markets are senior executives who use BlackBerry 24X7 in their job. One that comes to mind is a series of pilots being rolled out in 2008 targeting Merrill Lynch Investment Bankers. The objective is to provide corporate mandated training to Investment Bankers over Blackberry. What’s interesting is how the pilot is organized: Merrill Lynch is using their internal Learning and Human Resource staff as the first pilots to work out technical issues as well as test out the ergonomics of programs.

Research points to the need for heavy investments in recruiting high paid professionals as compared to investments in training high paid professionals. Deloitte Research finds that the typical US company spends nearly 50 times more to recruit a $100,000 professional than it will invest in their annual training once they are on-board.

What has been your experience in using the BlackBerry for learning? Share it here with our readers.

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Does Your CEO Have a Blog?

There is so much talk lately about how your learning organization or human resource organization should utilize blogging. Questions abound like:

• What strategy should the learning and human resource department have with regard to blogging?
• What guidelines should be in place for how your employees blog, i.e. what topics to stay away from and how to use blogging as a way to build stronger bonds with your customers?

Often I hear comments like, “my leadership is afraid of blogging,” or “we have strict rules allowing a small number of senior people to blog and our department is not included in this small number of senior executives.”

It seems to me there are some larger questions you should be addressing like:

• Does your CEO know what a blog is?
• Should your CEO have a blog?
• Has your CEO blog been reviewed in the blogosphere?
• Do your top three competitor CEO’s have blogs?
• Are these competitor CEO blogs a corporate communications tool or does the CEO really post about significant issues?

Interesting questions to ponder as more companies begin experimenting with social media to develop trust, improve communications and increase vehicles for employee development.

To find out about what your competitor CEO’s are doing in terms of blogging, I recommend you go to TheNewPR CEOBlogsList Wiki.

To date, 58 of the Fortune 500 companies have blogs. But in most cases, the blogs are company blogs, many maintained by corporate communications departments (like Clorox, which has one that answers questions about stains), rather than CEO’s penning their own blogs.

But there are notable exceptions and two CEO’s come to mind that regularly post to their blogs. One is Jonathan Schwartz CEO of Sun Microsystems who posts on a regular basis about his interactions with customers around the world. The other is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and CEO of HDNet.

As you continue to research what strategy to adopt and to create a set of guidelines with regard company blogging, I recommend consulting a survey recently conducted by content security company,
Clearswift.

The survey was conducted among 939 corporate decision-makers on matters related to corporate blogging, wiki’s and participation in online networks/forums and other aspects of the so-called Web 2.0. Some highlights from the survey found:

• 20 percent of IT and business decision-makers don’t have a policy governing appropriate use of the Internet, including social media sites
• 39 percent of IT and business decision-makers consider social media to be relevant to today’s corporate environment, while 36 percent do not see social media as relevant to their businesses
• 13 percent of organizations are not aware of social media and have no policy on it

So before your begin to develop a policy for your Human Resources and/or Corporate Learning department regarding blogging, wiki’s and other social media, first find out what your company policy is regarding the usage of social media at work. For Human Resource and Corporate Learning professionals, I find the Sun blog policy to be highly informative.

Finally, let’s continue a dialogue on CEO’s as Bloggers:

• Should more CEO’s be bloggers?
• Should this be part of their job in next 5 years?
• Should CEO bloggers participate as part of a corporate communications strategy or use blogging to begin a “real” dialogue with customers?
• And how can Human Resource and Corporate Learning departments “experiment” in their own departments about innovative ways to leverage social media at work while maintaining security standards?

Technorati Tags: CEO, talent management, social media, Sun Microsystems, HDTV, Human Resources

Facebook for the FORTUNE 500 Firm?

This week, I spoke and attended the CLO conference entitled “Orchestrating Change: Leading Organizations with Learning.” My presentation focused on Brave New Learners: Millennials and Beyond.

The presentation addressed such issues as:

• What impact will all of this have on the four generations currently in the workforce?
• Do Millennials really learn differently?
• Will FORTUNE 500 companies ever create their own Facebook for internal use?

There is no doubt that online social networking is weaving itself into the fabric of all four generations in the work force, defined as:

Veterans born between 1925-1945
Baby Boomers born between 1946-1965
Gen X born between 1965-1977
Millennials (Gen Y) born on/about 1978 or later

It was the discussion about these topics that really got us into a lively and engaged session with lots of questions and frank dialogue:

The four generations of the workforce should really be defined attitudinally (i.e., what they are involved in at work and how they have embraced social networking, rather than by their chronological age). I, for example, am a Baby Boomer, but think, act and engage like a Millennial.

Despite the huge popularity and widespread adoption of social networking websites like LinkedIn and Facebook, the concept of social networking has had a difficult time finding traction in the business world where IT managers fret about security issues, and rightly so. Instead, the “early adopters” of social networking for learning and human resources are creating “Facebook-like” applications behind their firewalls. They are also thinking about what they expect from social networking and how it will benefit the organization. In addition, they are asking themselves “What do we want ‘increased connectivity’ to bring to our business? What does success look like for the recruiting, sales and learning departments?”

A new category is emerging in the social networking landscape called “socialprise,” a mash-up of social networking and enterprise computing applications. Look for more examples here from companies like Select Minds and InsideView.

Finally, and perhaps most compelling, the audience for the session at CLO was overwhelmingly comprised of Baby Boomers. One Chief Learning Officer from a Fortune 100 firm came up with the most honest assessment of why FORTUNE 500 firms will continue to be slow to adopt to social networking:

“I know I continue to feel guilty when I am on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I feel that I am not working, not producing those power point presentations or answering those emails that I have stacked up on my in-box.”

But then another member of the audience shot back:

“That would never be an issue for Millennials. They have social networking in their DNA and know connecting to colleagues and using the latest technology to stay on top of industry trends is part of working in the 21st Century.”

But let’s remember as we explore how to incorporate social networking into the enterprise that it’s not about the technology. This is still relatively new to Fortune 500 firms - the larger issue is to have a clear vision for what you want to accomplish and build both online and offline solutions that allow increased connectivity for your employees, customers and business partners.

Technorati Tags: social networking, CLO, Facebook, LinkedIn, Millennials,

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Business Week 50 Best Performers: Is Your Company On The List?

The annual Business Week survey of the 50 Best Performers is out on newsstands.

Here are a few things to think about: Is your company on the list? What are the companies on the list doing in terms of people development?

First the top list of companies:
1. Coach
2. Gilead Sciences
3. Allegheny Technologies
4. Verizon
5. Questar
6. Apple
7. Colgate-Palmolive
8. BJ Services
9. Abercrombie & Fitch
10. MEMC Electronic Materials
11. CB Richard Ellis Group
12. C.H. Robinson Worldwide
13. IntercontinentalExchange
14. UnitedHealth Group
15. CME Group
16. Starbucks
17. Robert Half International
18. Avon Products
19. Cognizant Technology Solutions
20. Sunoco
21. Goldman Sachs Group
22. Exelon
23. Amazon.com
24. Rockwell Collins
25. Nucor
26. Varian Medical Systems
27. AT&T
28. Autodesk
29. T.Rowe Price Group
30. Bed Bath & Beyond
31. Pepsico
32. Expeditors International of Washington
33. Lehman Brothers
34. Google
35. Schlumberger
36. Best Buy
37. IMS Health
38. PNC Financial Services Group
39. Constellation Energy Group
40. Sherwin-Williams
41. Microsoft
42. Precision Castparts
43. Titanium Metals
44. Moody’s
45. Coca-Cola
46. Barr Pharmaceuticals
47. TJX
48. Centurytel
49. Nvidia
50. Exxon Mobil

A few observations:

The list is created based on financial measures. Business Week selects the top performers in each of 10 sectors based on two key metrics: return on investment and sales growth over the past three years (and for the financial service firms, their return on equity and growth in assets). But as we know that only tells a small part of the story. What about the commitment these companies are making to innovation and people development? One of the companies - Lehman Brothers is in fact doing both, all the more remarkable given the current chaos in the financial services and sub-prime marketplace. This year Lehman Brothers ranked number 33 on Business Week’s Top 50 list and while down slightly from the previous year, the company continues to make a commitment to people development.

One of the interesting innovations in learning used by Lehman Brothers is Metaphoric Learning, a learning method that takes participants out of their familiar surroundings and gives them the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new world. Metaphorical Learning is not just another fad. Rather, this learning method, as pioneered by Duke Corporate Education, ties learning outcomes to key business priorities. At Lehman Brothers, metaphorical learning is used to develop relationship building skills among investment bankers who become part of a pit crew changing tires trackside at a NASCAR race while building key skills sets that focus on developing execution skills and how to be a member of a complex team.

To date, over 500 Lehman executives have participated in metaphoric learning experiences and according to Lehman Brothers there has been a relationship between those who participate in these learning experiences and an increased retention rate. Is this method widespread? Currently it is focused on niche populations in financial services and medical fields but is gaining traction among a broader segment of workers even New York Police Department has used metaphoric learning to build observation skills among police detectives. Is it effective? The key to using metaphoric learning is to be sure it is linked to strategic business goals, the specific skill sets you want to build in a target audience and then measure the outcomes such as increased employee retention, revenue and productivity. If you have experience with metaphoric learning please share your experiences with us.

Technorati Tags: metaphorical learning, Duke CE, Lehman Brothers, Business Week

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Talent Management: What Is Your CEO’s Involvement and Engagement in Growing Global Talent?

The demand to grow the best breed of talent is on the CEO agenda but still many CEO’s struggle to resolve the talent shortage for their businesses. There is a fundamental disconnect between how executives value the importance of talent management versus the amount of involvement and rigor they have in the talent management process. This is one of the major findings from Growing Global Executive Talent, a global online survey of 412 executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Development Dimensions International (DDI). Click here to download the PDF of the full report.

According to this survey, 55% of respondents said that their organization’s performance was likely or very likely to suffer in the future due to insufficient leadership talent.

One of the more compelling quotes in the survey findings was from a CEO in support of investing more time in talent management. David Novak, CEO of Yum Brands, shares this in the survey; “Show me a good leader and I’ll show you a good business.”

A number of key findings emerged from the survey that can be highlighted and referred to as evidence of the importance of talent management, namely:

• 66% of the respondents from the survey are making talent management a core business strategy equal to or more important than other business priorities. Some CEO’s are increasingly playing a hands-on role in expanding and fine-tuning their talent management initiatives. For example, Mr. Majdi Abulaban, vice president of Delphi Packard Electrical Architecture, said he is now spending 50% of his time on talent management, up from 35% two years ago.
• 55% of respondents said their firm was fair or poor at identifying talent and communicating promotions. Strong talent management depends on clear communication where potential candidates understand where they need to improve and what they need to accomplish in order to be in line for advancement.
• Only 20% of respondents said they spend time on managing leadership talent or involved their human resources department as a “true strategic partner.” One thought for Human Resource professionals: Be proactive in involving yourself as a business partner. Waiting to be “invited” to assume this role will clearly not work for you. One suggestion: develop an enterprise people development plan, this will give you the strategic view into your organization’s talent needs. Furthermore, given the fact, that just one in ten CEO’s said they reviewed leadership talent with their Board of Directors, this appears to be another opportunity for Human Resources professionals to begin to engage with their senior leadership in putting talent management on the agenda for the Board of Directors. And having an enterprise people plan may be the first request of the Board.

So, the survey asks what is preventing companies from adopting a more “rigorous” approach to talent management? Some common strategies mentioned in depth in the survey findings include:

• Develop an integrated talent strategy - meaning do not patch together various programs, but rather adopt one comprehensive strategy requiring leaders to serve both as executive sponsors and champions of the talent strategy as well as active participants in the development of talent.
• Identify talent potential early - the demand for strategic leaders is outgrowing the supply and this results in the need to identify and invest in internal leaders on a regular basis. This requires a routine scanning of the skills, knowledge and talent of the organization, and isolating leaders who show a combination of strong performance and leadership potential.
• Use innovation and take “calculated risks” in executive development - push your learning vendors to use innovative design approaches including metaphorical learning experiences - a term referring to a learning method that takes participants out of their familiar surroundings and gives them the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new world as they go through a set of learning exercises.

So what are your barriers to gaining traction with talent management inside your organization? Please share your experiences with our growing community.

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Technorati Tags: talent management, talent retention, talent leader, global talent, ceo

Is Your Company On FORTUNE’s Most Admired Company List?

Every year I wait to see which companies made FORTUNE’s list of America’s Most Admired Companies. This year, Apple is not only ranked #1 in America, but also #1 Globally and in the category of Most Innovative Company. Apple has not only created successful new products but it has disrupted three different industries - computers (with the Mac), music (with the iPod) and movies (with Pixar).

Let me make a full disclosure here: I own most of Apple’s latest products with the exception of the MacBook Air (though, it’s next on my list).

What I found most interesting about the Apple coverage in the latest FORTUNE article was the comment by COO Tim Cook, ”Apple hires people who are never satisfied. You don’t get a foot in the door unless your eyes light up when you talk about your Mac.” It really is passion that provides the secret sauce to talent management at Apple. It’s so easy to forget the passion quotient in thinking about talent management, but in the end it’s what drives customer satisfaction.

This is what Steve Jobs has this to say about recruiting and managing talent:

“When I hire someone really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for me or them. Recruiting is hard. It’s finding the needle in the haystack. In the end I ask myself: How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they are challenged? Why are they here? Hopefully the answer will be: They cannot do what you can do at Apple anywhere else.”

Below are the lists for this year’s top 10 most admired companies and the top 10 most innovative.

Top Ten Most Admired Companies
Apple
Berkshire Hathaway
GE
Google
Toyota
Starbucks
FedEx
Procter & Gamble
Johnson & Johnson
Goldman Sachs

Top Ten Most Innovative Companies
Apple
Nike
Medco Health Solutions
Procter & Gamble
Herman Miller
Walt Disney
Fortune Brands
Burlington Northern Santa Fe
McDonald’s
ProLogis

Managing Talent Across Generations

This week I participated in an interesting panel at the 2008 National Human Capital Institute entitled, Attracting and Retaining the New Economy Workforce: Generation X and Y.

After a brief discussion of how generational differences can impact behavior in the workplace (see below), the focus of the panel was on what talent management executives can do about developing new practices for attraction and development of Generation Y, also known as Millennials or the Google Generation.

Some suggestions to consider in thinking about adopting new practices for a multi-generation workplace include:

• Learn how the marketing, operations and sales departments in your firm are using social media to attract and retain new customers. In many organizations, experimenting with new media happens outside of the human resources department. For example, in June 2006 Blue Shirt Nation was launched for Best Buy associates. This is a voluntary, open-source, corporate-sponsored social network site that operates outside of the corporate firewall and is moderated by its users. Currently there are 20,000 members of Blue Shirt Nation and it’s become a place for Blue Shirt associates to help each other solve retail store operation issues. It has become influential in affecting changes to the email policy, improving enrollments in the 401k program and setting up systems for employees to communicate between shifts. In terms of retention, the funder of Blue Shirt Nation claims that while company turnover rates hover around 60%, members of BSN have a turnover rate of just 8.5%.
• Work with your talent management group to develop innovative ways for Net Generation X and Y’s to connect with one another while showcasing their creative abilities. One of the panelists, Leah Reynolds of Deloitte shared a YouTube clip from the Deloitte Film Festival. This is a contest run among Deloitte new hires where they make short films that express their vision of the firm’s culture and values. The best of these videos are posted to YouTube, check out my favorite, entitled, The Green Dot. It is about a Deloitte superhero who shows what’s its like to be a client services superhero for a day.
• Finally, as you work with your teams to create new and innovative ways to attract, develop and motivate Net Generation X and Y’s be sure you take a business approach. Develop a business case for why your organization needs to look at newer alternative methods. Also define the target audience and, importantly, the results and metrics you are looking for in terms of increased retention and increased on-the-job performance.
  

What Will Be The Impact Of FREE On Corporate Learning?

“Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business,” on the front cover of the Wired Magazine March, 2008 issue is one of the most thought provoking articles I have read in a long time. The author is Chris Andersen, who also wrote The Long Tail and resides as Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine. The article explores the concept of FREE - a marketing strategy where digital products are given away and previews Chris’ forthcoming book called “Free.”

Chris argues that with cost of digital products rapidly dropping, it’s time to give them away for FREE. There are plenty of examples in the article including: free web web mail from Google and Yahoo, free access to online content from the New York Times, and free DVR’s from Comcast. According to Wired article:

FREE was once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Just last week the United Nations University was launched. At this stage, the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal offers open access to about a dozen courses developed by three of UN’s Research and Training Centres and Programmes (RTC/Ps) and the Tokyo-based UNU Media Studio.

The goal of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to make the course materials used by UN Research and Training Centres available on the Web, free of charge. This is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses, or even customized learning programs, but to provide content that can be used by educators for curriculum development, by students to augment their current learning resources and by individuals for independent self-study.

As more of these initiatives are launched and heavily promoted I can see senior executives of companies asking learning and talent management professionals the tough questions including how to integrate FREE content into some of their customized learning programs and in the process lower the cost and improve the quality of these programs?

On a final note, I wanted to take Wired Magazine up on their offer for a FREE March, 2008 issue where this article is the cover story. But on the Wired web site you will see the following notice: The March 2008 Issue For Free Offer is Now Closed. So much for walking the walk…