I have learned of a 1 hour webinar offered by NetSpeed Learning Solutions that will take place on February 10th. The information on what will be covered in the webinar is located here. If you are interested in using web conferencing tools to collaborate and interact, you may want to register. ASTD’s The Buzz newsletter is the source for how I found out about the webinar–you’ll be asked when you register. It doesn’t look like you have to be a member of ASTD to register for the seminar. See you online.

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I didn’t think I should create a whole new entry for this bit. I came across an interview with Warner Burke, the author of one of our text in Change Strategies. It’s a quick read and it covers many of the points that we’re reading about. One idea that I really like is that people don’t resist change they resist the process of change.

Yesterday my sister’s family joined us for a Chinese New Year celebration. The actual lunar new year isn’t until Monday but we celebrated as close to the actual date as we could. I always have some arts and crafts activities focused on the holiday for the nieces to enjoy although at two years old, the youngest likes to scribble and rip things to shreds over learning about cultural traditions.

Her older sister made me a bookmark out of construction paper. I told her I had tons of reading to catch up on and it was a perfect gift. She responded by telling me she has a million books to read. That warmed my heart.

As I was getting caught up on reading today (Organization Change: Theory and Practice by W. Warner Burke), I was thinking about something we learned last semester about how some organizations are like a family. What the head of the family says and does affects how everyone else in the household behaves. This is certainly true when I watch how my sister’s family acts and reacts to each other. I know it was my experience growing up.

Our client in the Capstone class is a family-run business. It will be intriguing to see up close how the views and values of a few family leaders shape a company. In our preliminary research, it seems the leadership is quite concerned about the needs of the workers. It also seems like the family is defined by their business. I’m looking forward to see how the culture has been shaped at the company by these family members and how much outsiders have been able to influence the company. I hope we’ll be privy to that information as I think it will directly tie to whether or not our suggestions/solutions will be heard and implemented.

*That’s Happy New Year in Chinese.

I came across an article today that mentioned UMBC’s Training Forum and thought I’d share it as a resource.

There are a couple of videos on the page available from YouTube. If you’re into training, you probably know the name Thiagi. His video is here. His talk is about Rapid Instructional Design.

There’s another video on the site as well featuring Ruth Clark. Her talk focuses on leveraging virtual classrooms.

Updated 01/18/09:

I also found this site (actually re-found it): Gladwell dot com. He has an article about choosing NFL quarterbacks and quality teachers. Sounds like an odd comparison but it works and while reading the article, I was struck by how many indicators of a good elementary school teacher are also indicators of good trainers/instructional designers–engagement of students/participants being quite high on the list.

I had hoped to get a ton of reading done while our offices were closed for Winter Break. Instead I did clear the coffee table of magazines and I read Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff. This is a great book and really resonated with me especially in light of coming off the high of the Consulting Skills and Organizational Learning classes. Although the book deals primarily with how to facilitate large meetings, I saw many similiarities in the concepts we learned in Consulting Skills. The idea of keeping my mouth shut seems to keep coming up and I hope I’ll be able to practice silence with the occasional deep breathing technique to help move myself and my organization forward this year.

Of course there’s no surprise when I say how much I like Weisbord and this book revisits his (and I assume Janoff’s) style of plainly telling you how to take concepts and apply them directly. The book isn’t overly filled with citations of Concepts and Theories but assumes the reader has some experience with leadership. It was nice to see a book written for managers and leaders that applies HRD in a way that makes it approachable and practical for everyone to make the most of the ideas we all know.

I was also glad to be reminded of:

• don’t set out to change anyone, but use their strengths
• although structure is huge we tend to overlook the importance of acknowledging it
• anxiety is good
• someone always has the answer if you pause to really hear it
• the room of confusion is powerful

I recommend Weisbord and Janoff’s newest book. It’s relatively short. It’s possibly shorter than the pre-reading we have for Capstone (she smiles) but make sure you have a pen handy because you’ll be making notes in the margins.