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Britain Has Got Talent…and the Professional Development of the Progressive Manager

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Well the Apprentice is over for another year.

What TV does the Progressive Manager watch now in the name of professional development?

Try Britain Has Got Talent. Not usually my cup of tea – but watch Paul Potts singing Nessun Dorma.

Notice the body language of the judges as they:

  1. Find out that a car phone salesman is going to sing them opera (This is going to be bad…)
  2. Hear the opening bars of a recording of Nessun Dorma (How bad is this going to be…)
  3. Hear the beauty that comes out in this man’s voice.

If you have ever had any doubts about the importance of reading facial expressions and body language and how it speaks volumes just take 4 minutes to watch this video.

There are so many lessons in this clip alone around passion, talent, self confidence, opportunity and risk taking. Watch it – on the company’s time – and learn.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA]

Are you doing ‘what you were born to do’?

Three Humps and a Stick – the Third Sector and PMN

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A great post from Seth Godin looking at pricing that I believe has relevance in the third sector and for social enterprises – and has really helped me to think through what we are doing with the Progressive Managers’ Network. The three humps and a stick refers to four price points that you can offer your product or service at. Reading his original post should help you follow this one!

We offer lots of stuff for free. This blog for example, the podcasts and the online forums. We do as much as we can at no-cost. This helps us to achieve one of our aims which is to provide great management development experiences to progressive managers.

Our workshops are at the ‘low cost’ hump. By selling open programme workshops and supporting learners through websites and podcasts instead of manuals we can cut costs and improve service – better management development for less. This is important for many in our target audience.

But we are also asked to do work at the mid to high price point humps too. Clients who do not want to do their learning in public, or who can’t yet access web based support – and so commission workshops and training events in house – for which they pay a premium.

Before reading Seths post we were just doing this because it ‘felt’ right. It is great to have a rationale now to hang it on.

How big is your stick?

How effective are you at developing your service at each of the three price humps available to you?

Tre Really is on Another Level!

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Tre from The Apprentice

Perhaps you, like me have been irritated by Tre’s regular assertions that he operates on another level to the rest of the candidates in The Apprentice.  However it appears that the psychologists have just released some research data that suggests he could be right.

Keep telling people something for long enough and they will begin to believe it.  Which of course works fine if you have a more or less captive audience – but if people can choose not to listen to it  -as they do in most organisations you just end up looking like a fool.

People Often Think An Opinion Heard Repeatedly From The Same Person Is Actually A Popular Opinion

So what if Tre used his psychological insight to continuously tell people how well they were doing?  Perhaps he would have more friends in the house, better working relationships and more influence.  Sounds like a winning recipe to me!

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Longer and shorter or Faster and slower

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Great Seth Godin post about how ads are getting shorter so we can get the message across more quickly at lower cost. As Seth points out in todays world people can choose whether they want to watch adverts – so you may as well make them long – and run them on You Tube for free.

And Peter Senge says that if differential calculus were invented today, no would learn it because it takes more then two days (and no-one spends more than two days learning anything in the business world these days).

So the world gets faster and things (adverts, training courses etc) get shorter. But then there is the slow movement – slow food, slow enterprise and slow management. Some processes can not be rushed if their fruits are to be fully enjoyed.

There are always choices, faster is not always better.  Efficiency is not always a good thing.