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In Gary Larson’s famous cartoon, a student asks his teacher if he can be excused because his brain is full. It’s funny as a cartoon, but it is tragic, wasteful, and all-too-common in corporate training. Most training programs try to jam too much content into people’s...

Recent articles have once again raised the question of how much corporate training actually adds value, and how much just goes to waste—something for which we coined the term “learning scrap” to draw the analogy to manufacturing scrap.  Both kinds of scrap waste time,...

Direct-to-consumer advertising is intended to encourage patients to ask their physicians about a particular drug when they think it might help them. But we don’t expect — or want — physicians to simply dispense a drug without first establishing that it is the right...

Most training and development professionals are motivated by a genuine desire to help people, teams, and businesses succeed. So, when we get the call that says, “I need a training program …” our natural tendency is to say, “Great, we will get right on it.” As it turns...

In baseball, a player’s batting average is the number of base hits per times at bat. The higher your batting average, the more valuable you are. In learning and development, your “batting average” is how often you improve performance per training initiative. The...