Online Articles

By Bob Lee, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Learning Solutions, Citrix Online April Showers, located in Twin Falls, ID, is a home-based business founded in 2008 by April Durham, a successful graphic designer. April Showers provides blog and Website design services and also offers a variety of training workshops for those who want to learn how to design their own blogs or start a professional blog design business. The company has a staff of six.

By Brad Karsh, President, JB Training Solutions As an HR professional, you are thrilled to organize compelling training programs for your employees, but how do you guarantee high attendance and participation? No matter how great the program is on paper, if attendance is low, then the impact is lost. So what can you do? Fortunately, there are a few simple and (mostly) free techniques for filling your training room every time:

By Margery Weinstein Critical to Cerner Corporation’s success, the company says, is the way it creates a culture of leadership and builds a company of leaders. To ensure Cerner generates a pool of talented leaders, the company designed a framework to define its overall strategy for leadership development. Its goal in creating this model is to empower organizations across Cerner to systematically identify and grow prospective leaders. Additionally, Cerner aims to decrease turnover and increase its internal promotions vs. external hire ratio.

By Tom Rieger, Senior Practice Expert, Gallup There are no fearless leaders, but there are courageous ones. Everyone has fears they need to face. The key is to learn to overcome those fears. Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” To create a fearless company, leaders must master fear—their own and others’. They have to have the courage to fix what’s wrong.

By David Intrator, President, The Creative Organization In my seminars and workshops on creativity, I spend a lot of time emphasizing the value of being an idiot. Because in the all-important opening phase of the creative process, which I call “making a mess,” stupidity is your greatest asset. This is not the time for clarity, precision, or cleverness. Rather it’s the time for sloppiness, incoherence, and the mindless generation of stuff.

By Kristy Westfall Moyer, Training Account Manager, Signature Worldwide “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”—Benjamin Franklin Whether you are a customer-centered or an employee-focused company, success hinges on sustaining a culture of lifelong learning. Happy employees equal happy customers, and in study after study, they show that the happiest employees are the well-trained ones who receive ongoing education.

By Laura Stack, MBA, CSP As a business professional, would you ever send the first draft of a report to your boss or client? Probably not; no doubt you’d want to smooth out the rough patches and check it over for typos first. Most of us don’t even let e-mails go without making sure we’ve done our best to communicate both cleanly and efficiently. Polishing our written work is accepted as a necessary part of doing business.

By Matt Plass, Interactive Services’ Chief Learning Officer In 2007, there were 38 prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Know how many prosecutions we saw in 2010? Almost double the 2007 figures with 74 prosecutions in 2010—not including 150 investigations that are still open.

By Hank Moore, Corporate Strategist There is a difference between how one is basically educated and the ingredients needed to succeed in the long term. Many people never amass those ingredients because they stop learning or don’t see the need to go any further. Many people think they are “going further” but otherwise spin their wheels.

By Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler Is it possible  that  an organization’s performance could  hang  on something as soft and gushy as how individuals deal with crucial conversations? Study after  study suggests  that  the answer  is yes.