Dear readers,

The summer seemed to fly by this year. In addition to watching hours of Olympic coverage, baseball pennant races, getting ready for the start of school and finish some of those projects started back in June, it is also a great time to take some stock of where things are for training initiatives in our organizaitons.

The featured articles selected for this month's issue outline a number of important ways to help you take inventory of your training and HR goals, examine change in your organization and adapt to new ways of organizing and leading during the coming year.

Using Models to Manage Strategic Learning Investments
By Christopher Moore

Gone are the days of technologies looking for a problem to solve. Today, technology investments must be strategic and driven by an organization's business focus. However, not everyone fully realizes the strategic importance of technology investments to a successful learning initiative. While the human element is still the core component of the process, technology can accelerate the human impact on the initiative's value. To maximize employee development, it is critical to harness the power of technology to drive bottom-line results. Learn More

More and more these days, managers are concerned with worker morale, after more than two decades of mergers, acquisitions, restructuring and downsizing we are finally beginning to notice than stressed-out, burned-out employees are not exactly able to provide world-class continuous improvement and dazzle-em-with-delight customer care. As customer loyalty (a highly profitable strategy) becomes harder to capture we need to start paying a great deal of attention to the work environment we provide for our workers, that is if we want to keep them, and the customers happy. Learn More

Action-Training for Effective Change
By Jonathan Byrnes

The difficulty of managing change confronts many managers. I remember talking to the head of a major telecom company who said, in essence, that the company needed to change significantly to succeed in the newly deregulating world. His management team would have to think and act very differently. What should he do? Send a memo to all managers? Give a speech?   Learn More

Leading from the Middle
By Deepak Sethi

No longer are we sure what it means to lead, whether at the top, the middle, or the front lines of an organization. Yet we continue to define leadership primarily as the work of senior executives. In so doing, we overlook some of the most important and abundant sources of leadership.   Learn More

Adapt or Die: The Strategic Role of Learning in the On-Demand Enterprise
By Tony O'Driscoll and Paula Briki
 
As IBM examines the impact of Internet technologies on the future of the enterprise and the work they carry out, it envisions the development of the On-Demand Era in which business models are componentized around value rather than function, technologies are autonomic (they heal themselves), and socially enabled, networked organizations anticipate market needs ahead of time. IBM learning strategist Tony O'Driscoll and Paula Briki, a program manager for IBM's Learning Leadership team, outline the strategic role learning will play in the on-demand enterprise of the future.  Learn More 

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