Conversations with Maria Palazzi - a commercial animator, decoder of choreographic thinking, user of metaphors for communications, polymath

As, a pioneer in commercial applications of computer animation, Maria Palazzi, the director of Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University, shares her views on merging arts, humanities, design and technology to further understand creative and other thinking processes. Prior to her academic appointments, Maria was a senior animator and director for Cranston/Csuri Productions. Her work has been nominated for awards from Clio, and screened at ACM SIGGRAPH and international film festivals. She is an unrelenting champion for increasing participation of young women in computer animation.

This interview with Maria is the fifth in our series about learning, design, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work processes.

RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
MP> No I am not. Never was into Board games either.

RD> How do you learn?
MP> I learn in a multimodal way. I definitely learn by doing. I also learn by reflection and I have to internalize, process and reprocess it. I read and probably that’s the best way for me to take in information. I draw and I map to make sense of complexity of ideas (perhaps my Graphics background) – that in turn allows me to process the information that I read and heard. Then lately I finish the learning process by reflecting and by communicating and reinforcing my understanding using metaphors. This last part has become more important to me, as I intensively work with multidisciplinary creative teams.

RD> True – the act of rhetoric is to create an image that someone can relate to and makes the content more relevant to the audience. Recently I read a blog written by Jill Konrath – a leading Sales effectiveness trainer interviewing Anne Miller (an author of the book Metaphorically Selling) – who talked about metaphors in sales communications. Tell me more.
MP> Absolutely, it can be used in any form of communication and understanding of complex transactions and processes. The more images you and I bring to the discussion and use the metaphors to communicate, the better the learning reinforcement is for both you and me.

RD> Do you think younger generation especially under-40 are learning differently?
MP> Well! I read. I don’t think younger generation takes their information by long-form reading that much as I do. Their information intake comes from different sources in shorter spans. I am not judging it, but the only issue I see while teaching students is how they find information. Because my Mom was a librarian and I worked in a library, I was taught very early on how to use a library, my reflexes automatically knew what keywords would lead to faster and more relevant results to find content. When Google and other search routines came along, that transition just made the results be delivered faster to me (from printed cards to my screen). Nowadays, that library visits seldom occur and how to do a keyword search is not a skill that is intuitive to them, , Sometimes working with my students, with all their different devices, they have a tough time finding scholarly information. I find that they struggle to determine what keyword they should put in that makes their search provide efficient and relevant search results. This I think makes their start of their learning longer. Once the information is received, processing the information and complexity of ideas—irrespective of age, I think there is no difference. Then it diverges again during reflection and communication, but that’s more of a style preference. These days, irrespective of age, use metaphors and more non-linear way of communicating simply because interactive learning and media tools make it faster to communicate complex ideas. Of course you must realize I have an inherent bias in my observations because I deal with Arts and Design people.

RD> What is your definition of immersive learning?
MP> It really depends on whether it is a verb or a noun. Sometimes it is how a student or a learner immerses in the content in order to learn and sometimes we create (like in ACCAD) an immersive learning environment where the learners come in to experience. I personally think that creating immersive environments or simulation-lab environments cannot only teaches someone the complex ideas but provide new understanding of old ideas. This is about immersing students in knowledge – then learning happens.

RD> If I understand what you are saying, in the technology world, that “immersing students in knowledge” is what we call “user experience”.
MP> Exactly, after the experience, the learning happens. So! As a teacher, “immersion” becomes a verb. Teaching them how to immerse and then create artifacts where they learn while immersed and then send them to the next level to learn more. Technology enables the building of artifacts. This encourages someone to become lifelong learners.
RD> This reminds me of the movie “Inception”, where you assimilate by building the artifacts and then play out the concepts and then redo for better. Have you seen it?
MP> No! I have not.
RD> You will love it – and try to see it on the big screen.

RD> How do you envision using games/simulations to teach people to use information better and also learn to understand complexity?
MP> A good example of this, is a project called Synchronous Objects that we did at ACCAD. It is about “Choreographic Thinking” based on a dance by choreographer William Forsythe. The dance is called, “One Flat Thing reproduced”. Norah Zuniga Shaw, a professor from the Dance department and I worked on this project to understand how his (William Forsythe’s) choreographic thinking works. It was not meant to be a form of dance documentation, but instead a visual way to unlock the ideas about how Forsythe’s complex systems of organization. The materials we created—animations, graphics, interactive tools—are investigatory as we wanted to probe Bill’s choreographic thinking and they are exploratory as we wanted to discover what we could see in the dance, and how we could visualize those interpretations.
To make Synchronous Objects, we assembled an extraordinary group of graduate students who are animators, designers, dancers, and scientists – as well as an outstanding group of faculty and researchers at Ohio State who brought their expertise the project.

RD> What is your definition of “Choreographic thinking”?
MP> A choreographer’s (in this case William Forsythe) strategies for planning time-based and space-based events and group relationships, and then presenting it in a way, a choreographer presents it to their audience.
RD> This just blows my mind. This is so similar when we think of designing complex simulations of a work process or interactions where eventually there is an output to the audience i.e. the consumer or customer in my world. Tell me more.
MP> When I first looked at it, as a graphics and visual person I could not even understand the complexity and kept asking myself, what am I looking at? I am an animator, I am a visual thinking person, and I never could seem to understand what I am looking at in the dance. I realized soon that what we typically expect a linear experience with a story-line with a beginning and an end like the NutCracker. It was not linear.
He was using this concept called “Counterpoint”, when he was arranging the piece on stage. I have been exposed to the concept of “Counterpoint” from jazz music. My parents had exposed me to lot of Jazz in my childhood. So! What finally helped me, is taking that Jazz metaphor to understand and learn about this non-linear complex narrative or as you would say “immersive simulation”.
We had to then deconstruct that thinking. We had to break it down to little parts of information bits and objects. We had to re-map using many different folks from various disciplines to build relationships among those objects. Then use information visualization skills to reconstruct sets of narrative, while keeping his ideas intact. We had to also determine how different learners would come to the site. By different learners I mean learning styles that different users would be comfortable to assimilate their own metaphors. For example, some are visual learners , some learn by word analogies etc. So! The site presents multiple ways into the material, it is very non-linear. We mined the data from the dance to define each object’s parametric range and what and how they can interact and what relationships can be had.
We have 20 objects – some of those are truly abstract – i.e. you would not assume by looking at the object that it came from that dance. But what the objects do is challenge you to answer the question – “what else might this dance look like?”
RD> To me this latter part of the exercise is applying “Group Theory” and “Topology” from my past life of dabbling in Mathematics. The objects can have certain properties like reflexive, associative and transitive as examples and then as a group or a topologic construct they can behave in certain way and you get more properties out of it that you can visualize. Is the mined data from the project shared with others? Incredible! Still having goose bumps.
MP> [Laughs] To create a continual experience for the audience, we have it available for interactive play at http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/
We share the objects – of course this is not the only interpretation but it is our interpretation. We had statisticians, anthropologists, geographers, mathematics, neuroscientists, designers, authors – lots of disciplines play with the objects and come up with organizational strategies. We shared with them, how we discovered the objects but then had intense discussions of the relationship of the objects and how they relate to the objects and led them create new prototypes.
RD> This project clearly shows how technology, art, humanities and design can be brought together to create an immersive learning environment to do innovation on a very complex process such as creativity of a dance. Of course, this validates how we can use this project thinking to deconstruct complex human interaction and work processes and recreate new innovations in thinking and work processes.

RD> You know – I can go on talking about this. But I have to let you go soon. I wanted to ask my last set of questions. You have led the path here locally in Columbus to increase women participation in technology -- what trends have you seen in 1990's versus 2000's? How do we increase women participation to join the game/graphics production? Are there gender-based differences in design thinking?
MP> We have a summer program at ACCAD, where we bring young women from 8th and 9th grade schools to participate in workshops. These selected women work with women mentors and use “problem-solving skills and collaborative learning to create digital animation”. We have been doing this now for ten years. There are no gender-based differences in output but how they approach a design is very different from what it was ten years ago. These young women understand what media is and understand what story is. They have already played with Photoshop in sixth grade. So! These young women are much more well-versed on the tools and technology and spend more time in the critical thinking or design side and come up with projects that involve complex thinking and production through a collaborative effort. Lately I have invited the same group back a few times to work on more complex projects and they have amazing retention, and I can see the changes. It then makes computer animation careers much more of a reality for them. The other interesting thing I have noticed is that these children finally see that there is a continuum of careers between an engineer and an artist. They no longer feel that they need to pick one. They want to operate in their comfort zone.

RD> Thank you Maria. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Let us continue our discussions.
MP> Let‘s do so -- because I think we have some opportunities to collaborate.

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Conversations with TA McCann - a sailor, a CEO, a person "just interested"

As a serial entrepreneur, sailor and someone just interested in stuff, TA McCann CEO of Gist. Gist provides a next generation contact manager and social media hub delivering value to users as a crowd-sourced solutions to search, to learn and to communicate and to make valuable connections. Prior to starting Gist, TA founded “Jump2Go - providing innovative solutions for the radio industry, HelpShare - a web Q&A company, and Soft Labour, a web design and development consultancy” as well as running the Exchange business for Microsoft.

This interview with TA is the fourth in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.

RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
TAM> I was never a video gamer but enjoy occasional board games such as Scrabble.

RD> How do you learn?
TAM> Primarily, I am an experiential learner. Secondarily, I learn by auditory and verbal learning. The best way for me is doing a project. I generally find people who are learning something that I am interested in and then I put myself around them and then do a project with them.

RD> What is your experience in how people learn and how learning is being delivered especially in the context of corporate training as opposed to schools and universities? Do you see a trend of learning content being delivered to individuals like you where the delivery adapts to the person’s way of learning?
TAM> I am certainly not an expert in education. However, I see a movement towards project-centric and team-centric learning. When I went to school, it was much more individual based and by the book. Now it is much more team reports and collaboration. I am seeing learning is a much more collective task. I see among the progressive west-coasters a more self-directed learning beginning among kindergartners. Montessori teaching was always self-directed where a teacher might say,

You Suzie you are interested in hockey, you John are interested in gardening, you Rini enjoy talking about cooking – let the functional skill follow those interests and I will teach you multiplication or language or composition based on that interest.

Having been on the board of a Montessori school, I understand this principle. But before, once a child was past kindergarten, the teaching became by direction from school and university and it carried on to the post-secondary and corporate world. Now the principles of self-directed training are becoming more prevalent among adults. It translates really well in the corporate world especially with the rise of social media. Now, an employee says,

I need to learn how to do the work or I am interested in having this skill, I know there are others like me who have already learned how to do it, and I will practice with them.

For example, if someone wants to effectively learn how to use social media, no one goes to school for that or reads a book about it. Suppose someone wants to grow roses in their backyard and learn to use the social media technology. They start by creating some social media accounts, follow others who are writing about it, discuss with others, if they like enjoy writing, then they start blogging about roses. Amidst that dialog, and using the technology, the learner uses self-topic of interest and with trial and errors with other people with same interest learn how to grow roses.

RD> Do you see learning and development community in businesses moving away from classroom and compliance-based training? What was your experience at Microsoft when you were there?
TAM> Yes and No. At Microsoft, classes were free and easy to attend. I took more than my fair share of classes at Microsoft, simply because I wanted to learn and it was readily available. Personally, I do not enjoy online training because I like the human interaction. I liked the instructor-led training. Many of these courses were really well done from an instructor-led training perspective but very few were project-based. Given that this was the early part of the past decade, and a bit dated as much has changed or evolved since then, I think it is moving towards a better virtual space where again it is self-directed and team-centric learning. More and more people have taken matters in their own hands via current technology and even mobile technology. They are unwilling to wait for batch-mode training, they want to crowd-source the learning. In software training, more and more people do not use manuals, nor do they sit in classes to learn how to use the software, making demand for instructor-led training less. There are many software now and more and more will be designed in the future, where the user will drive and source learning content.
For example, someone says,

I have a need, I have a passion and I will use the software. If I like it, then I will tell other how well it works and then provide tips on certain things.

Software developers, like us at Gist, are making it easy to use and fairly intuitive interface whereby a user asks these questions:

User - How quickly was it to set up?
Developer - Quick and easy.
User - How much does it cost to set-up?
Developer - Zero for Gist.
User - How much deployment do I need?
Developer - None.

This dialog then creates a consumption-driven learning model. The answers they get are then proven immediately by setting it up and then when they find it easy, they tell others. Then they can answer the question,

How can I get it on my mobile?

Then they ask by searching, if the mobile app is there, they set it up. If they like a cool button, they write about it. Then others follow. This becomes crowd-sourced and on-demand. Software when well designed will still have some complexity behind some three doors that an average user cannot open, and that’s where customer service and trainers or power-users will open those doors and promote that learning about the complexity. I think that’s the trend that traditional training community has to provide.

RD> You are absolutely right. We have been asked many times, why we don’t have manuals for our Learning and People management SaaS console with step-by-step instructions. I always ask the user the question,

What task are you trying to do?

They name the task. Then I ask them,

Given you had an overview, how would you do the task?

They immerse themselves in the product and then within 3 seconds they figure it out. It not shortens their learning time, as our design too is very intuitive, it saves us the cost of having an entire team doing documentation and version controls. This then saves money the user by not transferring the cost in the pricing.
TAM> Yep! It is the continuous cycle from the user to the designer to the developer and back to the user in a continuous learning loop. I think this evolving user-driven learning model for software can hold true with any learning associated with any work process.

RD> This segues well into my next question. User adoption for enterprise software has historically been a big issue. When the user’s initial learning cycle and effort gets simplified and initial getting up and running gets simplified for an organization, data should show that users adopt faster, But there are still big issues with SaaS models such as Salesforce.com and others that come to mind. What factors affect user-adoption in this day and age?
TAM> SaaS design in the past was not very intuitive, when you consider Salesforce.com. There are three trends in the software design today and is foreshadowing enterprise software design in the future.
First, software needs to be easy to use and be intuitive. I do not see some of the SaaS or other enterprise software from ten years ago as being that.
Second the software needs to provide instant gratification to the user. After those first two are met, then the user wants more and then you give them more. There is very tight cycle of effort then reward and then effort and then reward. I think almost all enterprise software ten years from now will have this type of design model that not only addresses first-time users but also addresses the needs of ongoing-users. What this leads to is that there has to be a way where a manager can be able to say and teach in a simulated way how much more improvement user Rini can do. This is where the manager says,

Rini – look what a great job you have done and announce it to the world.

This brings the third piece of how what you guys are doing becomes very important in users adopting. The more and more a game’s mechanics teaches not only critical thinking and how you use the technology and work process; you have built a relationship between that learning skill and the real work. Whether you work at a call center or elsewhere, employees will have “you got a gold star” incentives in real-time. Whether it is passively broadcast or instantaneously broadcast, both are immensely valuable to increase the user adoption.

At Gist, we have a new Game “Learn That Name” that teaches how to maximize the value of using Gist.
Here, we provide no manuals or training, but I-the user scores some points playing it and learns the value with small investment of time, small amount of gratification, and then learning happens.

RD> Our software and games relate not only to immediate learning goals, but also to real-time work performance metrics. We have done pilots and studies to prove the value of how it helps change behaviors and makes the learning consistent. However, the big objection that we hear time and time again, is that the user group of our technology (or other technologies like FourSquare and Gowalla) are self-selecting early adopters and that user-adoption is all about middle adopters and this might not help. We find that the incremental change in performance for early adopters is huge, the change for middle adopters is huge, and that the change for late adopters are much less. The last group, in my opinion, should look for a new job. However, this objection comes up all the time. How would you address it?
TAM> Before I answer that question, let me tell you of another trend. People who try and fail are better learners. Let’s look at the microcosm of iPhone. Most users will download an iPhone app, try it, like it, decides to continue, dislike it then delete it. This cycle is happening with any one user multiple times a month. Of course, Apple has a great job again making it intuitive and easy to install and easy to delete. I try one application but 200th time I do it, I become very confident to increase my productivity.

Mac is very good at giving that opportunity to users whereas Windows has not, hence much faster adoption in use of Mac for those who try it and less for Windows who get into the mode of “living with it.”

People who are lifelong learners are also early adopters; they like this type of change and they do it better. For employees who are these early adopters, I am not surprised that they will have a larger increase in their productivity. The performance gap between middle adopters and early adopters, I see as widening except with right leadership and incentives and rewards for the identified early adopters are leading to the traditional middle adopters move towards early adoption.
Again, the pool of early adopters is larger because failing and learning has become such a faster cycle. Learning Games companies like yours will bring more of these users to light in front of the management teams. I agree with you, late adopters should look for another job, that it’s a lost cause.

Companies should incentivise employees to be more productive with newer technology and tell them,

you guys will figure it out yourself, you tell us how it works, you help others to use the product and we increase productivity and in the long-run, we have faster deployment cycle, we don’t need corporate training and we can have change happen faster.

My experience has been that with that kind of leadership mantra, fast-fail change/reward mind-set, easily deployable technology, intuitive design will move the middle adopters.

RD> What does social selling mean to you?
TAM> Relationship ventured networks. Everyone should consider himself or herself to be in sales. In sales and marketing, customer support, and technical support and for software – you are directly helping with recruiting and selling. In that respect, social media is every employee’s tool to social sell whether it be to end-users or to recruit employees. There are three components for that.

First there is a listening component. This way you just don’t get information about TA McCann the buyer, but more and more components of data about what TA is about. The same goes for the buyer knowing more and more about the seller. Social selling is about the buy-cycle as opposed to the sell-cycle. This means more touch-points with long-term effect in the buy cycle.

The second aspect is the “social” component. Now someone who is trying to sell to me knows I am the CEO of Gist, I started a Montessori school and I am sailor and I have backyard chickens. The seller can connect at that level. Every aspect of the information I provide is socially relevant. It is no different before whereby I met a guy at a church and eventually that guy comes to my hardware store. The last component of social-selling is the how to manage content to build that trust. I can post today,

I am going to go to Hawaii and am interested in scuba-diving.

This is a signal from me to the world – give me content, give me information and recommendations for hotels, best place to dive, best gear place. The opportunity then becomes to those listening how to address this.

For example, I can post today, "reviewing VoIP systems" on twitter. The ones who do this listening badly, will immediately call me to sell me their crap. Those who do it well will send me a tweet about VoIP buying guide. That education and sending me relevant content builds the understanding and builds the trust and that trust leads to the opportunity to sell.

RD> So! Looking back in the past two years what percent of significant and meaningful professional relationships have you built and nurtured using social media?
TAM> Well! The main relationships in last 2 years came from conferences, simply because I go to a lot of conferences, and I go because that’s the way I learn. So! That shared context has given me focused opportunities to generate contacts. However, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin have all been incredible useful to me to nurture that first in-person contact and also bring back people that I knew from the past to have an almost daily interaction. Social media has helped me easily maintain and take those professional relationships to the next level. The percentage is increasing in an accelerated fashion for that maintaining part with orders of magnitude.

RD> Thank you TA. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Good luck with increasing the number of Gist users.
TAM> Let us continue to promote learning!

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Conversations with Ray Taylor - a Sales 2.0 manager, a biker, a digital native Part II

As a Regional Sales Manager at Standard Register, Ray Taylor leverages Sales 2.0 tools and social media to give the best value proposition to his customers. He is a biker, a marathon runner, and a digital native. This conversation with Ray is the third in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing, user-adoption and work performance.

... Continued from Part I

RD> Do you see more of a training need for how to maximize the use of a tool, or is there more need for training where you say, here is a bag full of tools, and teach them which tool to use when?
RT> There is a tactical part and strategic part in the training content. For example, Live Meeting: teach people how to use it and tailor sales presentations within Live Meeting. That is the tactical content. Then what you do with that becomes the strategic part, where peers or managers can deliver that training by sharing best practices. For example, on the fly, showing the ability to share an ROI tool with the client once and close the deal, without getting on the road to meet with the client. The sales reps who were with me then became inspired to try something similar.

It is very hard for training events to teach the strategic part. Not because they can’t do it but because it’s too much too fast. It’s about finding the coachable moment, one person at a time.

RD> I use the example about teaching phone etiquette as opposed to training sales reps to manage the interaction. Corporate trainers typically teach the phone etiquette. What do you think about the value of old methodologies in current times? Do think there is some time-invariance to the content?
RT> Exactly, and that’s where we need different ways to train. Having said that, there is one area where corporate trainers truly add value, and that is in creating a common language across the organization. This makes it faster to spread the cultural change as long as the content that they deliver are not restrictive. But, just as the shelf life of products is getting shorter and shorter, the same goes for training content; it cannot be sustained for long.

Our sales training can no longer be focused on products and services. We cannot be walking and talking brochures. Training content that can’t ??? stays the same forever. Trainers and managers who have failed to see that they, too, can innovate are not as valuable. It is like the analogy with colleges: a few years ago, a university banned its professors from putting their lectures on YouTube because that would make education free. A professor went against the policy and posted his riveting lecture on YouTube. It spread virally and actually brought in more college applications for that professor’s department. The University lifted the ban.

Corporate training as well needs to become more innovative and less protective. For example, trainers can embrace the blended model. Their survival doesn’t depend on the classroom-only model.

RD> Tell me about your findings regarding the blended model?
RT> The blended model makes perfect sense. The reps start to learn those minimum skills and common languages online, on their timeline, and then come prepared to the classroom. Classroom interactions are used for practicing and being creative under facilitation, but they move faster because the pre-work is done.

RD> Are you seeing more games being used in sales training?
RT> Not yet—none other than yours!

RD> Well, that’s good news for us. (Just kidding.)
RT> The games are a great way to address this. I have seen e-learning—a PowerPoint with multiple choices—but games are so much more interactive and competitive and fun.

RD> On social selling: what does it mean to you?
RT> Selling using social media is very powerful for lead generation. Before, sales was all about cold calls based on paid research. Now the rep can find good reasons to connect and determine the best timing for getting in front of the buyer. The better understanding of the information they gather from social media they have, the more likely they are to win the competition for the buyer’s time and attention. Social media really facilitates that discussion.

It helps grow the network for future calls. It is a great tool for maintaining the trusted advisor status. Social media allows you to communicate with someone the way they want to be communicated with. Social media has limited capability for the rest of the sales process in qualifying, understanding business needs, and negotiations. The face-to-face meeting is still the goal in many complex sales environments.

RD> What does Sales 2.0 mean to you?
RT> I think it is the second wave of using sales skills in the Internet era. Twenty years ago, to get information about someone’s products the buyer would call the sales rep in the local region and inquire. Now most people research before they reach out to sellers. The skills for salespeople have to be different now. I remember only a few years ago, I heard sales people saying, “Oh! I am not technology-oriented. I do not know how to turn on the computer.” They thought the prospect of using technology was funny. I would ask them if they realized that “what you just told the buyer is that you are stupid… you might want to stop doing that.”

Now, a similar thing happens when salespeople tell prospects, “I think Twitter is just a joke,” or “Facebook is for my kids.” I give them the same coaching: “Did you realize Facebook is a huge marketing initiative for this customer?”

Just as the customer is researching you on-line, they expect you to do your homework. You can no longer get appointments to just learn about the prospect’s business—they expect that you know about their business when you call, and that you can move quickly to how you can help them grow it.

Sales 2.0 fundamentally changed the idea of loading up the salespeople with product knowledge. Now salespeople have to know about the prospect’s company, their problems, their strategy.

At Standard Register, as part of our Lean Six Sigma initiative, we had the customers come to our sales leadership meetings—very different for us. One came to tell us that they wanted us to participate in their Six Sigma project, as we were part of their supply chain.

It is no longer about the typical qualifying closing questions: Are you ready to close? What information do you need to understand the ROI? Now it is more about: What is the problem you are facing? What solutions have you tried?

RD> For somebody taking up a new sales job, what advice would you give as to what they should do the first 60 days?
RT> Be social and be intellectually curious. Own your own career. It is less likely a company today will invest in you. One cannot rely on that any more. Find all the opportunities to learn and don’t sit there and wait for it to happen. Take the initiative.


RD> Thank you, Ray. It has been really interesting chatting with you.
RT> Let’s keep the conversation going.

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Conversations with Ray Taylor - A sales 2.0 manager, a biker and a Digital native Part I

As a Regional Sales Manager at Standard Register, Ray Taylor leverages Sales 2.0 tools and social media to give the best value proposition to his customers. He is a biker, a marathon runner, and a digital native. This conversation with Ray is the third in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing, user-adoption and work performance.

RD> My first question for you is, what games are you playing now?
RT> I am addicted to Angry Bird on my iPhone.

RD> How do you learn?
RT> I learn by first reading, then doing, and then teaching.

RD> What do you see as key issues in sales training these days?
RT> Historically, sales training is seen as another training, where everyone learns to perform a process the same way. It is designed to teach you to achieve results the way others achieved success before you. Managers talk about replicating success. However, training modules start off suggesting that you need to “be different” from others to succeed in sales. The training delivered by celebrity trainers eventually makes you “the same” -- very quickly and what seemed to differentiate you, begins to sound the same and will not help you attract prospects and customers any more. Training should deliver content to drive meaningful change.

Another issue is selection of sales associates. We must find people who have intellectual curiosity, the desire to do things differently. In a rapidly changing environment, training in change management will make them more successful than traditional sales training focused on product, cold calls or closing tactics. The intellectually curious will resist getting into a rut and will use any media available to get the results. They will generate their own leads and not wait for Corporate to give it to them. If I look at LinkedIn profiles of CFOs—supposing that they are my target—they are going to express different preferences. Traditional training teaches us to treat them all the same, even going as far as creating scripts to address their issues. In fact, they may not care about the same issue.

I have to learn how to tailor the message—that is the training new reps need. Training in my opinion should be more about what tools are out there, how to use them, examples of how someone used them, and then inspiring the reps to create their own path with some structured coaching. Even better, engage them with multiple types of media: games, YouTube, social media.

Case in point: Marketing these days sends interesting data to sales reps but we cannot just blast that information at all prospects. Trainers can teach the reps how to use the information, but then let sales reps be creative. Some will email the marketing collateral selectively at relevant times, others can leverage the content even more by writing it on their blog or by landing speaking engagements. Sales professionals need to be given the freedom to be creative and to understand better the meaning of the end goal.

RD> With social media and other technologies, I think that lead generation will become more of a sales rep job and marketing will focus more on brand marketing. How do you see that transition happening?
RT> I think it has converged. When I was starting out 20 years ago, Peter Drucker said something to the extent that good marketing will make sales jobs obsolete. That was scary, as I was just starting my sales career and hoping for a good long run. Luckily, he was wrong.

Technology, the Web , and globalization made marketing more difficult. They now manage so many channels, but with each channel having less power. Before you used to be able to tell people what your brand was—do three TV commercials on the big three networks and you were able to reach 95% of your buyers.

Executives in the C-Suite operating in this economy are banging the tables saying, “we cannot have another bad year.” They turn to marketing and ask, “What is your big idea to fix this?”

Traditional marketing folks are focused on campaigns to blast a million prospects to gets 500 customers. But they have to resist that temptation. Marketing has a smaller budget and has to do more with more interference for attention. They can’t tell the CEO, “I only have three people and I can’t get it done.” They have to crowd-source it. Give the sales team messages that can be delivered at the time that the information is relevant to a prospect’s growth strategy. The sales rep can participate in lead generation and qualification. If you can create a strong partnership between sales and marketing, you can be everywhere. Listening is first, use social media to find out where customers hang out and what they care about. Then your guidance—not your sales pitch, but your guidance—will be valuable. It will yield spectacular results.

RD> What do you think about the role of social media in B2B?
RT> Often it can be heard in the offices of larger business, “Well! In the B2B world this does not work.” But every business person is a person with interests and personality—so to embrace social media, a sales manager has to hire sales people with different aptitudes and develop them.

Drip leads as opposed to dumping leads. Use social media to be more effective. For example, at a company that sells to small businesses, we found a monthly source where we could get all the newly registered companies. So this huge list was given to the sales people and they said, “this list is not any good for me as there are no phone numbers.” They researched a few and gave up because the task seemed too daunting.

I uploaded the list and assigned a few leads each day, rep by rep. The leads were added to Salesforce.com and guess what: there are hyperlinks to Google and LinkedIn to acquire phone numbers and company information. The sales people have to have different skills, and managers have to develop different processes.

RD> Why can’t sales people fault the marketing?
RT> Sales people can get blinded by the shiny new technology and expect instant results. You can still knock on the door and pick up the phone and ask. You can use social media. There is just no one way to serve up customers ready to buy without investing some effort and trying more than one strategy. It comes back to that intellectually curious person who will not fall into the rut. Hire for that and train them to learn constantly. Trainers who love their methodology—and their acronyms for do this first, this second and that third—are obsolete.

RD> I agree. We tell people that PAKRA is a philosophy-agnostic learning company; the training methodology is your problem.
RT> Right. Any methodology is good for teaching the minimum skills. If you have inexperienced people you need to give then the basic skills, and most training programs are very good at that. But after that, teach them creativity and reward them for achieving results rather than tracking their compliance with a sales process.

Continued .. Part II

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Conversations with Nate Riggs - a disruptor and social media content engineer -- Part II

As a “social media content engineer” and business communications strategist, Nate Riggs of Social Business Strategies helps businesses determine their branding and marketing strategy using social media. In 2009, Nate was named a mentor in Len Kendal’s “Constructive Grumpiness” blog Top 30 under 30 Tweeters. Interview with Nate is the second in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.

Part II

RD> So far, we discussed social media in the context of marketing. What does Sales 2.0 mean to you?
NR> To me, Sales 2.0 is how-to use new tools and technology innovations to do something in a more predicted way. A sales professional who uses and leverages new technology such as social media can do their Sales 1.0 style consultative selling better. I might be wrong but the process of sales is still 75% what happens face-to-face and the ability to read non-verbals. That will not change. However, with Skype and new phones that do video, at the end of the day, we can do it without field sales. Also in Sales 2.0, a salesperson by using social media can get and leverage information about the prospect that these face-to-face virtual interaction better and more timely.


RD> When you first go into an organization, how do you evaluate the resistance you will see in user adoption of social media in day-to-day work?
NR> Everybody wants to do everything and the kitchen sink. My suggestion is always focus and do something well – that works in social media strategy too. Having said that, you have to also evaluate upfront if the company has to change the paradigm and how to encourage the culture adoption. My most successful company is the contact center in Canton, OH. They first answered the question: what the image of their employees will be to the world, then they went about creating the brand using social media. Typically, I first meet with the leadership and determine what they are about. Michael Hyatt is a perfect example. His company Thomas Nelson Publishers is a culture of innovation, but it began with Michael setting that direction.

As a consultant, I also look for silos and power struggles. 9 times out of 10, I find that there is power struggle between the old and new school.
I am not making a path-breaking observation here and such struggles existed since beginning of humankind. However, the interesting part that I find is who makes the old school folks: they are folks who from mid 1980s to end of 1990s innovated and successfully embraced technology. Now, they hold the key accounts, money and the tenure. Yet they forgot that power of experimentation, they once indulged in. The new school folks are those who got to work in 2000 to now. They want to experiment and do the new innovative stuff. The conflict starts when the old school promotes agendas with things that they are more comfortable with. Meanwhile, the business leader gets caught in the middle and playing both sides. I am learning to manage and influence both these groups of stakeholders.

RD> Do you see the opportunity of games as a solution to manage the resistance and increase user adoption?
NR> I see enormous opportunity. But I also think that you might encounter the chicken and egg problem. Game is very powerful in increasing adoption. If the business is a culture of early adopters, then they will naturally embrace the games and we will never find out if games were the deciding factor to impact user adoption. If the culture is not a culture of early adopters, the games will just work to move them towards the faster adoptions side on the curve of adoption. Dennis Crowley and folks at foursquare nailed it. The idea of badge and point system got people hooked. Four times a week I check my points and compete one week a month crazily and I will beat someone in Columbus called Ben H. one of these days. I must say, I do it because of the points. To me the badge does not do much. The badges are only visual indicators of the human behavior. Gowalla has great badges and some say better user interfaces. But in my opinion, user interface alone cannot create dependency. The game mechanics of points does it for foursquare. Games are motivators. When companies are ready to implement social media and do social selling – games that teach them how and games that help adopt and embrace it – will be an awesome fit.

Having said that, one has to figure out how to address the two issues that will surface with a game: (a) someone will figure out how to cheat and (b) if monetary awards are provided to winners then there is a likelihood of decreasing returns on the intended value. If the game addresses these in the design, then I think there is awesome opportunity to increase adoption for any new change – be it in new technology, new initiative or new leadership.

RD> Thanks Nate. It has been really interesting chatting with you. Good luck beating Ben H.
NR> Let us continue to pick the appropriate strategies.

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Here is Alvin Toffler on Education -- Retweet of post from Sir Ken Robinson

Alvin Toffler -- I read Future Shock -- Oh! Gosh! 25 years ago. I found the book immensely path-breaking but I did not like the neo-cons embracing his forecasts in the 1990s. Having said that, I like his idea about teaching kids "critical-thinking skills" as he says in this video with his wife in 2008 talking about the future of education: Alvin Toffler on Education

It is definitely worth watching. This is a Retweet from Sir Ken Robinson.

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Conversations with Nate Riggs - a disruptor and social media content engineer -- Part I

As a “social media content engineer” and business communications strategist, Nate Riggs of Social Business Strategies helps businesses determine their branding and marketing strategy using social media. In 2009, Nate was named a mentor in Len Kendal’s “Constructive Grumpiness” blog Top 30 under 30 Tweeters. Interview with Nate is the second in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.

Part I

RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
NR> I used to be a major gamer. Not any more—I do not have a game system at home any more. As my kids get to that age, I am sure I will get back to it.

RD> When you played video games, what were your favorites?
NR> I loved Wolfenstein games. I really liked the old games with DOS prompts. In high school I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning playing Doom. I was a big Mario Cart gamer in college. I liked the war-type games.

RD> How do you learn?
NR> I learn the best “audibly.” For instance I can read a book, but if I listen to it, I can remember down to the quotes. Also, when I do it and figure it out myself—that’s when I learn. I need a bouncing board, and when I hear myself saying it—it becomes very clear. I carry a sketch pad without lines; the stuff begins to make sense. Then when I communicate or teach, the learning becomes permanent.

RD> I completely relate to what you just said. At age 15, I got my first paid job, which was to tutor a kid who was 14 years old. During that experience, I learned that teaching made the concept more clear to me. I had a big private tutoring practice from that age until I came to the U.S. for graduate school. The reason I have been in the learning business now for 30 years is because at that early age I saw its value. Also, I worked in healthcare where one of the most important learning practices is “see one, do one, teach one.” It seems yours is more like “hear one, do one, teach one.”
NR> Yes. Absolutely.

RD> How did you get into social media and B2B marketing?
NR> I got into social media because of going into game chat rooms. Then my introduction to traditional B2B marketing was through the marketing agency I joined after graduating from college. Where I saw the opportunity is that in B2B, it is still an interaction between one person in a company and one person in another company trying to make something work. (Social media) became the tool to address that interaction. In fact, among all tools in B2B marketing, social media is more powerful because it surrounds the loop of a customer as in B2C2B.

RD> When you look at social media, do you also include the online communities?
NR> Yes! I do. It is the new telephone. Most get confused between viral marketing and social media marketing. There is a sharp contrast between viral marketing and social media. Viral marketing is about ideas that spread and you are leveraging the context. Social media is any technology that allows human communication and allows viral marketing to be successful.

RD> As you work with your clients, are you seeing many businesses asking not only to implement a social media strategy and technology, but also asking how to manage the social media?
NR> Yes and no. Many businesses want to do social media but then mistakenly lump this tool into getting automated multiple directory listings, or paper advertising. This is a tool and you need humans to do it. It is sometimes very hard for companies to understand that. Some get it sooner and some don’t. It is all about the leadership—especially the CEO—understanding how to use the tool; it is not meant to displace an employee. When I see companies not getting that message, I clearly tell them they are not ready to do social media.

RD> You are absolutely right: there is a huge difference between automating a process versus using the technology. For example, while vacationing in Greece I did not keep up with my tweets, and I lost 40 followers.
NR> It is exactly what you said. In the 1990s, I think technology like ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems was about automating manual work processes, somewhat displacing the human and now the technology is about having the humans use it.

RD> Many of these are hard to keep up with in this “short attention span” generation. How do you address that?
NR> From a B2B standpoint, make it a team sport. In Hubspot they are using 50+ bloggers and then with those frequencies they get traction in getting the response. You have to figure out a source for this. Is this going to be insourced or outsourced? I tell a company if they do not want to engage with the right amount of resources, they should consider other channels such as search engine optimization etc. When a company is ready to invest the effort then the benefits are exponential for the company

RD> We decided at PAKRA, after much experimentation, that social media is where we want to place the bulk of our effort for qualified lead generation. The problem I then faced was that despite showing certain employees why they should engage in social media and maintain the effort behind it, we struggled to make them do it. First, I thought it may be age-dependent, but it had nothing to do with age.
NR> I am first-generation Millennial and I am fully immersed in this, but imagine my surprise when I was presenting once to high school kids. They were very skeptical. You could almost hear the voices of their parents stating the dangers of digital presence: of pedophiles, cyberstalkers, etc. I think the way to communicate to those who do not want to embrace this in a business where their leadership is involved and give them guidelines. For example, be professional, don’t post your cell number and address everywhere. The problem is everyone thinks they have to put everything on the web, emote about everything. People tell me that “you put everything on the web, we know about everything you do.” The answer is “no you don’t. I have a complete self outside the websphere. You don’t know what I don’t put.”
Always be yourself online, but leave out the parts of your life that have no fit or relevance to the digital self.

RD> You don’t see age as an issue?
NR> Age barriers have gone. I remember the first day Google came out: a white screen. That point was pivotal. Libraries became irrelevant and we have access to anything we want. If I need five Swahili words I can get on my mobile phone.

RD> Do you think that the Web democratized the learning process?
NR> Yes! You don’t have to be privileged and have to go to expensive schools to learn. You don’t have to get hardware to get the information. Web has enabled us to get information faster and then if you are willing to learn, it has tools and technologies that help you learn better and faster. I remember in Grade 1, I had to learn how to use Dewey decimal system to find something, now I can find something quickly with the words I know.

... Continued in Part II

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