Category Archives: Training and Consulting Business

Apr 13

The Tyranny of Middle Class Values and How Some Think About Work

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I wrote on the human resources discussion list, a short piece that was stimulated by one consultant’s praise for the employment engagement concept, one that, by the way, I abhore for a number of reasons.

The gist is that pretty much all the fads that get popular — employee engagement, autonomy, TQM, etc are based on a hidden set of values that tends to come from the upwardly mobile middle class — a group that is ambitious, and desires to get ahead. Perhaps one reasons these initiatives fade away is because the work world simply isn’t made up exclusively by those people.

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Mar 01

Bacal’s Law of Consulting

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You probably don’t know that I’m the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Consulting, which is now out of print. I’m still interested in the consulting business, and recently came across a conversation with a “consultant” stating that organizations resist change because of fear, and a few other generalizations that suggested HE knew organization’s problems even before meeting them. Yuck. So, this is what you do upon being retained.

1) Assume that the organization has rational, coherent reasons for the things they do and how they do them, even if, on the surface, those things don’t make sense to you. SEEK THEM OUT.

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Feb 04

Do you want to have a radio show on organizational development?

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Got a phone call out of the blue asking me if I was interested in hosting a regular radio show (I think it’s a radio show) on org. development. While I would jump at the chance to do something like this if someone paid me enough, at this stage of my career, I’m not interested in doing this for exposure. I haven’t looked into this yet, but it’s 99.9% certain I won’t do it. But will you?

If you are interested just leave a comment and your email, and I’ll see what I can find out about it. I don’t want to post the details to everyone lest the folks get snowed under. Is it a legit thing? I dunno. Probably an Internet based thing.

Aug 17

Learning To Say No, Important To Training/Consulting/Speaking Business Success

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In my travels, talking to trainers, consultants, and most importantly, customers and consumers of those services, a clear pattern emerges about one of the most common reasons training and consulting fail. On one level it’s simple. Training and consulting interventions fail because they are badly conceived, too limited in scope, allocated insufficient resources, or are in plain terms, a bad idea in the first place.

But how do these projects go ahead? Isn’t it the consultant’s or trainer’s responsibility to simply say NO to jobs where it’s impossible to succeed? Well, it certainly should be and that’s part of the expertise that we bring to the table and for which we get paid. Well, for some of us anyway.

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Jun 29

Reporting and Interpreting of Workplace Research Data – Atrocious!

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Can it get any worse? Probably not. Mainstream news outlets are often reporting on research about the workplace — about what works, what doesn’t work. This year twitter and social media research is in the limelight. Last year employee engagement was widely reported on. Plus, of course, the general garden variety research having something to do with behavior and productivity in the workplace.

The problem is that the articles are often misleading, or directly and/or indirectly suggest conclusions to readers that are simply unwarranted. Misleading material includes complete direct conclusions not supported by the study (ie. stating completely wrong things), restatement of myths that were never true but have become urban myths (there are several about learning and training), to the most benign practice of providing inadequate guidance to readers about the meaning of the researc. Here’s an example. Continue reading →

Jun 07

Comment on Some ASTD Comments (or, My God, You let these people train others?)#astd #trdev

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Super Duper E-Trashcan Made Specially as a Receptacle For Idiot E-Fads.

Super Duper E-Trashcan Made Specially as a Receptacle to Idiot E-Fads.

Some of you may know that the ASTD Conference concluded last week (American Society For Training and Development). A few people took the time and made the effort to either inform during the conference, or write up their impressions after the conference, and no doubt, they should be commended for the spirit of sharing.

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May 05

Attempts to sabotage creating a training/development community of practice

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Earlier today I announced the creation of a twitter hashtag, #trdev so people wanting to create a training and development community of practice on twitter could find each other, and interact. We have additional plans to make this work. However it will NOT work if the tag is used for NON-RELATED tweets.

Within 3 hrs. of announcing the tag, providing instructions for use, etc, Doug Constant @onpointcoaching started spamming the tag with messages of various types NONE of which pertain at all to the topic. You can see for yourself what he is doing by doing a search within twitter for #trdev, and you can see what appears to be a deliberate attempt to prevent you and I from creating this community.

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May 04

Bacal’s Law of Multicausation

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For any phenomenon there will be a multitude of factors that caused the phenomenon. Therefore, any attempt to explain that phenomenon by invoking a single variable will always be wrong, and worse, misleading.

This is an exceedingly important element. We constantly look to change something by altering a single variable, then end up wondering why the results don’t change. It’s simple, though. No single variable, on its own, is responsible for any singl result. There are countless examples.

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Apr 21

Openx Hosted Ad Serving – Cautionary Alert

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I’ve been a user of openx software for a long time, and gone through several name changes of their’s while hosting the ad serving software on my own servers. For a long time I’ve had a desire to unify all of our ad serving on one server, and unfortunately, to do so would have required me to invest in a relatively expensive dedicated server to handle the needs of our ten websites.

When openx let me in to their free hosted service, I was excited to find a solution from a familiar organization that had a familiar interface. Sadly the initial excitement faded. There are definitely things you should be aware of before you commit the time to move to Openx hosted.

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