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We advocate the need to go beyond training and development because we recognise that neither is enough and each has its characteristic limitations. Development is too open, training not open enough. Training cannot cope with a world of uncertainty, while development may accept it to the point of giving no guidance in how to shape the world. Training cannot deal with a high degree of complexity: development does too little to bring order to complexity.

[The concept of] restoration acknowledges that people need to have something "put back", restored to them through their daily work. This is especially true where the knowledge economy denies people the familiar satisfactions of predictability and of the regular production of tangible goods.

Training that produces tangible results starts by changing behaviour - which ultimately changes attitudes.

Ultimately, e-learning will be most effective when it no longer feels like learning -- when it's simply a natural part of how people work: Today, people say, 'I'm working,' and what they're doing is quickly answering emails and voice mails. They don't say, 'I've got the next two hours slotted for email.' If you do things in small chunks, they become just another part of your job. We want learning to become just another part of people's jobs. E-learning will be successful when it doesn't have its own name.

One problem with how most companies deliver information is that they expect people to spend too much time at one sitting. We work in a world of limited attention spans, unlimited demands on people's time, and endless multitasking. Learning programs have to reflect these realities: most e-learning is still anchored in the mind-set that learning means going somewhere for 8 hours at a time to study a 40-hour curriculum. We may have a 40-hour curriculum, but we deliver it in 20-minute chunks, or even faster. That makes it easier for people to build learning into their workday.

Although building strengths can lead to world-class performance, training to improve areas of weakness is essentially damage control -- by aiming to eliminate defects, it inspires adequate, not superior, performance.

...The fact is, training can do wonders for the right person in the right job -- especially when that training builds on the employee's greatest talents. But all the training in the world cannot make an employee the right person for the job.

Productive learning often takes place in stages. First, the learner is exposed to the core concepts, and then he or she tries to apply them and finds that he or she needs to understand them better. This makes the learner more receptive, and so the process repeats itself. Most effective courses are structured this way. Periodic tests help highlight progress and areas where more work is needed. By contrast, all too often in business, subordinates are simply instructed and left largely on their own.

What I have a problem with are the amounts of money that corporate America is spending on motivational training. I've attended presentations by...leading figures in "training and motivation" who present this very expensive, rah-rah cheerleading nonsense. These people are getting paid $1,000 to $5,000 a minute, but they aren't accomplishing anything more than a sales manager can accomplish simply by taking his staff out to eat once a month, which is far cheaper.

Corporate America is structured to give people what they want. We need to get away from that mentality and, instead, give people what they need. Skills training may be boring and pedantic, but it doesn't have to be, and a lot of people need it. Instead, we hire people to motivate us to have a better attitude. It's all part of the nonsense that's pervasive in society -- that attitude alone is enough to prevail.

The mistake organizations frequently make is to use training and development as a damage control strategy to shore up the weaknesses of those who are not doing well. That is a mistake. It's a bad use of corporate assets. Training and development need to be directed towards the best performers, i.e. to polish diamonds not polish coal.

In pursuit of leadership talent, organizations tend to hire for knowledge, train for skills, develop for judgment - and hope for wisdom. When wisdom does not materialize, they are forced to hire it.

People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

Most organizations have management development programs in place, and some have multitiered programs. But generally, the tiers are differentiated by the amount of training given, without reference to any fundamental shift in the way managers must think and lead. Such programs fail to take into account the different behavioral demands that accompany different levels of responsibility.

Many of today's midcareer workers are well educated and have retained their love of learning. They know that increasing their skills will raise their chances for personal and professional advancement. However, many find themselves too busy for extensive education and training; personal development time comes at the sacrifice of other responsibilities, both on the job and off. And some people, especially those who have reached positions of authority, stop seeking development opportunities because they hesitate to take risks or don't want to admit that they have things to learn.

Meanwhile, too many organizations foster a silent conspiracy against education: They cut the training and development budget first in lean times. They stand silent when managers discourage employees from seeking training on the grounds that it will interfere with getting the work done. And they fail to require managers to set career development plans for all their employees. As a result, many midcareer workers are overdue for a serious infusion of training-which can include refresher courses, in-depth education to develop new skills, and brief introductions to new ideas or areas of business that expand their perspectives and trigger their interest in learning more.

Education for adults is basically experience understood in tranquility. In other words, you have the experience and then you can go away to a place of tranquility like a school or a course and reflect with the help of people who give you some concepts on what you've learnt or what you've experienced. Then you go off and do it hopefully better next time. And come back again. School is where there should be oceans of tranquility in a turbulent world. It is where you pause and reflect on what you've been doing and put some sense into it.

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

I sincerely hope that we're seeing the end of retreats. This personalization of business relationships is misguided. For one thing, it's expensive to have people climb poles or shoot at one another with paint guns. But the more depressing thing is that it's taken us half a century to realize that when you remove everybody's inhibitions, you create more problems than you solve. Regrettably, the whole retreat thing started with touchy-feely consultants who believed that if we all loved one another, then good behavior would follow. Whatever made anyone believe that? Think about it: People marry because they love each other, and good behavior doesn't necessarily follow. People love their children, and good behavior doesn't necessarily follow. Love is no guarantee, and we certainly don't love everybody in our business environment.

As the best professional investors know, it's not how much you invest that helps you outperform the market, it's where and how you invest. The same principle applies to workforce performance. By differentiating workforce investments, and by tailoring those investments to critical jobs and roles, high-performance organizations in both the public and private sectors get a bigger bang for their buck in the form of superior business results, greater productivity and other desired outcomes.

In hiring and managing individual employees, it's important to understand what is difficult to change (talent) and what is more easily changed or acquired (knowledge and skills). Once you hire someone, you are largely stuck with their talents, whereas you can still impart new skills and knowledge. Without a clear understanding of these two different aspects of ability, you will have an incomplete picture of how talents play into hiring decisions and could become more prone to making hiring errors.

Leadership development is ensuring "that people in leadership roles have the competence to determine and to carry out the [company's] strategic imperatives. If competence is acquired through experience, then it is the strategy of the business that determines which experiences are necessary to build it. The crucial links . . . are from the business strategy to the leadership challenges it suggests to the experiences given to its talented people."

An exclusive focus on execution-as-efficiency leads companies to delay, discourage, or understaff investments in areas where learning is critical. It’s a given that switching to a new approach can lower performance in the short run. The fastest hunt-and-peck typist must endure a short-term hit to performance while learning to touch-type, just as the tennis player suffers initially when shifting to a new, better serve. These are the costs of learning, which has its payoff in future performance. Managers who overemphasize results can subtly discourage technologies, skills, or practices that make new approaches viable.

Adults learn in predictable steps. Before employees can master a new skill effectively, for example, they must be convinced it will help improve their organization’s performance, recognize that their own performance is weak in that area, and then actually choose to learn. Yet most corporate training programs overlook these prerequisites and just assume that employees “get it.” This approach is a big mistake because it allows normal patterns of skepticism to become barriers to learning. The results are familiar to anyone who has attended a corporate training event. Instead of approaching training as active learners, many employees behave as if they were prisoners (“I’m here because I have to be”), vacationers (“I don’t mind being here—it’s a nice break from doing real work”), or professors (“Everybody else is here to learn; I can just share my wisdom”).

The typical U.S. company spends nearly fifty times more to recruit a $100,000 executive than it will invest in his annual training.