Keep Informed: Read Workplace Learning Today We've just launched a new Blog and RSS feed. Workplace Learning Today is a group effort by senior Brandon Hall Research analysts Janet Clarey, Richard Nantel, Tom Werner, and Gary Woodill to provide readers with a daily summary of news, events, commentary, and research on all aspects of workplace learning. | |
| Using Second Life® for Workplace Learning: Analysis and Resources | |
Second Life is the best known virtual world environment and has attracted huge amount of interest from the learning community. Thought leaders in training profession have described its potential enthusiastically. Although most workplace learning efforts in Second Life are in the early stages, some intriguing early-adopter implementations exist. This report provides the key information you need to help you evaluate the potential benefits of using this platform. Continue > |  |
Mobile Learning: The Essential Information for Training Professionals | |
| Learning analysts have for years been predicting wide adoption for mobile learning. But, until now, this has not occurred. Mobile phone companies are at last seeing cell phones as miniature Web-enabled computers in people's pockets rather than portable telephones. Consequently, smart phone sales are soaring. This report provides you with the key information you need to expand beyond a desktop-based learning strategy towards one where people can learn anywhere, anytime. Continue > |  |
| Customer Service Skills: Descriptions and Excerpts of Online Courses from the 2007 Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards | |
| Gaining customers for your products and services is hard. Keeping them as satisfied customers is even harder. Consumers have so many product and service choices now that they'll quickly abandon a company if the quality of its customer service is lacking. Consequently, customer service training has never been more important. This report contains nine case studies and online excerpts of customer service courses submitted to the 2007 Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards. Continue > |  |
| Building and Fostering Virtual Learning Communities | |
| Extensive evidence suggests that effective learning communities provide important benefits for learners and their organizations. Apart from significant gains in learning, benefits include reducing isolation, enhancing collegiality, increasing job satisfaction, and Instituting new approaches to solving problems. This report provides you with the key information you need to understand and foster virtual learning communities within your organization. Continue> |  |
| How Learning Management Systems are Integrating Social Learning Technologies: Review and Outlook | |
This report will provide you with an understanding of how new social learning technologies such as blogs, wikis, peer rating of content , and tagging/bookmarking, are being integrated into learning management systems, making the addition of Web 2.0 technologies to your learning strategy easy. Continue> |  |
| Creating Online Tests and Assessments: 19 Easy-to-Use Tools | |
| Your courseware may be well-organized, instructionally sound, and full of “wow” factor, but without the right kind of testing, you’ll never know how effective your learning really is. This report can help you quickly see which tools will be right for your organization. Continue> |  |
Learning Technologies for Healthcare Education and Training | |
| Since human lives are at stake, training in the healthcare industry is rigourous, intensive, and critical. Complicating matters, the medical world changes quickly as new procedures, practices, and technologies are introduced at an ever faster rate. To meet these challenges, healthcare has in the last decade embraced innovative learning technologies. This report provides an analysis of how the medical world uses a multitude of learning strategies to improve performance. Continue > |  |
Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in Training and Development: The Business Brief | |
| This report provides only the key information busy learning professionals need to know about collaborative learning. What is computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)? What can CSCL do for training and development? What can collaborative learning do for a business? What software and hardware do I need to implement CSCL? And more. Continue > |  |
| Containing 40-60 page profiles of 76 systems, Brandon Hall Research's LMS KnowledgeBase is the most comprehensive resource available to help you compare learning management systems and select the system that best meets your needs. Continue> |  |
| See all Brandon Hall Research reports and KnowledgeBases | |
"Real People" is the shorthand title for what Tom calls "Excellence for the Rest of Us: A Book for Real People, Working in the Real World in 2008." In this manifesto, Tom contrasts the thinking of gurus (like him!) to the thinking of the rest of us ... those who toil in more conventional settings. In Search of Excellence introduces this idea when Tom and Bob Waterman write, "Hard is Soft. Soft is Hard." By that phrase, they are referring to the people things, the soft stuff that's more difficult than the numbers game of business. Tom revisits and expands on this thinking in "Real People."
We're re-issuing this column as a holiday offering from tompeters.com. Tom wrote it once upon a time for his column syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, but we think its lessons are timeless. And, what better way for us to recognize the holiday season than to post this article—"Lessons About Life & Enterprise from Baking Christmas Cookies."
Tom introduced this collection as his effort to get you to pay "'strategic' attention to what has always been Issue #1 in organizational effectiveness ... from Napoleon to the man in the moon." Namely, cross-functional effectiveness, which will help you "'Deliver Speed,' 'Service Excellence,' and 'Value-added Customer Solutions.'"
The Top 50 Have You [done these things in the last week, day, hour?] list is Tom's reaction to the phrase "Mapping Your Competitive Position." He contends that you should, instead, put some effort to the tasks on his list. In his estimation, they're important to the short- and long-term health of any enterprise, big or small. If so, the mapping will become a secondary issue.
Further ruminations on the ideas that led Tom to his "Purpose" screed, below, resulted in this offering—his attempt to lay out the "big stuff." He introduced this rambling piece in a 
As the 25th birthday of In Search of Excellence approaches, Tom has been pondering what the practice of management is all about—good, bad, or indifferent. He concluded that entrepreneurial capitalism is the strongest force possible for unleashing human potential, and that it depends upon the effective practice of management. And, according to a review of Thriving on Chaos, "Effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity, and growth to workers. ... The decent thing to do is also the smart thing." That is, effective management is humanistic management. 
This is the next installment in the Success Tips series. It is not as nicely done as the Success Tips 1-50, because that was designed by the folks at ChangeThis. Tips 51-75 is a quick conversion from MSWord to Adobe Acrobat. When we get to 100, we'll have ChangeThis post the second half of the collection, and offer a classier PDF here. But for now, at the request of a member of our community, here is 
Tom unapologetically repeats himself and revisits a favorite theme—the importance of saying "Thanks." He asks you to send the PDF to ten colleagues-friends today. Get Tom's "
Unofficially called "Getting Lucky," of course. This is a list that appeared in Liberation Management in 1992, in which Tom offers 50 ideas for increasing the likelihood that you'll "get lucky"—in business. Download it below, and find its relevance to your life today. (Don't miss the challenge at the end.)
Another question posed to Tom, another list of ideas by Tom. This collection is his 
Asked to come up with some quotes suitable for printing on the side of a coffee mug, Tom was inspired to write this collection: 
As an alternative to New Year's Resolutions, Tom assembled his "Top 41" Quotes to live by in 2006. He offers them to you to adopt if you wish, also. Pick one or two, or use them all. 
In Dubai, on September 18th, 2005, the head of IIR Middle East, Jessica Sutherland, asked Tom a "simple" question. He pondered it for weeks and gave us this, 
In the face of outsourcing, automating, downsizing, and all the other possible assaults on your position, Tom gives you tips on turning your company, your department, or yourself into a Professional Service Firm—doing work that makes a difference. 
Tom's 2005 summer project, a 240-page PDF full of rants ("CEOs Are Idiots!"), raves ("Lord Nelson Had All the Answers"), and more. 
They say, "Plan it." Tom says, "Do it." They say, "We need an initiative." Tom says, "We need a Dream. And Dreamers." Tom takes issue with what "they" say and goes against popular organizational wisdom in 
… to Help You Succeed/Make Money, Pt. 1 This is the first half, 
This Microsoft Word file includes every post Tom wrote for the tompeters.com blog from July 2004 through January 2005. It's a searchable, printable reference for easy reading of Tom's posts. 
Tom presents 20 hard truths about the inevitabilities, pitfalls, and matchless opportunities arising as off-shoring, automation, and technology permanently change how we do business in the world. This 
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Strategy. If your business strategy hinges on knowing where you're going, you'll find a very different point of view in Tom's questions and answers about "strategies" for success. 
This compilation of topics on Tom's mind in the summer of '04 features his "Summer of Soul" discussion of the journey to Greater Awareness. You'll also get "10 Good Reasons to Get Up in the Morning," and more. 
Tom's 60 TIBs. In honor of his 60th birthday, Tom put pen to paper (and fingers to keyboard) and compiled 60 thoughts, one for each year, that captured his professional and, to some extent, personal journey. He wrote about technicolor, audacity, revolution, weirdos, branding, and taking charge of your own destiny, among other things. This 