Change Management does not sound like an interesting topic to me. And I would be surprised if you are excited about it too, but it is a necessary part of any organisation. So recently I started reading John Kotter's book (thanks to Susi for purchasing it), Leading Change. So far I have not been disappointed. I've known about Kotter for some time as his name is often thrown around business publications but he sounded more like a theoretical academic to me. Reading his book has kind of changed my views about him as his writing is quite pragmatic, practical and not really heavy on the technical side of things.
So what are my initial thoughts about the book?
For me it's more of who should read it instead of my initial thoughts about it. To start with I think leadership teams operating at the C level should read it, and also have a good open discussion about how they can integrate some of its lessons into their organisations.
I also think managers at the mid-level should read it too. Learning and development practitioners should definitely it read since most of what they do is about supporting change. I do think the material in the book could be used to design a good training course, instead of spending money on some ridiculously expensive course.
That's a challenge for me, perhaps.
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Monday, 3 March 2014
Ambitious Learning Goal
I set myself an ambitious learning goal this year: to read and review one learning and development related book each week. So far I've done well because I have read and reviewed eight books and started reading the ninth today. But why am I doing this? Is this just a pointless exercise? So I thought initially until I started thinking about one my personal dreams. A couple of years ago I came across three websites which are:
These sites write book summaries and you can buy a subscription to their library of summaries. Although I never bought any of their subscriptions, I fell in love with their business idea. It was the kind of business idea I would want to have on a small scale because I do a bit of reading myself. And being a learning and development practitoner I know that after reading a book, you forget about 70 per cent of what you read in a week's time if you don't start putting it into practice. At least reading a book summary can mean you still have access to some of the knowledge, because no book summary can totally cover the full contents in a book.
With so much passion and desire I thought of the one topic I love reading about: entrepreneurship!. I went out to charity shops and Amazon uk (the used books bit) and bought about 30 business biographies (I still have them stored somewhere) and decided to start a small site with business biography summaries. Initially it was going well, but it soon became difficult and there were a number of reasons for this. A lot of the biographies especially the autos were very subjective and amounted largely to self promotion (hey look at how great I am, I have bult this wonderful business). Rarely will any biography tell you the whole truth about what made their business successful. In fairness some do but they are really the exception. I got discouraged and shelved that idea.
But now I have picked up the idea again, so I thought why don't I start writing summaries of learning and development books. The benfits for me are immense, I'm reading and learning and it may also help other people to choose books and learn from the summaries. So far I have only been writing reviews, but hopefully the summariwes will come later. Here is a link to my blog with all reviews I have so far written: http://ladtools.wordpress.com/
These sites write book summaries and you can buy a subscription to their library of summaries. Although I never bought any of their subscriptions, I fell in love with their business idea. It was the kind of business idea I would want to have on a small scale because I do a bit of reading myself. And being a learning and development practitoner I know that after reading a book, you forget about 70 per cent of what you read in a week's time if you don't start putting it into practice. At least reading a book summary can mean you still have access to some of the knowledge, because no book summary can totally cover the full contents in a book.
With so much passion and desire I thought of the one topic I love reading about: entrepreneurship!. I went out to charity shops and Amazon uk (the used books bit) and bought about 30 business biographies (I still have them stored somewhere) and decided to start a small site with business biography summaries. Initially it was going well, but it soon became difficult and there were a number of reasons for this. A lot of the biographies especially the autos were very subjective and amounted largely to self promotion (hey look at how great I am, I have bult this wonderful business). Rarely will any biography tell you the whole truth about what made their business successful. In fairness some do but they are really the exception. I got discouraged and shelved that idea.
But now I have picked up the idea again, so I thought why don't I start writing summaries of learning and development books. The benfits for me are immense, I'm reading and learning and it may also help other people to choose books and learn from the summaries. So far I have only been writing reviews, but hopefully the summariwes will come later. Here is a link to my blog with all reviews I have so far written: http://ladtools.wordpress.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)