Speaking to CEOs and senior officers of Silicon Valley high-tech companies today, Senator Hillary Clinton had a unique suggestion:
Why not create a reality TV show focused on brains instead of beauty?
Which got me to thinking about training programs (I know... it's a stretch, but somehow I can turn any subject into a rant about training). Why does the term "training" have to have such a negative connotation? I have dedicated the last 10 years of my life creating corporate training programs... yet I find myself evading at almost all costs the four mandatory training programs I must complete as a Sun new hire... mainly because I've already plodded through two of them, and quite frankly, they're boring as all get out.
There's a lot of talk about social learning, Web 2.0, personalization, virtualization, Second Life, etc., which is all fine and dandy -- but until we learn to make training less boring and monotonous, the delivery modality is somewhat irrelevant. A boring PowerPoint presentation is boring regardless of whether it's presented to your Second Life avatar, or your physical self in a classroom.
We need to make training sexier... liven it up.
And, naturally, I'm looking to a politician like Clinton for inspiration...? I don't know, it's early and I haven't had my coffee yet... But, anyhoo, she went on to say:
"We’ve got all these reality shows about singing and modeling and hairstyling," Clinton said to laughter.
"Let’s do some reality shows about innovation. And let’s have some cash prizes out there to try to get young people to start thinking that way."
OK, sure, if there was a cash prize awaiting me when I landed on the last screen of the Business Conduct course, I probably wouldn't be trying to avoid the course at all. But, sadly, there's not. I do know there's about 50 slides of text-heavy reading. And I just don't find that sexy enough to compel me to get on with it.
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