Editorial

I rented a car from Budget for a meeting I had today abt 45 minutes from my hotel. I got up this morning to find out the car battery had died. With just enough time kfor the drive I had to leave the car and hire a taxi for the long trip. When I got…

Persistence is a key to learning and having fun with math.  Research shows that most Americans when presented with a puzzle or problem that’s even moderately difficult will give up trying to solve it within a minute or less.  Being persistent is essential to developing good solutions and ideas or even brainstorming effectiveness. I blame…

The book, Developing Talent for Organizational Results, has a wide range of exercises, insights, and research provided by many of the ISA’s most experienced and proven learning providers.  Now, in one place, you can get quick access to this information.  MOHR Retail contributed a chapter on “Reinforcement: Making Great Training Pay Off!” (starts on pg 415).…

ISA was started 35 years ago when formal training and development companies were few and far between.  The new ‘training’ industry was just forming and it took leaders with tremendous courage and insight to recognize that even competitors could learn something from each other.  At this year’s annual conference we had the pleasure of reconnecting…

If you made a list of challenges and likes about your job in retail you’d probably find that the things that made you crazy, e.g., changing priorities, limited resources, multiple goals, would actually be on the other side of why you liked the job, e.g., never dull, always interesting, a new challenge every day, forced you…

Not all of our retail clients choose to do more than our classroom training.  While our programs are practical, industry-focused, skills-based programs that drive results sometimes the effort stops with the session. This retailer was different.  They typically used their national meetings as a stage for all the Home Office departments to come in and do a…

We have launched a final draft version of our “RSS” program or Retail Store Support.  In order to refine RSS into a final version we have been conducting phone and observation interviews to uncover and confirm the list of performance modules we will build for RSS; each with a unique discussion strategy as well as…

One of our core Communication Skills is Shape Performance with Reinforcement.  There are several techniques we cover when teaching this skill to District Managers or Store Managers.  I happened to have a more diverse group today that included Regional Presentation Managers, L&D, and some DMs. We were talking about how we sometimes reinforce behavior or…

We’re an official distributor of Inscape Publishing’s new online Everything Disc Workplace style surveys.  This new version of DiSC provides an even  richer and more intuitive individual report for participants to use.  It focuses on eight priorities that your individual style values.  Having information about your style is very helpful.  Having information about others you…

Did you know that even with the best training only about 16-24% of participants actually use what they learn back on the job?  I don’t know about your company but for us that’s just not good enough.  There’s another statistic though that is encouraging.  If participants in training get some type of reinforcement whether from…