Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

Good ideas and discussion over at Corante’s Future Tense blog - We are all apprenticing at light speed. Just a bit from the post:

“…As Peter Drucker and others have argued, economic progress in the coming decades will be driven to a large extent by our ability to improve the practice of knowledge work. That means improving the quality and speed of apprenticeship based learning, which brings to mind Drucker’s observation about productivity improvement in the early days of Frederick Taylor. Whenever Taylor examined a craft job, he discovered that the traditional tools and methods carried with them unseen and unexamined inefficiencies.”

My perspective: In today’s increasingly flat world, knowledge is key to competitive success - yet our education system is designed for the past industrial age - rote learning for repetition and test-taking ability versus learning how to think and creative problem-solving ability. (The world isn’t as neat and tidy as an MBA case study, tis a pity.)

So, enough already of the big words and my bla-blah. My point is I cringe when I hear someone say “I don’t have time to learn/read/look at that” or “Why should I learn that?” - in response to some new idea or technology.

If we’re not learning, we’re not growing, and we’re very likely missing great business opportunities (and getting left behind by our competitors.) And, that’s just as true for a retail store owner or a corporate employee as it is for a free-lance business consultant.