Treating Mistakes as Training

There’s the story of a top salesman who made a terrible mistake. He’d bought a vast amount of fruit. He thought it would be a bargain but had totally overestimated and his company was left with tons and tons of this rotting fruit. He arrived at his office the following day and started to tidy his papers, clearing his desk. He gets a call from … [ Read more ]

How to do Training

In 1991, we put some 900 people through a basic seven-step problem-solving course, using two approaches. About half the employees came to our central corporate training facility for standard classroom training. The other half were trained in teams, on the job. This group didn’t get trained until they were part of a team that was working on a real problem. When they got to a … [ Read more ]