Dale Carnegie goes Global!

A Message from Bob

Are you prepared to conduct a business meeting in India? How about a client pitch in Russia? A planning seminar in China?

More of us are going to be called upon to function professionally in different cultures in the coming years as globalization continues flattening out the world's economy. While much of the focus of this historic shift has centered on technology, the need to communicate effectively is just as important, if not more so.

A recent article in Time magazine about Dale Carnegie Training starting its first course in Bangalore, India, sums up the need succinctly: "The quality of degrees varies widely between institutes, and while many graduates may possess cutting-edge technical skills, their interpersonal and communication skills lag far behind."

While that sentence refers to graduates of India's burgeoning technical and engineering universities, it could just as well be said of American graduates. How many are ready to communicate with people from other cultures? What sort of training is being offered in relating to business people in emerging countries?

The type of communication and human relations skills taught by Dale Carnegie Training are becoming more critical than ever as global competition continues to shrink our world. Increased commerce and easier communication are creating a world where only time zones remain as a barrier to doing business. The pressure to communicate on the same level across cultures will be critical to achieving success.

A student in the new course in Bangalore said he has learned basic corporate principles such as the importance of asking questions instead of giving orders. "It's like learning to speak the lingo and to fit in," the student told the Time interviewer.

We in the United States face the same challenge. Business customs vary from region to region, and it will be a mistake to assume that our customs will take precedence. If we want to avoid losing business as a result of failing to understand cultural differences, it's important for us to start learning about those differences today, to better prepare for tomorrow.

Read the article in Time magazine

Bob

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Your Biggest Investment Will Equal Your Biggest Return!

A Message from Bob

Businesses facing rising costs and declining revenue often resort to the obvious: layoffs.
A number of studies have shown that this blunt approach destroys shareholder value over the long term. But what of the more common - and more insidious - corporate habit of cutting back or eliminating training and employee development efforts?

Three recent studies prove that investing in employee development boosts both gross profits and stock prices significantly.

The Harvard Business Review published the results of a research project conducted from 1997 to 2003 that followed the stock prices of hundreds of companies that invested twice the industry norm in employee development. From 1997 to 2001, most of these companies achieved better-than-average financial performance in a variety of areas, including shareholder return.

So the researchers - Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer of Knowledge Asset Management, a money management firm in Maryland - invested money in three live portfolios of companies in 2003 that "spend aggressively on employee development."
All three portfolios outperformed the S&P 500 market index over their first year by a whopping 17 percent to 35 percent.

The American Society for Training and Development in Alexandria, Va., recently evaluated 540 U.S. companies in a similar study. Those that invested 3 percent to 6 percent of payroll on workplace learning achieved a 37 percent higher annual gross profit per employee than those that spent little or no funds on training.

An even larger study by the University of Pennsylvania, which included 3,200 companies, showed firms that increased spending for workforce training and development by 10 percent boosted productivity by 8.5 percent, while a similar increase in capital expenditures increased productivity by just 3.8 percent.

Factor in the high cost of frequent employee turnover and you begin to get the picture: Employees are indeed the most important asset a company has, and investing in their development pays off big time on the bottom line.

Bob

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Communicating with Full Impact!

We have started offering "sneak peaks" of our training sessions with new video presentations on the website, Dale Carnegie of Western CT Website.

A few months back we added a blog. Over the past few weeks we've established a presence on several other websites and added links to those sites on our web page. And now we're adding video.

All of these changes highlight a subject of great relevance in today's highly wired world - the impact of different forms of media on communication.

Today we communicate through many more methods than in the past. To the spoken and printed word we've added email, voicemail, instant messaging, electronic texting, faxing, blogging, video and videoconferencing.

We are communicating more than ever in this country, but are we communicating effectively? Multiple means of communication can be a good thing, but too often what we gain in variety and convenience we lose in clarity and understanding.
Everyone has had the experience of misinterpreting an email, or having your email misunderstood. This happens because we lose the advantages of face-to-face communicating.

According to UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian, only 7 percent of meaning comes from the words we speak. Thirty-eight percent is in the way the words are said, and a full 55 percent of meaning is conveyed through facial expressions.
So you can see that sending a quick email doesn't include the natural, face-to-face clues to your meaning that accompany face-to-face interaction.

That's not to say we all need to stop using emails and video to transmit information. These are vital and much-needed ways to communicate in today's fast-paced world. Instead, the point is to be aware of the differences among the various media and learn to take that into account.

For instance, when writing an email be sure to consider whether you are assuming the recipient will understand your intended tone. What you intend as humor may be received as negativity, for example.

Video carries similar risks. A video camera cannot catch all the nuances of a face-to-face meeting, and video presentations often distort subtle aspects of communication such as emphasis and demeanor.

By all means, take advantage of the various new media designed to facilitate communications, as we at Dale Carnegie Training of Western Connecticut are doing. But remember, to really make business move forward we still need to meet with each other as often as possible and communicate the old-fashioned way - face to face.

Have a great day!

Bob Dickson

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