by Jay Cross on January 24, 2012
The metronome that measures the pace of human progress ticks ever faster. More happens in one of your seconds at work than in one of your grandfather’s hours. You can feel it, can’t you?
People and organizations around the globe are linking into a single vast network. Every new connection creates more value than it gives up. Membership is snowballing. Interconnections form like topsy. Time accelerates because the denser the interconnections of a network, the faster its cycle time.
As events come faster and faster, change becomes visible. We can see that what once appeared rigid is actually fluid.
This…
…becomes this:
Look at a flower in your garden. You see a still life that doesn’t appear to grow.
Watch a stop-action film that collapses a month of that flower’s life into minutes, and you see that the flower is growing all the time.
Organizations are not so different from flowers. They’re both alive. As time speeds up, constants become variables. New opportunities unfold. Nurture the growth of organizations or flowers and they thrive; neglect them and they wither.
by Jay Cross on January 23, 2012
I’m investigating how people learn to speak a new language.
More than a million people have signed up with Chinese Pod to learn to speak Chinese.
Co-host Jenny Zhu filled me in on how this Shanghai-based company is helping adult learners, 60% of them from the U.S., attain fluency. Podcasts, more than a thousand of them, are part of the answer, but it takes more than exposure to 12-minute podcasts to master a language.
Most of Chinese Pod’s learners are 25-50 year old adults who are learning Chinese for personal growth, as a hobby, or because they have Chinese spouses or kids. 75% are native speakers of English. Increasingly, they’re abandoning their desktops and using smartphones and tablets to access Chinese Pod. Some are expats living in China and some are university students supplementing what they learn in class.
What made Chinese Pod the leading choice for learning Chinese? For one thing, you can sign up for free. Fewer than 1% of those registered users are paying for the experience.
Also, when Chinese Pod debuted in 2005, most textbooks and training materials were disembodied from real life. Few teachers had ever visited China and knew little of Chinese culture. Chinese Pod’s approach was to focus on providing something useful; the alternatives were merely academic.
Personally, I think I’m immune to learning languages in a classroom. I’ve studied French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and German and can’t speak any of them. If I wanted to learn Chinese, I’d give Chinese Pod a try.
