This morning I received an email announcing TimeRime, a site that enables you to produce a timeline with links, photos, YouTube videos, etc. There went my day!

Since Internet Time Group is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary, I couldn’t help myself. You can create a timeline like that above for free. If you pay up, you can also embed a version that enables you to click to more extensive reference pages like this Internet Time Timeline.

On the occasion of its one hundredth birthday, Harvard Business School is taking a look in the mirror.

Working Knowledge, an online forum from HBS, gave Professor Emeritus Jim Heskett a platform to raise the issue of the relevance of case study instruction. One hundred eleven people left comments! I’ll summarize their observations and offer a few critical comments of my own.

Heskett’s original article noted that “The case method has become synonymous with education for management. In fact, it was derived in the early 20th century from training for the law at Harvard by several members of the Harvard Business School faculty…. Most recently, the question has been raised about whether the case method encourages the development of skills in framing problems prior to decision making. Traditional cases have come under fire for being self-contained documents that describe a protagonist facing a decision with a set of packaged data available on which to base the decision.”

Columbia is using “decision briefs” made of articles describing a management challenge and a video of the decision-maker; student research can be open-ended.

Commentary
Most of the commenters came out in favor of case study or against it, failing to address how the case study process could be improved. “I vote for the case study,” said one. My vote goes for bringing the case study into the 21st century.

Those in favor, a wide majority of the commenters, like cases because they teach critical thinking and decision-making skills, require synthesis of business complexities, nurture pattern recognition, and teach that there are no “right answers.”

Naysayers complained that case study is too time-consuming, is poor for teaching subjects where there is one correct answer, come in at too lofty a level, and are not real life. Cases aren’t very useful as reference material; it’s tough to spotlight the takeaways.

My experience
During my two years at HBS, I devoured in the neighborhood of a thousand cases. Except for a funky computer simulation, a screening of Twelve Angry Men, and a handful of role-play exercises, everything was taught with cases. HBS was slavishly devoted to the case method of instruction and tried to force-fit case study into every instructional situation. Give a kid a hammer….

Cases are a crappy way to learn a something like the basics of accounting. You can discuss accounting until the cows come home and never intuit your way to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. My class had semi-official workarounds for such situations. Everyone received a programmed-instructional workbook on accounting. (We didn’t talk about it in class for it wasn’t treated as part of the program.) Occasionally we received a “Note,” a pamphlet explaining a concept independent of a case. Some of us also bought text books and swapped crib sheets on topics like finance and marketing management.

Most of my learning came from working on cases with my study group. Half a dozen of us met in the evening to suss out the salient points of the next day’s three cases. This exploratory give-and-take was highly participatory, more so that the classroom discussion fielded by a member of the faculty the following day.

One of the commenters tells the joke of the MBA who settles down in his plush office on his first day of work and tells his assistant, “Bring me my first case.” No, cases are not the real world. Case facts are pre-selected. Time is compressed. Politics are largely absent. You are tipped off whether to look for the answer because it’s a finance case or an organizational development case or whatever.

Successful case discussion requires adept faculty, but case study is inevitably more engaging than preaching at people. A case study better mirrors real life that a lecture, a workshop, or a text book. Cases inject ambiguity missing from most instruction. The “answer” is not clear.

The case study method of instruction is held back by limitations that no longer apply. It’s like the two extra members of artillery teams just prior to World War II. They were there to hold the horses long after trucks had replaced the horses on the field of combat.

Paper cases were limited in the amount of information they could provide. (Sixty pages is a long, long case, but a very abbreviated description of a complex business situation.) This is nonsense. Why shouldn’t a case contain the mountains of financial history and project reports one encounters in a real business? Cases should include extensive on-line exhibits and support information.

Multimedia was once expensive to prepare and difficult to show. Today a portable video camera half the size of a pack of cigarettes costs under a hundred fifty dollars, and it’s a snap to post video to the net. Cases should include interviews will all sorts of people impacting the situation at hand. Interviews with people who don’t see eye to eye will enrich the case.

School students of English composition are taught to begin by preparing an outline. Then they write the essay. And then they throw away the outline. Why? My friend Bob Horn, inventor of information mapping, points out that the outline is an integral part of the work. The outline should go forward with the paper. Think of the hours you’d save if business documents included the outline! The outline enables a reader to x-ray the meaning of the paper. Some case study should include the outline of prior reader’s investigations.

Instead of a case that starts as a pamphlet, imagine a case that is housed on a wiki. Student speculation and analysis would be recorded for the next wave of students. As in my study group, people would be able to peer into the heads of others to learn how they think about things. Cases on wikis would expand in utility as students built on one another’s observations.

Case discussion is a mix of team and individual learning. The student reads the case and performs a preliminary analysis on her own. The study group trades viewpoints and builds upon one another’s observations. The discussion the professor typically singles out one student at a time to interpret what’s going on. Then the analysis is over.

Might it be worthwhile to revisit a case several weeks after the class discussion? Or for students to conduct prep sessions with several different study groups? Or to review best-of-breed solutions from prior years? Or to do comparative analyses of several related cases? Or to analyze a case from the viewpoint of several disciplines?

Case studies can serve as a touchstone for discussions of real-world situations in organizations. I may write a few to include in the informal learning environment I’m constructing. I already know the last few sentences. “The project manager, George, is a recent graduate of a well-known Eastern business school. He has just been given responsibility for the project. What should George do?”

Jeremiah Owyang was kind enough to send me his slides from yesterday’s session on Social Media: Hype vs. Reality at Online Marketing World. I have tweaked the presentation of the information but the findings are Forrester’s.

Here are six levels of participation in social media.

Here’s the picture in the U.S., Europe, and China. Draw your own conclusions.

And here’s the impact of age.

Last Sunday’s New York Times had a six-panel cartoon of two guys standing under a street sign saying “Wall St.” A wave appears to the right of them. It gets bigger panel by panel and finally engulfs them. Floating away, one says to the other, “Whoa, didn’t see that coming.” If the participation-by-age chart above means nothing to you, you’ll soon be able to say the same thing.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art serves as my office when I’m in the City, and I used it for contemplation and sustenance between sessions of the World Online Marketing Conference today.

Online commerce has lessons for learning professionals putting together learning platforms. For example, the people today were really hot about live help as a sales tool. Text chat comes in many varieties. It’s a no-brainer if you’re selling from your website. Likewise, shouldn’t live help be a component of any important in-house learning event?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve advocated treating learners as if they were customers. If an online marketing champ were running training, she’d be testing new approaches every day and pouring over heat maps of traffic every night. She’d be minimizing distractions, making navigation drop-dead simple, and calling drop-outs to see what went wrong. Every lesson, workshop, and pointer would provide a way for users to leave review.

Social networking sites account for more web traffic than news and information sites. Here’s the bad news for online marketers: people don’t go to Facebook to shop. They visit social sites to see what their friends are up to, to send messages, to update their profiles and check other people’s profiles, to look for people, to listen to music, or to write a blog post. Here’s the good news for learning professionals: people go to social sites to commune with others; that’s the vehicle for most learning in organizations.

So much for another day at the office.

Harvard Business School launched the MBA degree 100 years ago.

HBS marked the occasion by interviewing 30 deans and associate deans and roughly 100 students of various business schools. I’ll give HBR Alumni Bulletin good marks for candor, for reporting that “The findings presented a mixed diagnosis of the health of MBA programs but on balance were, in the words of one HBS faculty member, ‘depressing’.”

Professors Srikant Datar and David Garvin wrote that MBAs graduated with valuable, current business and management knowledge in my generation, but now you can learn just as much at an in-house program at a major financial institution or consulting firm. Business schools are faulted for not getting globalization right.

Many MBAs don’t understand the practice of leadership or have sufficient awareness of their impact on others.

Proof

“A number of recruiters said that what they value most is the screening process top schools use to pick students, and a few preferred to recruit straight from a school’s admission list.”

Things were worse before wake-up call generated by a 1959 Ford Foundation report that characterized MBA programs as vocational in content and indefensible in quality.

What should HBS do now? Datar and Garvin heard recruiters asking for more soft skills such as self-awareness and the capacity for introspection and empathy. They also found MBAs lacking in critical and creative thinking, as well as communication skills.

HBS Dean Jay Light said, “Throughout our history, we’ve had periods of frank self-reflection. The Centennial has provided an opportunity to assess the impact of significant innovaitons over the past few decades in the context of a rapidly changing world– to step back and see the forest and the trees.”

Adobe Digital Editions is a free app for reading and annotating pdf files as well as maintaining them in an attractive bookshelf format. Sounds dull as dishwater, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought. And then I tried it. Adobe Digital Editions has a great feel to it. It’s intuitive.

Kevin Kelly has released a new edition of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.  It is a free download. I first read Out of Control a dozen years ago while on vacation in Switzerland. It shakes up how I think about things to this day. Out of Control is profound.

Bringing the pdf of Out of Control into Adobe Digital Editions transformed my reading experience. I immediately started hopping around from one section to another, annotating as I went. I’m doing the same with my own books, Learnscaping and Informal Learning. I am flying through the material.

Thanks to my pal Urs Frei in Zurich for turning me on to Digital Editions.

Once a year, the local citizens here let their freak flags fly in a march down the main streets of town in costume. (Some residents are always in costume.) Everyone ends up on the lawn in front of City Hall. It’s always great for chuckles. This year the Mayor was allotted a spot next to the East Bay Atheists.

Obama supporters will appreciate our political climate:

I love the Cheney + Satan bumper stickers.

Herod Blank, who lives down the hill from here, has been hosting “art car” festivals for ten years. The How Berkeley Can You Be festival brings out the art cars in droves. The pen car has 10,000 pens glued to it.

A great addition this year was a half dozen young women wearing little but body paint:

College kids are different these days. Awash in multiple distractions, most have the attention spans of gnats. They lack the discipline to put in the hard work to learn things the way you and I did when we were in school. Ye Gods, most of them don’t read email any more, much less books. They live in the fast lane, skittering across the top of important issues without ever getting to the heart of the matter. And before you know it, they will graduate and become employees of our companies.

Learning professionals know that the incoming generation is not going to put up with what has passed for corporate training since the 70s. I asked a newly minted college grad what she thought of eLearning. Her reply: “Sucks.” Why? It’s too one-way, there’s too little choice, it’s so…. structured. Entering the workforce, she plans to vote with her feet. If the ladder to corporate success requires enduring traditional, ho-hum, take-it-or-leave-it training, she’ll work somewhere else. Corporations that don’t offer employees the freedom to learn with others will end up with the dregs, not the top talent, and will fail to survive as a result.

At the CLO Symposium, Karie Willyerd showed samples of how Sun Microsystems is preparing to greet the workforce of 2020. This is a group that learns from nano-nuggets. Sun is constructing a platform that makes the nuggets available; you can mine for them however you choose. The magic of Sun’s approach is that it accelerates informal learning. Performance is what matters, not how you learned to perform. (Check this out.)

The next morning, Jonny Parkes of The Irish Learning Alliance shared a vision of Elite, a learning platform where the semantic web, social learning, and communities of practice converge. Once again, the approach was to build the sandbox, not to pin down what people do with it.

Not only are Sun and ILA developing the sort of learning environments that I expect to dominate the future, they are laying the groundwork for something much larger: the true integration of learning and work.

Throughout the CLO Symposium, people grappled with ways to explain the value of learning to business leaders. Perhaps that makes sense if both parties think work and learning are different things. That’s no longer the case.

In a knowledge society, work and learning are the same thing. Sun and ILA are developing what I call learnscapes. A learnscape is the platform where knowledge workers collaborate, solve problems, converse, share ideas, brainstorm, conceptualize, tell stories, help one another, teach, keep up to date, forge partnerships, build communities, and distribute information. Learnscapes are where and how modern work is performed – including workplace learning.

Back to those Twittering, Facebooking, always-on college students. Our challenge is not to design overlays and alternatives to accommodate them. Instead, we should be developing ways for them to take advantage of their approaches to the world to make our businesses more effective.

While we’re at it, we’ve got to drop the us-versus-them stance. They’re adept at keeping up with torrents of information, volatile situations, extreme flexibility, and real-time responsiveness. The oldsters are not.

We have to stop thinking that we’re creating learnscapes for them. What we’re really doing is building networks to help us all work more effectively. Yeah, they’re different. But so is the world we live in.

<span style=”background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);”>The issue learning professionals need to address is not how to talk with business people; it’s how to be business people.</span> We used to tell people how to do things. From here on, we have to help them figure out how to do things for themselves.

This was as far as I got after 90 minutes of trying to install the software.

Norm Kamilkow, Mike Prokopeak, and the CLO staff must have a crystal ball back at the office in Chicago. How else would they have known, six months in advance, that the U.S. economy would be going down the toilet? The CLO Symposium that just ended at the Hotel Del Coronado focused on the perfect topic for times of economic meltdown — Measuring Success: Learning’s Positive Impact on Business.

Norm kicked things off by drawing an analogy between training and baseball. Baseball is easy to quantify but statistics don’t tell the entire story The Chicago Cubs hold the record for the most wins in a row… but that was in 1906 or so. Ballpark figures can lead you astray.

Baseball scouts once judged new recruits primarily by gut feel. Now it’s a science. Scouts live by metrics.

Similarly, training departments once took chances on things because they looked good. These days it’s imperative that learning leaders make their case with relevant numbers.

I’m going to cherry-pick topics from the Symposium here, and in doing so I’ll call Norm’s that last sentence into question.

Following a keynote by Ed Cohen, former CLO at Booz and now head of Satyam Computer Services’ School of Leadership, we launched into a ThinkTank session chaired by Cedric Coco of Lowe’s with observations from Kent Barnett (Knowledge Advisors), Michael Echols (Bellevue University’s Human Capital Lab), and Patti Phillips (of The ROI Institute).

Issue: Human Capital is the largest unmanaged cost in business. Who should be in charge?

• Patti: The CFO is taking charge. Upside potential: visibility. Downside vulnerability: visibility.
• Kent: Should be senior management function
• Mike: Human Capital Lab interfaces with operating managers.

Issue: What are the biggest mistakes in installing HR metrics?

• Kent: Industry looks backward, defending our budgets (but human capital is all about the future). Need to recognize element of risk in time; leadership development takes time.
• Mike: How to establish what outcomes are sought? Discussion with operating managers on what outcome is desired. This must come up front. How do you isolate the impact of learning?

My note-taking took a hit at this point because I could not sit still. I was handed the microphone and sputtered out a diatribe, saying, among other things, that:

Learning professionals have been mouthing the same words about this stuff for the last quarter century, and it’s time for us to wake up and smell the coffee. All the data in the world is not going to do any good if the decision-maker doesn’t buy it. You have to start by getting the manager holding the purse strings to agree on what measures satisfy her that the training intervention has been effective. That’s it. You don’t need to measure everything that moves.

Measuring business impact is an inexact science. What the boss takes as proof is proof enough.

Patti told the audience that business decisions are micro. ROI is the answer. You build up the numbers and that’s your case. I think that if the world worked like that, CFOs could replace CEOs. It ain’t gonna happen. Bold executives are driven by intuition and qualitative factors, not arithmetic. Geez. No wonder learning professionals in most companies are not invited to the table with the senior execs.

Kent: Nobel laureate Gary Becker says just start measuring something. Put a stake in the ground.

Chris Hardy chimed in that DAU has hundreds of courses. They don’t do the micro number. He asked how you measure the performance of the learning organization. The Think Tank session didn’t address Chris’s issue. At heart, Chris was asking about scalability. The conversation in the room implied there was one best way to measure ROI. Obviously, Chris needs something more.

Making strategic decisions is fundamentally different from making operating decisions. Senior leadership uses gut feel, informed judgment, and vision to set direction. Managers at lower levels decide what projects to fund by describing the logic of how they will help carry out the strategy; this is where running the numbers is useful. ROI hurdles help identify the projects with the greatest potential return. They don’t address the big picture.

In a subsequent session, David Vance, former president of Caterpillar University, offered practical advice on metrics. Click the slides to make them legible; these are choice.

Jayne Johnson, director of Leader Development for GE at Crotonville, delivered the final keynote presentation. Someone asked how she measured the on-going effectiveness of Crotonville; she doesn’t. As for cost-justification in advance, no, GE believes in “launch and learn.” Experiment a lot, and keep what works.

This month’s CLO magazine has a wealth of viewpoints on measurement and ROI. Look at the excellent article Value Creation with Human Capital by Bellevue University’s Mike Echols. Read Norm’s Editor’s Letter for caution on spewing out too many metrics.

I may put together a round-up site for information on learning metrics. Here are video interviews with three of the wisest voices on this topic:

Kent Barnett, KnowledgeAdvisors


David Vance, former president, Caterpillar University

Greg Brisendine, Intrepid Learning Systems

Unfortunately, my interview with Mike Echols disappeared into the ether; do read his article; it’s worth your while.