Fredrickson Communications eZine - July 2009

by Site Admin,

In this edition of the Fredrickson eZine . . .

Adjusting to The Big Shift

by John Wooden
Director of Usability Services
Fredrickson Communications

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, all leaders of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, recently published a provocative study called “The Big Shift: Measuring the Forces of Deep Change.” Once I read it, I wanted everyone attending Fredrickson’s July 16 Learning Leadership Summit to read it in preparation. This is an authoritative, data-driven argument to stop managing for a 20th Century environment when we are living in the 21st.

The authors published a summary version of the report in the July-August edition of the Harvard Business Review. An even shorter summary is available in the authors’ blog on Harvard Business.org. The report presents some unsettling findings:

• The Return on Assets (ROA) for US firms has steadily fallen to almost one-quarter of 1965 levels. (ROA measures the return a company generates from its total assets.)

• The ROA performance gap between winners and losers has increased over time, with the winners barely maintaining previous performance levels while the losers experience rapid deterioration in performance.

• The “topple rate” at which big companies lose their leadership positions has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions.

• US competitive intensity has more than doubled in the last 40 years.

• While the performance of US firms is deteriorating as measured by ROA, the benefits of productivity improvements appear to be captured in part by creative talent, which is experiencing greater growth in total compensation. Customers also appear to be gaining and using power as reflected in increasing customer disloyalty. Read more . . .

Usability and User-Centered Design at 3M: An Interview with Kathryn Bohlke

by John Wooden
Director of Usability Services
Fredrickson Communications

Kathryn Bohlke is Manager of 3M IT’s User Information and Usability (UIU) Group. In this role, she has been instrumental in building a usability practice area, creating a comprehensive body of user interface design standards, and ensuring that applications and internal web sites at 3M are subjected to thorough UI design reviews. Kathy is also a Certified Usability Analyst through HFI and a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Management of Technology Masters program.

John Wooden, Director of Usability Services at Fredrickson Communications, spoke with Kathy about building and managing the UIU Group at 3M. Read more . . .

Learning Leadership Summit 2009 – recap and looking ahead

by J. Hruby
Marketing Director
Fredrickson Communications

Fredrickson Communications held the third-annual Learning Leadership Summit on July 16 at Travelers in St. Paul. We founded this event to provide a gathering specifically for the leaders of corporate learning organization throughout the Midwest.

This year we had a terrific turnout with more than 70 learning leaders from companies all over the Twin Cities in attendance. The theme of this year’s Summit was “Danger! Economic recovery ahead,” and our discussion centered on the role of the learning organization in the coming economic recovery. It’s impossible to capture all of the thoughtful and interesting discussion points that came from this event, but I’ll summarize a few points that I thought were especially interesting. Read more . . .