Today, in our Friday Filosophy #2016-1 I want to focus first on learning. We are undergoing a complete makeover, a radical one, in our learning business. We are converting everything to internet based learning.
We are creating programs we call Learning: On Demand which will cover 60 plus internet based self-study programs on specific subjects. These programs will replace our live webinars.
We are also in the process of developing the Virtual Classroom programs. These programs will replace the actual classroom seminars we have been conducting for the past twenty years. 2016 will be the last year we offer the live classroom as a learning format. The Virtual Classroom will offer 14 plus specific learning products. They will all have CEU available.
Let me start then with some quotes on Education and Learning.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King
Education is wasted on the young.
Albert Schweitzer
The tools of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
David J Boorstin
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J D’Angelo
And now for our Friday Filosophy.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.
Indira Gandhi.
The time is now
Friday Filosophy #2016-1
Today, in our Friday Filosophy #2016-1 I want to focus first on learning. We are undergoing a complete makeover, a radical one, in our learning business. We are converting everything to internet based learning.
We are creating programs we call Learning: On Demand which will cover 60 plus internet based self-study programs on specific subjects. These programs will replace our live webinars.
We are also in the process of developing the Virtual Classroom programs. These programs will replace the actual classroom seminars we have been conducting for the past twenty years. 2016 will be the last year we offer the live classroom as a learning format. The Virtual Classroom will offer 14 plus specific learning products. They will all have CEU available.
Let me start then with some quotes on Education and Learning.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King
Education is wasted on the young.
Albert Schweitzer
The tools of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
David J Boorstin
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J D’Angelo
And now for our Friday Filosophy.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.
Indira Gandhi.
The time is now
Friday Filosophy #2015-39
I’d like to begin our Friday Filosophy #2015-29 by wishing each and every one of you a wonderful Thanksgiving Day. I grew up in Canada and Thanksgiving is October, close to Columbus Day, and that is also close to my birthday, I love pumpkin pie. So have some cider, or whatever your choice of beverage, enjoy turkey and the complete meal. Most important of all please enjoy your families. Cheers!
Our rural ancestors, with little blest,
Patient of labour when the end was rest,
Indulged the day that housed their annual grain,
With feasts, and off’rings, and a thankful strain.
Alexander Pope
What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Erma Bombeck
Thanksgiving, after all is a word of action.
J. Cameron
Thanksgiving was never meant to be shut up in a single day.
Robert Caspar Lintner
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not a coincidence.
Erma Bombeck
An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day
Irv Kupcinet
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-38
Tomorrow is a very special day. My daughter is getting married. Friday Filosophy #2015-38 offers some quotations about marriage. Have a great day, sweetheart.
It is not a lack of love, bit a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup with drink but drink not from one cup. Give one another your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone. Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Khalin Gibran
Every good relationship, especially marriage, is based on respect. If it’s not based on respect nothing that appears to be good will last very long.
Amy Grant
I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
Ellen Key
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-37
These may be weekend philosophies at times. For Friday Filosophy #2015-37 we have chosen to focus upon the season with our quotes today.
Now that we are completely in the Autumn season and the clocks have all moved back let’s reflect on the season.
Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
Delicious Autumn. My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot
My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.
Robert Frost
Autumn arrives early in the morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster to the sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as it could not be, as if it had not been.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.
B. C. Forbes
The time is now.
Marketing Monday v2015.1
We haven’t done one of these in a long time. For Marketing Monday v2015.1 we are catching up.
With the flurry of activity this past year it has been a little difficult to get ahead of the curve. Some of the recent activities:
We have launched learning Without Scars. This has been a very nice step in the progression of our offering learning products and services to the capital goods industries. We have updated all of our classroom seminars: there are eight. We have added to our list of webinars: there are now sixty one. We have started down the road of converting all learning products to a web based platform: we will have seventy five of them. We are moving toward the translations of our offerings first into French and Spanish.
We have developed an internet based replacement for the twenty group business we ran called insight (M&R) Institute. We have created, in a partnership, The Capital Goods Sages. This is going to be an internet business modelling business. This will be available for use in late 2015.
And finally, we have re-purposed our consulting website to bring it in line with our other businesses.
Have a look and let us know your thoughts. We are here to serve you.
www.rjslee.com
www.learningwithoutscars.org
www.thecapitalgoodssages.com
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-36
For our late Friday Filosophy #2015-36 we present some serious comments about life from some pretty incredible people. Enjoy!
Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Marcus Aurelius
Do not dwell on the past, do not dream about the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.
Arthur Rubenstein
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-35
For our Friday Filosophy #2015-35 I want to give you all a quick peek at what we do in our classrooms. In nearly every one of our learning classes I ask for definitions of three words: ignorance, stupidity and insanity.
There is a lot of hemming and hawing but ultimately we get to the end.
Ignorance is not knowing what to do.
Stupidity is know what to do and not doing it.
Insanity is continuing to do what you have always done expecting different results.
Pretty straightforward, I think.
How can we know what to do if we don’t read? So today rather than put out quotations to stimulate your thinking I am going to give you some authors that you should be reading.
Patrick Lencioni. This man has been extremely busy with ten or so books to his name. All of them are great reads and very insightful. Try “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job” and “The Five Dysfunctions of team.”
The second author is Clayton Christenden. Two books come to mind with this author; “How Will You Measure Your Life” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”
Finally are three individual books; Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World and finally Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think.
Fall is a wonderful season for reading. I hope you take some time and get these books and continue with your personal development.
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-34
Since I believe in the power of education, professionally and developmentally, Friday Filosophy #2015-34 focuses on the topic of education. The quotes at the close are my own: what I like to call “Sleeisms.”
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.
George Washington Carver
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle
The only person who is educated is the one who has learning how to learn and change.
Carl Rogers
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for lifetime.
Maimonides
Education is wasted on the young.
Albert Schweitzer
Too many people think that their learning has ended when they leave school. That is in fact when their learning begins.
RJS
It is rather strange that education has become like the rest of society. The more money you have, the better the schools to which you can send your children.
RJS
Why do we constantly settle in life? We settle in our living conditions, we settle in our jobs, we settle in almost every aspect of our lives. Why don’t we take a different approach? Let’s strive more and settle less.
RJS
One of the many observations I have made over my years is that the more people know about a particular subject, the more open they are to learning even more. On the opposite side, the less people know about a particular subject the more stubborn they become that their opinions are right.
RJS
The time is now.
Friday Filosophy #2015-33
We continue with a theme of leadership this week in our Friday Filosophy #2015-33.
A good leader can’t get too far ahead of his followers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
Lucretius
He who conquers others is strong. He who conquers himself is mighty.
Lao Tzu
The time is now.
Management Musings 2.7 (Reprised) #MondayBlogs
We are in the process of updating the business page for our consulting, and I wanted to give you a reminder. What follows is our statement of where we are as a group and where we are going. I am as excited now, and as motivated today, as I have been at any previous time in my forty five years working in the Industry. I am truly blessed.
Our consulting business is winding down. I am not aggressively soliciting business like I once did, but will be dealing with requests on a one to one basis. As long as there is interest in my skills and experience I will be more than happy to assist. Our website, rjslee.com, is still live and active, with ongoing updates to our articles and our recommended reading. With our reading lists, you can find selections from Business Teachers, or Business Management Tools, and many more. I like to direct avid learners to that resource, as it can provide foundational texts to motivate you in pursuing your goals.
The Learning business is becoming a much more prominent focus for my time. We are excited about our new venture, Learning Without Scars, and using all the current technology to bring our learning products to the market worldwide. We will be offering ten classroom seminars, forty webinars and ten internet based self-study programs in fifteen different languages. We will be moving to having a YouTube channel and developing a series of streamed products for use by everyone in fifteen languages as well. All of this is being done with a new web page as well. We are working with a terrific partner on this project. Brian Shanahan of “shanahandesign” is the gentleman we have selected to do this work. I am extremely pleased to have found Brian as he does wonderful work. Thank you, Brian.
Our Company Insight (M&R) Institute which has been the platform for the traditional Twenty Group business is being replaced with a new and improved technology driven product. I suspect this new model will become the new standard for twenty group operations in the coming years. This new product is being developed in conjunction with Foresight Intelligence. Dale Hanna, the CEO of Foresight Intelligence, and I are putting the finishing touches on what we believe will produce strong value to dealers in assisting them to be all that they can be. The new product offering will be complimentary and confidential. The dealer will be able to sign on to a model and either identify who they are on not, their choice, enter their information into a “FITNESS” model and receive a “FIRST” results response on key management measures for each of the five major departments within a dealer. The FIRST will show each management measure and a traffic light type graphic with a color code to recognize their performance as out Insight standards. These standards have been developed in our consulting business over the past forty five years in working with well over 1,000 different dealers around the world. The dealer then can go and make the necessary changes in their business without anything further. If however, they want assistance with the click of a button they will be directed to the “FAIR” page will is a series of “TIPS.” Each TIP leads to an implementation process. Each one of the TIPS is a tried and true example of the consulting work I have been doing for the past thirty five years. If the dealer wants further assistance we have developed a network of “ACES.” Each ACE is a retired senior executive from a dealership who still has the interest and energy to continue working in the Industry just not on a full time basis. Dale and I are very excited about this new offering, which we are presenting as the Capital Goods Sages.
I hope that you will find this news as exciting as I do in providing you with it and look forward to continuing to be a part of your team in Product Support.
The time is now