ANDERS GRONSTEDTPresident, The Gronstedt Group Inc.Louisville, Colorado

Anders Gronstedt is an established management consultant and speaker whose global firm specializes in improving frontline performance through the use of customized simulations, podcasting, Second Life virtual experiences, and other innovative learning solutions. His global client list includes Dell, ADT, FedEx, and Volvo. A former faculty member of the graduate integrated marketing communications program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gronstedt authored The Customer Century: Lessons from World-Class Companies in Integrated Communications, which was selected by Soundview Executive Summaries as one of the top 30 business books of 2000. He hosts a weekly meeting on Second Life called “Train for

Success,” and will be a featured guest blogger on ASTD’s official blog. Visit T+D Online for more info.

Q|DO YOU HAVE ANY MEMORABLE ANECDOTES FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES WORKING WITH COMPANIES SUCH AS DELL, JAMBA

JUICE, ERICSSON, AND VOLVO?The Gronstedt Group was brought into Dell when the company was under siege from the blogo-sphere for poor customer service a few years ago. We got an amazing inside look at how the tech giant turned on a dime from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 company. In the words of Jeff Jarvis, the blog-ger who started the firestorm, Dell went from “worst to first.” Looking back at the online program we developed for all employees, it’s almost laughable how we introduced them to the basics of blogging, given how deeply the company has now integrated social media and customer and employee conversations into their culture and business processes.

Q| WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE CHANGE WITHIN THE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS?

Most training departments are the Detroit of business functions—creating products with little demand, to the detriment of the environment. Transporting instructors and students around the country to classroom sessions where learning is treated as a separate activity from work is as obsolete as the Model-T.

THE LONG VIEW //

And the drone-a-thon e-learning programs that are built using the death-by-PowerPoint ap-proach are a joke at most companies. Our industry will have to get out of the information delivery business and into the performance improvement business. This is hard for old-school learning professionals, who are steeped in courses and curricula, learning management systems, and Kirkpatrick models. They need to come down from the stage, and get out of their faculty cloaks to join the online conversations. We have a long way to go.

Q| DO YOU THINK COMPANIES TODAY ARE DOING ENOUGH TO ENGAGE THEIR GAME-SAVVY, SOCIALLY NETWORKED EMPLOYEES?

A handful of companies do. EMC cranks out five to 10 podcasts a week to their employees. At IBM, you can show up to a training session in Second Life as a fish. Jamba Juice has podcasts featuring “talking smoothies.” Ericsson executives make cameo appearances in our story-based video simu-lations. We just developed a spy-themed augmented reality game for TELUS. But a majority of companies are still run by insecure bureaucrats who keep employees seques-tered behind a Berlin Wall and provide e-learning programs that haven’t progressed much from the CBTs of the 1980s. The same people who banned email and Internet access in the 1990s are now banning Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life from the workplace. Learning professionals need to free themselves from these practices before all of their talent is out the door.

Q| HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN THE POWER AND REACH OF SECOND LIFE (AND OTHER SIMILAR INTERACTIVE ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS) TO A

SKEPTICAL CEO? I don’t waste my time with skeptical CEOs. Adoption of virtual worlds is a bottom-up revolution. It starts with the evangelists. They come to our weekly “Train for Success” meetings in Second Life. Then they send their colleagues [to the meetings]. Next, we help them pilot and test. Before we know it, we have an army of evangelists and a groundswell of support. At that point, it’s more a matter of pointing out to the CEO that there’s an angry mob headed to-ward the castle with pitchforks and torches and who appear to be a little restless. We demonstrate how virtual worlds address the CEO’s business needs. We present studies from peer-reviewed journals that prove virtual worlds to be equal or better than live meetings and classrooms. We always try to get the CEO into the world. Virtual worlds have to be experienced first-hand. We let them face the unique qualities of 3D virtual worlds for rich, immersive social experiences; authentic contexts for experiential learning; simulation and role-playing; modeling of complex scenarios; 3D data; and product visualization.

ANDERS GRONSTEDTPresident, The Gronstedt Group Inc.Louisville, Colorado

Anders Gronstedt is an established management consultant and speaker whose global firm specializes in improving frontline performance through the use of customized simulations, podcasting, Second Life virtual experiences, and other innovative learning solutions. His global client list includes Dell, ADT, FedEx, and Volvo. A former faculty member of the graduate integrated marketing communications program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gronstedt authored Companies in Integrated Communications,Soundview Executive Summaries as one of the top 30 business books of 2000. He hosts a weekly meeting on Second Life called “Train for

Success,” and will be a featured guest blogger on ASTD’s official blog. Visit T+D Online for more info.

Q|DO YOU HAVE ANY MEMORABLE ANECDOTES FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES WORKING WITH COMPANIES SUCH AS DELL, JAMBA

JUICE, ERICSSON, AND VOLVO?The Gronstedt Group was brought into Dell when the company was under siege from the blogo-sphere for poor customer service a few years ago. We got an amazing inside look at how the tech giant turned on a dime from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 company. In the words of Jeff Jarvis, the blog-ger who started the firestorm, Dell went from “worst to first.” Looking back at the online program we developed for all employees, it’s almost laughable how we introduced them to the basics of blogging, given how deeply the company has now integrated social media and customer and employee conversations into their culture and business processes.

Q|WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE CHANGE WITHIN THE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS?

Most training departments are the Detroit of business functions—creating products with little demand, to the detriment of the environment. Transporting instructors and students around the country to classroom sessions where learning is treated as a separate activity from work is as obsolete as the Model-T.

THE LONG VIEW //THE LONG VIEW //THE LONG VIEWTHE LONG VIEW //THE LONG VIEW //THE LONG VIEWTHE LONG VIEWTHE LONG VIEW

And the drone-a-thon e-learning programs that are built using the death-by-PowerPoint ap-proach are a joke at most companies. Our industry will have to get out of the information delivery business and into the performance improvement business. This is hard for old-school learning professionals, who are steeped in courses and curricula, learning management systems, and Kirkpatrick models. They need to come down from the stage, and get out of their faculty cloaks to join the online conversations. We have a long way to go.

Q|DO YOU THINK COMPANIES TODAY ARE DOING ENOUGH TO ENGAGE THEIR GAME-SAVVY, SOCIALLY NETWORKED EMPLOYEES?

A handful of companies do. EMC cranks out five to 10 podcasts a week to their employees. At IBM, you can show up to a training session in Second Life as a fish. Jamba Juice has podcasts featuring “talking smoothies.” Ericsson executives make cameo appearances in our story-based video simu-lations. We just developed a spy-themed augmented reality game for TELUS. But a majority of companies are still run by insecure bureaucrats who keep employees seques-tered behind a Berlin Wall and provide e-learning programs that haven’t progressed much from the CBTs of the 1980s. The same people who banned email and Internet access in the 1990s are now banning Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life from the workplace. Learning professionals need to free themselves from these practices before all of their talent is out the door.

Q|HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN THE POWER AND REACH OF SECOND LIFE (AND OTHER SIMILAR INTERACTIVE ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS) TO A

SKEPTICAL CEO? I don’t waste my time with skeptical CEOs. Adoption of virtual worlds is a bottom-up revolution. It starts with the evangelists. They come to our weekly “Train for Success” meetings in Second Life. Then they send their colleagues [to the meetings]. Next, we help them pilot and test. Before we know it, we have an army of evangelists and a groundswell of support. At that point, it’s more a matter of pointing out to the CEO that there’s an angry mob headed to-ward the castle with pitchforks and torches and who appear to be a little restless. We demonstrate how virtual worlds address the CEO’s business needs. We present studies from peer-reviewed journals that prove virtual worlds to be equal or better than live meetings and classrooms. We always try to get the CEO into the world. Virtual worlds have to be experienced first-hand. We let them face the unique qualities of 3D virtual worlds for rich, immersive social experiences; authentic contexts for experiential learning; simulation and role-playing; modeling of complex scenarios; 3D data; and product visualization.

Photo by David M

ejiasJU

LY 2009 | T+D | 75

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