Carlos -
I attended ASTD, delivering a presentation on Working Home, Selling
Globally. It was my 9th consecutive time of presenting. So, I've been to
these for many years.
An obvious shift is toward technology. There is much happening in various
distributed learning areas and it seems a lot of vendors are focusing
their energies in that area.
Presentations were good, overall. But I think that the facility made if
difficult. All time record crowds made many of the rooms much too jammed.
I do not know if you are aware of it but ASTD chose to change any room set
with round tables into classroom style to accomodate more people. This
threw a real problem at presenters prepared to do team discussions and
small group / tabletop work.
Best presentation? Don't know. I generally go to things that are either
very different or to see old friends present - standby's like Bob Pike,
Doug Malouf and the like.
Issues of TQM are fading, as is reengineering. That is not to say that
these ideas will disappear, but that the labels are becoming less
attractive.
Change continues to be an issue. Personal Growth is always an interesting
topic for people. Teamwork continued to be a strong focus of many
sessions.
I think that Productivity will be one of the next waves -- the focus on
performance consulting is driving people toward better tools for training
and managing and this would be the logical focus - quality is not exciting
people and most organizations are totally unprepared to engage in anything
really empowering.
Hope that is a bit helpful,
-- For the FUN of It!Scott Simmerman Performance Management Company 3 Old Oak Drive, Taylors, SC 29687 (USA) 864-292-8700 fax 292-6222 SquareWheels@compuserve.com
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--Scott Simmerman <SquareWheels@compuserve.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>