October 2006
How Soon We Forget
-- by Tom Nies
Xerox is widely considered to be an excellent “Learning Organization.” Not only does this firm consistently recruit top-notch staff, but Xerox also invests heavily in education, learning and training activities. As one measure of just how thorough are their efforts, Xerox tracks the amount of education and training that has been retained 30 days from a specific learning session. According to a person who was closely involved in these testing measurements, Xerox found that 82% of everything taught had apparently been forgotten after 30 days.
“How can this be?” you might ask. According to experts, such conditions develop for many reasons.
First, it is the nature of our conscious mind to seek to focus its interest as narrowly as possible. To do so, we must “off-load” other areas of interest which would distract from the specificity demanded for top attention.
Second, our human nature, as well as our conscious and subconscious, is organized hierarchically. Since our conscious mind constantly receives so much information, it could not function if all objects were kept at equally high priority. In order for us to optimally focus, our conscious mind constantly organizes and prioritizes the information received. Some information remains in our conscious mind, while other information is stored in the subconscious, retrieved when needed by “triggers.” This is why note-taking is such an important endeavor. Without such notes, we would have to rely on random triggers to summon up needed information from or subconscious.
Third, we tend to be creatures of habit. If we repeat something enough, we will not only remember it, it will become part of our makeup. Therefore, for any behavior to be habituated, the execution of it must be repeated over and over again. That’s why learning must be solidified by frequent drill and repetitious exercise. Failing to do so causes us to be com stale or “out of practice,” and hence subject to error or forgetfulness.
For those who may have a desire to consider these topics a bit further, I suggest the following resources:
The Act of Creation, by Alfred Koestler
Take Back Your Life, by Sally McGhee (specifically Chapter Five, “Clearing the Mind”)
Posted by TomNies on October 17, 2006 at 11:12 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink
The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006
Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke! Just like with a teenager's use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don't communicate very well, you know?
Many of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.
AN ANALYSIS OF GOBBLEDYGOOK
First, I selected words and phrases that are overused in news releases by polling select PR people and journalists to get a list of gobbledygook phrases. Then I turned to Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, for help with my analysis. The folks at the Factiva Reputation Lab used text mining tools to analyze news releases sent by companies in North America. Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes for the period from January 1, 2006, to September 30, 2006. The news release wires included in the analysis were Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and Primezone Media Network.
The results were staggering. The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period, and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was "next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard," "turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don't forget "interoperable," "best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.
Read the rest of The Gobbledygook Manifesto here.
Posted by David Meerman Scott on October 13, 2006 at 09:49 AM in Business Growth, Customer Dialogue | Permalink
