Interview with Thomas McDunn…
What is experiential training?
I’m glad you asked that, I get that question a lot. Experiential training is focused on learning by practicing concepts during the sessions. The exercises are set up such that the student practices the subject while still in the classroom. For the un-motivated student, it is hard to get through class, much less take something away from class and practice anything they got out of class. For adult learners especially, we are looking for life-long learning. We don’t want to spend a lot of time on things that will not be effective for us. Especially in today’s fast paced and “lean” world, we do not want to spend time on things that do not move us forward or that are progressive. I remember when I went to school they talked about practiced learning in Psychology, the idea that if you nibble at a topic and make it a habit you can have very effective learning. In today’s fast paced environment, experiential training is a way to make a WIN-WIN for your organization and the student. Making experiences in the classroom where the students are practicing before they ever leave, gets the ideas gelled. Experiential training also breaks up the traditional blah-blah of the lecturer and gets students to interact and participate making the whole experience lively and exciting. There is a plethora of information about experiential learning and training on the web, one place to start is the Association for Experiential Education, http://www.aee.org/.
Who are your typical clients?
Well, typical would be unfair. Each of my clients is unique and has unique issues and situations where I help them. If I had to generalize, each one needs help or assistance in their business. I help them get things done they do not have the energy or time to do themselves. For the small business owner, there are a thousand things on their to-do list but each one knows there are a few critical items necessary for their next big step in growth or success. When they review their list of things to do and where they have spent their time they realize they didn’t get around to those important tasks. They are pained by how the day got frittered away without getting to those important things. I help them, or assist them, in getting a few of the important things off the list that the day-to-day activities seem to overshadow. You have heard of the Virtual Assistant or VA, well I am a BA or Business Assistant. I even think a better word for the ‘A’ is Accelerator. I work on projects that my client never seems to have time for but get them accomplished to get their business to a new plateau. In this sense I help them accelerate the business to a new state of success. If they didn’t have me to help them, they would not get that jump start that takes them to the new level. Their important issues or ventures would never get off the bottom of the list. In some cases it can be deeply technical where the owner does not have the prowess or aptitude or time to tackle some design issues. In other cases, the client is just looking to get their marketing message crystal clear as they venture into a new aspect of their services or just trying to have a clearer message for their clients. In some cases, the client is an entrepreneur or inventor who is looking to get their investor pitch honed. I’ve had a chance to sit through dozens of investor pitches and I find that there is such a gap of misunderstanding generally between the idea person and the investor. I have a fool-proof seven step outline for inventors or entrepreneurs to follow that is included in my blog at www.tpmtech.wordpress.com.
What’s lept Like a Blog?
At the moment I cannot remember how that name came to me. I was attending a number of business network meetings in Rockford and I wondered what I could do that would be unique and help most of the people there. I was thinking that if you did it right, you could use social media as your surrogate salesman while you slept. Sleeping… slept like a log, hmmm… “lept like a blog”. Something like that. then stumbled into the WordPress engine and was quite taken by how it eliminates the drudgery of website management. From there I put together a simplified map of the most popular social media sites and developed a package to help people use social media as part of their marketing campaign. My business experience helped to get beyond just the cocktail party aspects of social media and “plan” on how to use it to help clients get to know, like, and trust my client’s business or staff. I put together a booklet that leads the development of the framework where most actions are automatic once it is set up. I set up the lept Like A Blog site as a reference for clients as new items come about.
What kind of things have you put on the lept Like A Blog site?
I started with a page dedicated to the main social media tools, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I have recently added a questions section for Chief Blogger to answer questions. Also, we added a video tutorial section where you can see how to insert a picture into a blog post or set up your Twitter icon. We found the little video snippets of the computer screen to be an effective way show people the little procedures of this type.
Speaking of video, what about YouTube?
When I started mapping out the Social Media Marketing Framework (SMMF), I could see there was YouTube on the horizon. After a number of people had been through the SMMF class they were saying, “What’s next?” And the You TuBee was born. I have a class similar in format to SMMF where we set up a YouTube channel and shoot and upload videos of various types. Right now in 60 days there is more video uploaded to YouTube than all 3 major networks produced in 60 years! That still blows my mind. We know that video represents about 51% of internet usage. There are 2 billion views per day on YouTube. That translates to a video watched everyday for every person that’s on the internet.
How do you decide what to blog about on this site?
I started this site after seeing an episode of “Shark Tank”. I was disappointed how the inventors seemed so naive about what they were presenting to the sharks. But, I chalked it up tho the dramatic effect for TV. I mapped out a month by month matrix of blog posts to highlight my advice and experiences with helping inventors with presentations to investors. What happens is every once in a while a technological or entrepreneurial item catches my eye and I post something about that too. I try to leave this WordPress blog for posting about the Shark presentations. I have other blogs for my other interests.
Can you tell us about a book you have read recently?
Sure. My wife Holly gave me a copy of “The Richest Man in Town” for Father’s Day. I read it cover to cover that day. It was a quick read, even for me. It struck a resonant chord with me as my mantra in the corporate world was “Customer Satisfaction.” I found in my professional life that it is easy to forget that customers drive your business. So you need to constantly be thinking about how serving customers makes for a fulfilling business. If you focus on customers then a lot of things that consume your day find their relative importance.
In this book, V.J. Smith recounts the tale of his chance meeting of Marty, a checkout person at the local Wal-Mart. Marty was very slow and deliberate with greeting his customers. Mr. Smith was intrigued by this. As he watched the people ahead of him receive a final handshake and “Thanks” for business from Marty, he started to realize this was no ordinary checkout person. Every return visit to Wal-Mart he sought Marty’s line. In fact, he wasn’t alone. Marty’s line was always the longest and attempts from other cashiers to shorten the line were ignored. Oddly enough, Marty’s items per day was the highest even though he was the slowest. After witnessing a noteworthy incident, Mr. Smith wrote a letter to the Wal-Mart president about Marty’s performance. Marty received a commendation from the powers that be and wondered who this Smith guy was. Eventually they met and Mr. Smith spent more quality time interviewing Marty on his secrets of people relations. Marty went on to receive further accolades and Mr. Smith added the story of Marty to his speaking engagements. I’ll leave the rest for you to read.
Do you have a favorite book?
Yes, well, I have lots of favorites but two come to mind, especially related to the industries I’ve been involved with. The first is “The Mythical Man Month” by Frederick Brooks. But let me tell you about “The Machine that Changed the World” by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. This book is a short version of MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program. In that study the term ‘lean’ was coined. Today the term is commonplace and many a manufacturer knows all too well how it affects their business. It was in the early 1980’s I found this book and I couldn’t put it down. It characterized what I knew only too well as a major equipment supplier in the automotive industry. My copy of this book is unique in that it has numerous notations in the margins and dog-eared post-it notes protruding from every edge. I put together a little presentation for our New Engineer Orientation on the Origins of Lean Manufacturing highlighting snippets from this book. I liked particularly the recognition of interchangeability as the key to mass production and not just the moving assembly line alone. At the beginning of Ford’s Model T production the average worker’s task cycle (meaning how long from doing Task A on car N to doing Task A on car N+1) was 514 minutes or 8.56 hours. With interchangeable parts this was reduced to 2.3 minutes, a phenomenal stride in productivity. By adding the moving line this was again halved to 1.19 minutes, reducing the time for the worker to walk and get the parts. When I worked in the machine tool industry, it was apparent that the need for interchangeability was made possible by ever increasingly precise machines. But the precision of producing parts within a “Tolerance” brought about the modern age of production and inspection.
Why do they call them Jo-blocks? A personal connection to this notion that I added (not in the book) was that of standardized measurement. Henry Ford wanted to make sure that when the holes in the front fender lined up a certain way at the River Rouge facility in Detroit, they lined up the same way for his copies of the factories in Dagenham, England, and Koln, Germany. At the time there was not a strong connection between tolerance and measuring techniques that is commonplace today. Once I had a measurement how could I make sure it was right to a standard? Henry Ford solved this problem by commissioning the Johansson company to make a set of gage blocks to use as the standard. These blocks were so finely ground that when pressed together (officially called ‘wringing’ ) they would cling together. The ‘Jo-block’ eventually become the common denominator for checking precision measurements. And that’s where the name comes from.
So, what about the “Mythical Man-Month?”
Huh, I got so wrapped up in the machine that changed the world. Hee-hee. The Mythical Man-month was a book written by Frederick Brooks and his experiences as a project leader on the IBM 360 project. He details all the extreme elements of new technology, clear specifications, 80/20 or Pareto principles, and project deadlines. He hypothesizes various project team configurations to realize the best result: on-time and within budget and it works! The mythical man-month notion comes from the idea that a task that is supposed to take 10 man-months for a single person to complete cannot be finished in 5 months with two people or 2 months with 5 people. Especially in software. His notions struck a chord with me in my early experiences in relatively large programming projects. He theorizes how the increased interaction of team participants increases the effort and hence a man-month does not have commutable properties. He published the first book in the late 70’s. He came back 20 years later and republished it with a few new chapters and addressed the changes in technology that he foresaw or did not foresee. Very fascinating. I have both copies.
Do you have any other favorite books?
One of my other favorites is “The Double Helix.” I was studying The History of Science in the 20th Century in College. This was one of the required readings. I particularly like it as it was a relatively thin book. Watson’s cavalier style made it easy for me to read. This was a story of Watson and Crick on their journey to crack what makes DNA tick. Years later I had a chance to visit Oxford University. Walking around the soupy mist I had a sense of what the atmosphere was like for Watson and Crick. For some reason the story always made a connection for me. 50 years later Watson made an update to DNA science in his book “DNA.” That was a natural follow-up for me too. In this book I learned of the Human Genome Project (HGP) sponsored by the US Government. Recently, I read “The $1,000 Genome” where the story is told of Watson receiving his genome on a computer at a cost of about $1 million. It is publicly available and the data is so vast it needs its own browser. Probably a training manual too as it is a bit cryptic just to fly around. It makes me wonder what visual tools will start to play out as we try to make sense out of all this information and the genes intertwining impact on health.
I see you posted about L.L.Bean – what was that about?
It was time to have books as our blog post topic. As I was thinking about the impact that social media has on the marketing business, I recalled the book “In search of L.L.Bean.” Armed with perennial studies of Harvard Business College, the author was able to track the thoughts and growth of the management of the organization as they went from so-so outfitter to preppy mail order catalog. The biggest surprise to them was their ads in Boy’s Life and Field & Stream didn’t yield much sales. They finally learned that women do the shopping and the whole makeup of the catalog changed.