Recent Developmentsback to top

Recent developments at WisdomTools include:

• Marty Siegel, our Founder and Chairman, was selected by Cisco Systems to co-author a book on e-learning effectiveness with Tom Kelly, Cisco's Vice President of Worldwide Education. The book, to be released this Fall, will lay out for business managers the successful and not-so-successful strategies and tactics for getting results from e-learning initiatives. Marty and Tom are currently finalizing the outline and the writing has begun!


• We successfully recruited two top people in the learning industry to our management team (see more detail in the "Greatest Victory" section).


• In November, we completed the first phase of our internal client service training. We believe that one of our key differentiators as a provider of e-learning solutions lies in our ability to delight clients. In order to continue to build this proprietary capability, we developed and deployed (to our entire company) a "Customer Service Scenario." We used a "blended" approach that began and ended with a half-day of classroom-based training wrapped around a month-long, three episode Scenario. The results are fantastic. Our associates are already using the tactics for delighting clients in their daily correspondence and approach with both internal and external clients. Because the Scenario captured our dialogues around service and retained all of the results of surveys, quizzes, etc., we will use it to continue to refresh our knowledge of how to delight clients throughout 2001.

Our Biggest Challengeback to top

The biggest challenge facing WisdomTools as we move into 2001 is a great deal of confusion in the marketplace about e-learning in general. At a recent industry conference, Elliott Masie's "TechLearn", it became clear among the 3,200 clients and vendors in attendance that there exists a sizable knowledge gap in the market for e-learning.

Potential e-learning clients (large corporations) are having a very difficult time sifting through the avalanche of propaganda from e-learning vendors. The criticism heard most often from buyers of learning and training is that all of the vendors sound exactly the same. Thus, it is difficult for clients to understand what they are getting for their money.

Combine this vendor-created confusion with the following factors...

• Lack of client experience in purchasing and implementing actual e-learning solutions


• No standardized pricing models that facilitate comparison shopping


• Very few actual e-learning success stories and thus little knowledge of what it takes to deploy a successful solution- and how to measure its impact and results


• No centralized purchasing of this type of learning

...and you have a major challenge for both clients and providers of e-learning solutions.

Fortunately for all of us, visionaries like Elliott Masie and our own Marty Siegel have begun to put forward some frameworks around the "e-learning" decision process. With Marty's forthcoming book and the great resources available at the Masie Center, our clients can begin to make better-informed decisions about their learning initiatives. Kevin Kelley, founding editor of Wired magazine, sums up the state of our industry... "Out on the edge of opportunity, there is high friction, high confusion, and high profit."

Our tactical approach for addressing this confusion in the marketplace is simple: (1) delight our clients by delivering real learning cost effectively as we promise, and (2) let our clients become our most effective sales people.

Our Greatest Victoryback to top

In 1997, McKinsey & Co. published a landmark study they called the War for Talent. The study focused on the strategies that great companies use in recruiting great people. Since 1997, Fast Company magazine, among many others, has often highlighted the study and pointed out that the ability to recruit the best industry talent is critical to a company's success.

As we close year 2000 and begin 2001, our team has two new leaders. Lisa Schumacher, our new Vice President of Sales and Marketing joined our team late last year from the Forum Corporation. Lisa brings a tremendous amount of e-learning experience to the table. At the Forum Corporation, Lisa was one of the first strategists to understand the impact of e-learning for Forum's clients. She repeatedly and successfully implemented large e-learning solutions for her Fortune 100 clients - some of the first successful global e-learning implementations in the industry. As the leader of our sales and marketing efforts, Lisa will lead our sales team as well as the current branding and corporate positioning work. Her well-rounded skills and deep knowledge of this industry are a huge win for WisdomTools.

Another huge win for our company is the addition of our new Executive Vice President of Business Development (to be announced in two weeks - due to the very recent nature of this addition and the timing of this report, WisdomTools will be issuing a press release announcing his arrival). Our new EVP has a long track record of success in the e-learning industry. In 1993, he founded one of the first e-learning companies. He and his team grew the company very successfully and last year, sold the company to a larger firm for a significant premium. At WisdomTools, he will lead our strategic partnership efforts and assist in sales, recruiting and product development.

With these two senior resources in place, WisdomTools is well positioned to deliver outstanding results and delighted clients in 2001.

Associate Profile: Michael Shermisback to top

Michael Shermis is hard to describe. Imagine a combination of the following: an air-traffic controller at Chicago's O'Hare airport; a Starbuck's barrista in the Sears Tower at 8am on Monday morning; and a carpenter ant. This may explain some of Michael's nicknames: Mr. NRG (energy) and Mr. Busy. And we can't forget... "Customer Shermis."

As a "Producer" at WisdomTools, Michael is a go-to guy for our clients. He coordinates the development of each client TRS and ensures a successful launch. Michael works extremely hard in this challenging role, helping to build our implementation processes and guide clients through the development cycle. As the whole industry gains experience (as I mentioned before), Michael's role becomes the critical one for ensuring that the solutions are received by the learners and that they get results for the client.

This is no small task. By necessity, Michael must lead multiple projects, manage information flows from client Subject Matter Experts (SME's), educate clients and coordinate internal functions... all within a tight timeline.

Michael is highly regarded by his teammates for his in-depth knowledge and ability to deliver. He is also highly regarded by the community for his volunteer leadership of countless projects and organizations.

A Lesson Learnedback to top

An important lesson that we learned in 2000, from both our own clients and our analyses of other e-learning solutions is that implementation is the key to success. We believe the reason for the slow-to-develop realization of the benefits of e-learning has everything to do with how implementation is dealt with in the partnership process. Implementation of training used to involve booking classrooms and making sure that binders were in place. Due to the lack of e-learning experience, we tend to focus on what Elliott Masie calls "installation" versus "realization."

It has been our experience with classroom-based training that the critical success factor in realizing the benefits from learning is people. This is not as obvious as it sounds. When was the last time you heard the leader of a business unit say to his or her associates:

"You will be going through a very important learning experience. It is my expectation that as you progress through it, you will pick up several key insights into the following business challenges...

"When you have completed the learning, I would like to sit down with each of you and discuss your insights, your plans for the application of what you have learned and the potential impact you see on our bottom line."

This type of direction and support of learning is rare indeed. But, this is what implementation is ultimately about. When it comes to e-learning, the early mistakes being made in implementation are due to the focus being put on technology considerations and not "people" considerations. Certainly, a strong e-learning partnership must address, up front and continuously, the technology challenges. However, we must not leave behind the valuable lessons from the bricks and mortar world of learning and acknowledge that senior sponsorship, direction and follow-through are as important today as ever.

A Comment on E-Learningback to top

In a recently published book called Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, authors Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster describe the classic "information" trade-off between richness and reach. They submit that until the networked Internet, all information distributed could either reach a very broad audience (e.g. TV advertising) or it could be very rich in detail (e.g. a sales presentation written specifically for one client) but it could not be both.

This richness and reach trade-off is very relevant to the direction our industry is moving. In the last couple of years, as providers of learning have rushed to take advantage of the power of the web, it is our belief that "reach" has been the ultimate destination for many of the solutions. Examples abound: corporations converting training binders into Powerpoint slides and distributing them via the web, or more recently, Northwestern University installing fast Internet connections in dorms in order to deliver videotaped lectures into students' rooms. Even the vast majority of knowledge management efforts to date have been hampered by this trade-off by becoming information repositories instead of sources of learning.

This development is not necessarily "bad," it is simply a natural progression from classroom-based training. However, we do believe that it is time for our industry to develop a new way to think about learning and begin to put to the test new methodologies.

Our clients are concerned about pockets of knowledge, experience or even wisdom that is trapped within their organizations. They need a way to get at that knowledge and draw it out in such a way that enables others to understand and apply it. We think the answer lies in a learning methodology and approach that leverages storytelling, blended learning and action and reflection, a methodology that turns the focus of e-learning to richness. We also believe that the other half of the battle, successful implementation, must be acknowledged as an integral part of the solution and not as something that comes later. It is our experience that if these two parts are addressed together, our industry will finally have the ability to measure the business impact of learning.

Craig Wortmann
President & CEO
WisdomTools, Inc.
December 31, 2000

© 1999-2008 WisdomTools, Inc.

An important lesson that we learned in 2000, from both our own clients and our analyses of other e-learning solutions is that implementation is the key to success.