Seth Godin wrote this week about how new technology affects our businesses. He suggests that instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt this new way of doing things to our own efforts, we rather ask “how will this technology undermine our efforts”. Undermine, in this context, is in the sense of a sinkhole appearing in the middle of the M1.
It struck a chord. A while ago I wrote about webinars hurting conference venues. Owners of venues and event organisers assured me that I was wrong. Yet, over the past five years, I have done more than 1000 hours of profitable live online training, but less than 50 hours of live seminars. It turns out that lot of other trainers are going down this path. And the more people who attend online, the more who start to use it for themselves.
I have a South African friend who trains techies. He used to fly around the world doing his training in situ. (Highly techie field.) After joining one of our webinars, he began to ask how many of his clients would prefer the online process, rather than paying for him to be there. That was 18 months ago. Last month he invoiced more than R1,000,000, training people around the world through webinars, without leaving home. (That means that none of that money was paid to venues, hotels, car hire companies, airlines, or printers – all of whom normally take a large chunk of that income.)
I contrast his results with the response I get each time I talk to a teacher about webinars. “Yes, but, what about the personal relationship.” And in that single statement they discard the future of teaching.
Frankly, I think that relationship means a lot more to the teacher than it does to the person sitting behind the desk. Who can recall an hour of Latin with Wesley Francis without a shudder? Classrooms are great for people who need to be forced to learn. But for those folk who have their own drive, they are hell.
Each of us who is inside an industry looks at it from inside our own box. Webinars won’t work for a group of four-year-old kids. But, they are an godsend for people under time pressure, or for deep training of smaller groups, or for impromptu groups. (Venues and impromptu are mutually exclusive concepts.) And these are the folk who make up a lot of the seminar market.
Let’s forget training for a moment. Let’s look at Google Translate. I use it because I am grappling with Norwegian. As do most of the others in my class. (Polish, Russian, Polish, French, Filipino, Polish, Iraqi, Thai, and Polish.). Google Translate does a fine job of quickly turning Norsk into English, or Russian or Polish. It is a fine tool.
When I am lost, which is very often, I type in the entire text of the letter that’s arrived with a large official stamp, or the website I am looking at, or the newspaper I am reading. Google Translate gives me fine rendition in English. Not perfect, but close enough.
When I speak to a Norwegian about the subject (and more recently a German Ph.D.) she bursts out laughing about how bad Google Translate is. And then she regales me with a tale about how some or other local idiom gets translated literally rather than rendering its true meaning.. (“He laughed his lungs out” being the German example, which means “he stubbed his toe”, I think)
In getting lost in that one tiny error, she discards a tool that the rest of us idiots use daily. And the world has no shortage of us idiots creatively playing with our tools as we dream of world conquest.
Which gets me to thinking. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at what our competitors are doing. They aren’t doing anything that we are not, other than maybe doing it better.
Maybe we should be looking at what complete strangers are doing because they are not locked in by our history. They are taking a complete new look at what we do, and seeing it for what it is: Quaint in an olde worlde way, and ripe for change.