Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Notice, please, that I use the term actionable service education, not customer service training. What is the difference between education and training? Talk to your partner please. Go. Excellent, excellent. So you train someone what to do in a certain way, in a certain situation, when it’s really important that they do it right. But you teach someone how to think so they can figure out what to do in a new situation that they have never seen before, which is why your project management education is so important for you to learn fundamental principles so you can look forward into the future and use them to help your organizations grow. Not just look back at where we had a problem, and let’s use project management to solve that problem.

You want your children to be educated because they’re going to see situations that you and I cannot even imagine, and we want them to be able to go, “Hm. Let me think about this and apply some fundamental principles.” Now, I’m not saying that training doesn’t count and it’s not important. In certain situations, you need it. My wife and I have got a former US marine who’s a close friend who’s been in combat. He said, “I tell you, when the bullets are flying, you stop thinking. But your body knows what to do. Because I went to boot camp.” And that’s why they go to boot camp. When this guy takes off, I really don’t want him to do creative thinking. I want him to know exactly what to do, especially if something goes wrong. And thank goodness these people are well trained. And that’s why no one died, right? Because the moment the geese hit the engines and knocked out power on both sides, immediately the pilot and the copilot went to the checklist. They knew what to do. They’ve been well trained. If this guy ever goes in, please don’t think out of the box.

But. But if you’re in a business where we need people to actually come up with new ideas, where we’re counting on our colleagues and our company’s counting on you to find a better way to do something that we’ve done it before. Then we’ve got to get people together so they can figure out what would be a good decision without escalating everything to the boss and saying, “You didn’t tell me what to do.” And I understand from my experience this works well in groups, which is why I ask you to have a partner. And I think that the spirit, as you can tell from me and from the balloon brand that I use, should be uplifting, because when you’re talking about serving somebody, there’s a skill set and a mindset that show up at exactly the same time.

This is a group in Singapore. Same thing I’m going to show you is working with bankers in England. You’ve got people in the Middle East who’ve learned to teach this down to their colleagues. This is a company that’s taking it worldwide in 14 different languages. This is a group in the United States that is working on trying to shift the culture. It’s a bit of a challenge, but I totally admire them, especially for their sponsorship today. Let’s give Microsoft a big round of applause. Come on. Talk about the world changing, right? I mean, they have a partner ecosystem of 600,000 partners that used to sit between the company and all over the customer base, and now everything goes into the cloud and there’s nobody in between. Big cultural development project going on. This is a group in India called Wipro. 110,000 people learning the same things I’m going to show you. Bank in Pakistan, an airline in Mauritius, teachers in Singapore at Temasek Polytechnic teaching this to students just before they graduate. So if somebody comes to you for a job, right, and says, “I have my business diploma. Can I have a job?” And another one comes from Temasek Polytechnic, and says, “I have my business diploma. Oh, and I know what services is. I know what creating value is. I know what a customer is. And I have some ideas for your company.” Wow. Isn’t that what’s supposed to be happening in education? It is.