North Pole Knowledge Transfer Goes LEAN!

Dear Maverick Pals,

Santa here. Todd is busy with year-end things and asked me to write this post for him. Normally, I’d say “are you kidding?” but things are running so smoothly at the North Pole I actually have some free time.

Why is it going so well? It’s simple. This year we retooled how we transfer and share knowledge and expertise.

Back in the days of wooden trains and dolls, it was easy. The elves hammered away and hummed their elf song, the reindeer pulled the sleigh and Mrs. Claus baked cookies.

Today, we’ve got Chinese suppliers sending us XBox chipsets. The new crop of Gen Y elves are making even the Bumble scratch his head. Mrs. Claus spent so much time trying to manage all the emails flying around that the cookies burned.

And to top things off, the reindeer were badgering me to turbo-charge the sleigh. “Pimp your ride” were Dasher’s exact words, and things almost came to blows until Mrs. Claus realized he was saying “ride” not “wife.”

Everything was getting so complicated, I hauled everyone into a classroom and tried to get a whole lot of teaching done. You can imagine how that went. Three weeks later, no one could remember the difference between a gift box and a soldering iron.

Finally, in desperation, I called Todd and his posse of Mavericks, and oh Donner what a difference!

They showed us how to implement LEAN Knowledge Transfer:

• We discovered that Elves are readers. So we put all our instructions online, made them searchable and rated them with DIGG technology. Now, the Gen Y newbies easily find the exact information they need right away.
• Since Mrs. Claus loves her laptop even more than kids love sitting on my lap, we had her set up Ning social networking sites where our suppliers, elves, and reindeer can all share what they know.
• We've got the reindeer training for hairpin turns on a virtual reality simulation. You should see them fly now. WOW!
• The Mavs even got me using mentoring techniques with the kids. When little Johnnie told me he wanted the Wii, I knew to repeat this back to him and good thing, too! I thought he was saying he had to "wee"; I almost jumped up and threw him off my lap.

LEAN Knowledge Transfer is great. We’ve saved tons of classroom training money and are getting so much done that I’m planning to take Mrs. Claus to the Cayman Islands for a quick 'test flight' right before Christmas. (If they have Wi-Fi, that is.)

Check out LEAN Knowledge Transfer and see what it can do for your own organization.

Happy holidays! And as Todd always says, “Let’s Ride!” (I prefer "On Dasher! On Dancer!...")

Santa, 
Chairman and CEO
North Pole Global Enterprises, Inc.