Pretty much everyone has tired of the novelty of Zoom meetings and Zoom Happy Hours. And yet we can be assured that we will be conducting core office meetings electronically beyond the foreseeable future. Even after the Covid-19 pandemic is a memory, the effects will linger in the form of working from home and drastically reduced office space.

In the mean time, companies will have to fulfill their annual employee training requirements. This is the time to change your old training routine and go from the same soul-crushing training to something that will actually move the company in a new direction towards innovation and meeting your corporate objectives. We all know the reason companies accept crappy training is that it is easier to pay the consultants you have on contract for training, even if it is less than what you’d prefer, is that the pain of finding a new consultant and going through the procurement paperwork is worse to the person doing that work than the crappy training sessions are for the masses of employees sitting through it.

But I encourage you to use this time of change to step outside your comfort zone and find someone new, someone who has developed exactly what you need. There are a lot out there.

I recommend you look at Integrity ISR and their innovative ISR University. I’ve spoken with Integrity ISR’s leadership team led by CEO Scott Bethel and President Danielle Storan about their offerings. What strikes me as worthy of your consideration is that their offerings are applicable beyond the Intelligence and National Security community to the corporate business space. Their course offerings were initially designed to fulfill training requirements for national security operations. However, their team realized quickly how applicable certain concepts were beyond a narrow strategic lane.

For example, critical thinking and advanced analysis are skill sets that leaders and managers in any business ought to be competent in. In my own experience, I’ve had more fruitful discussions about the critical thinking pitfalls and lessons of military operations in corporate seminars than I have had in the Pentagon and major military commands. That is because good leaders naturally see linkages between their issues and similar ones other people faced in a different environment.

To that end, I admire Integrity ISR’s deep expertise in the national security arena as well as their desire to make that experience available and applicable to corporate clients. I, personally, have always had a bit of a beef with proprietary courses by “institutes”  or consultancies selling programs with a diploma and the never-ending follow-on courses and annual gatherings of graduates. I’m probably in the minority, but to me some of these programs and gatherings are a bit cultish in how they’re about the individual at the top of the pyramid rather than about how the attendees apply the lessons to solve their business issues.

I promised early on that I’d never sell any proprietary system to a client. That if the clients actually apply the lessons from my seminars, they’d never need to call me for follow-on certification because the principles I teach and use to assist my clients doesn’t run out with time. When my clients call me back it is because they are satisfied enough to seek out help with a different issue, not because I’ve pressured them to the next level of certification.

Likewise with Integrity ISR, their advanced analysis course and senior seminars are just as applicable to the team at a brewery startup, a Fortune 500 Bank, a food flavorings company, or a local county emergency management department as they are to National Security professionals.

Give them a call. Or give me a call and we can talk about what might be the best way for you and your team to move forward with remote electronic training, or with developing a strategic plan, or with creating a leadership development program for your company.

Keep thinking…