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Tokyo, Japan
Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for over 40 years, and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the most recent 17 years, Ron had established distributors in the United States and throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer. More recently, he's begun giving seminars in English and Japanese to people interested in his overseas travels and expanding business overseas. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Authored Comments
Tracy, your introduction of communities of practice (CoPs) and selecting the Domain, Practice and Members are very interesting. It got me thinking how it would apply in my article “How to assess your organization's technological maturity“ (https://opensource.com/open-organization/20/3/communication-technology-…).
In the case in the article, I discuss a salesperson at an enterprise IT company working with a transportation company, and a Worksheet to download to determine the situation of the trucking company. I got to thinking. What would the “Domain of interest” be?
In the article, I mentioned three benefits of enterprise IT. I would guess the Domain is either to 1-enhanced trucking company’s interaction with its customer, 2-improve the trucking company’s operation, or 3-provide communication technology expertise, so it can open up new transportation business strategies. Let’s say we choose the Domain of #2-improve the trucking company’s operation based on the Worksheet results.
Then we can explore what “Practice” or practitioner shared resources (tools, techniques, and ideas)” is. I mentioned four broad solution areas in the article which all require different expertise: 1-Data gathering and company strategy analytics, 2-Social media, internet utilization, and interaction internally, 3-Telecommunication utilization within company (to avoid excess and unnecessary traveling for meetings, etc.) and 4-Automation technology utilization within the company. As “Practice”, let’s say we select #4-Automation technology utilization within the company based on the Worksheet results. It could also be described as providing embedded devices for information gathering to improve operations. We decide where we want devices on the trucks and company facilities, what information we want to gather from those devices and how we analyze that information received to improve operations.
Now, lastly we can move to “Members” after deciding the devices we want to use and why. The members should probably be the exact users devices and the information received in the transportation company, the IT company salesman as a coordinator, the appropriate IT company solutions architects as a device developer and selected device technical staff of the devices suppliers to produce the devices.
Building a community of practice (CoPs) like this and working through these three categories has been very helpful. Thanks.
What you mentioned that Étienne Wenger said about apprentices learning from each other is so true.
From Tokyo, I gave seminars for truck salesmen around the world. What I would do is set up the seminar room with the desks in a "U" shape, not classroom style. Then, the participants could talk to each other.
Before starting, I would ask the organizer who the top sales people are, the average sales people are and the beginning people are.
After I presented a given sales technique I would ask the group if anyone had used that technique and get someone to present if it was effective or not. That got the participants talking to each other which is what I wanted to achieve.