I just finished Jeff Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling. Great book with entertaining, blunt advice. In the book he says to get writing about things you are passionate about. So I’m following directions…
My son just had his first standardized test. He is four and a half years old and is in parent-paid preschool (read = optional). Testing? Wow. I’m an assessment consultant and this seems a bit overkill. But then we got the results – he’s a rock star with the alphabet except for the letter G – something we wouldn’t have known otherwise. OK, one letter. Not too shabby. The test seemed extreme but the results have changed the way we read to him now. We pause at the G words. We sound them out. We love the G words. The whole nine yards.
This got me thinking. What else do I care about but have no idea about the performance? What else in my life, work or home, am I just assuming is working correctly but have no data to support this assumption? Here’s a short list of things I came up with: my car’s engine, my wife’s cholesterol level, my financial planner’s recommendations, and my children’s math ability (math testing is coming up for the four year old).
What about you? How are your training programs doing? Is your team competent? Is your logistics system optimized? Do your audits tell you what you really need to know?
In the end I think it is a little weird that my son had a sixty-item assessment after only being on the planet for 54 months (ok, so I used months to be dramatic), but now I know what is wrong so I can fix it. And we are going to go gangbusters to get that golden goose of a letter before the next assessment.
