Learn and Lead: Redux

It’s been a rather quiet 2011 on this blog. Thanks to a couple of guest posts, there were 12 real posts in the whole year. As I reflect on last year, the usual excuse of getting very little time was the first one that sprung to mind. But in reality, I think I just didn't make enough effort. There were many blog posts that crossed my mind that didn’t get written. Many reflections that I wanted to share, many questions that I wanted to explore. Hopefully 2012 will be a better year for this blog. With renewed vigor in the New Year, I am hoping that I will post a lot more frequently in 2012.

Here’s a summary of blog posts of 2011:

I explored the question of whether an organization/business unit should be delivery led or sales led. I am still struggling to find the right balance.
Taking a stab at rants, I make a case that It's Not This Or That, It's This AND That.
A sponsored guest post by Ronnie Friedmann on Painless way to get and give employee feedback.
Picking up a question on Twitter, I share some of the lies I have heard by people while quiting their job.
In a guest post by Puja Anand, she shares her categorization of Clients from Hell.
A video presentation talk by Sir Ken Robinson triggered my thoughts on driving divergent thinking in our children.
Rupa Rajagopalan has been instrumental in running the Instructional Designers Community of India for the last few years along with some other enthusiastic members of the profession published my interview in their newsletter IDConnect.
Another guest post by Puja Anand in which she shares her experiences of dealing with clients from different cultures.
An experience sharing event at work triggered this post in which I share my defining customer moments.
I explore the question Is changing jobs the best way of getting a raise.
In the quest for learning something “new” all the time, the younger people are losing the quest to hone and improve what they know and keep struggling with “I am not learning anything new”.
A call from a recruiter who had not checked my LinkedIn public profile made me wonder why recruiters aren’t using social networking to hire.

2010 was a rather quiet year for my blog. My blog didn’t see much of me this year, only 24 posts this year. As for my other social media presence, it’s been mostly quiet all across. My RSS reader missed me, on many occasions I would mark 1000s of unread items as read and try to start again. Tweeting also took back seat. Tweetstats tells me I posted only 854 tweets in 2010 against more than 2000 the previous year. And still, sometime during this year, this blog completed three years, crossed 50,000 hits and more than 370 feed subscribers. Google Analytics tells me that hits this year were marginally more than last year.

During the year, my role changed from primarily developing elearning content to providing learning solutions for the Indian market. It’s mostly about selling training in various form factors, including instructor led and elearning. What’s interesting is the work we are doing with various ministries in the Government of India on employability and skill development, something that I hope to write more about in the coming year. The new role also takes me even closer to the actual implementation of learning solutions and is providing me new insights. I am hoping to make up for my sparse blogging last year in 2011.

Some of the posts I wrote in 2009 and 2008 continue to be popular and appear in the most read posts in 2010. My top 5 read posts in 2010 were: