"global" and "collaboration" and "partners"

I was asked to participate in a research survey recently that included some questions about brand awareness in the area of e-learning content providers. I hadn't heard of several of the companies named in the survey, but I did come away with a sense that if we'd hired branding gurus to help us name our company, we probably wouldn't have ended up calling ourselves "Global Collaboration Partners." We'd have certainly had "learning" or "training" or "E-something" in our name. But the survey caused me to reflect that when we started GCP with stars in our eyes, the name seemed perfect, and more importantly, as we've matured as a company, it's crystallized into a mission and a set of guiding principles.

GLOBAL

GLOBAL works for us in multiple directions. I blogged last week about GlobalTrainingPeople.com, our site where we give away 20 courses for 20 days for free, with a worldwide reach. It hasn't mattered a lick that the US regulations our courses are based upon have no authority in Ghana or Uzbekistan - the best practices that those regulations espouse help our training make people around the smarter, more efficient, and most importantly, safer in their work. GLOBAL also means that we have made our own operations more agile by tapping talents wherever they may come from. We've been fortunate to be able to flexibly enhance our team with talented programmers, media specialists, voiceover artists, and more, from across the US, Singapore, India, Argentina, Mexico, Sweden, France, Brazil, and on and on. Global network!

COLLABORATION

The quip was only half-joking when one of our senior partners opined that any member of our team would likely be unemployable solo; that only our combined talents, skills, and personal quirks added up to make one highly capable human being. That was a little extreme, and when I reread the words, doesn't paint us in the absolute most positive light, I guess. But even though it's an exaggeration, the fact is that our team collaborates exceedingly well. Using technology and a deep personal and working relationship to meld us, our team is able to develop accurate and superbly designed courseware, write insightful articles, navigate the business world and marketplace we play in, and provide value to the world around us. That's just internal workings; our clients also tell us again and again that collaborating with us to produce their custom training is easy and even fun, as we do it so well!

PARTNERS

We've collectively been in the e-learning business long enough that we knew what part of that field we wanted to play in, and most importantly, what roles we did NOT want to play. We rock at designing and creating excellent and effective training materials. And we like that work, a lot. So that's exactly what we've narrowed our focus to. We've been involved in the other aspects of e-learning: creating software tools, hosting a learning management system and providing the associated services, nurturing a stable of programmers... adding those tasks and responsibilities distracts us from that part we are most passionate about. So globally, and collaboratively, we PARTNER with folks whose passion and talents lead them to focus on those aspects of the business.

Global Collaboration Partners: not such a bad name for our company!