Harold, I've been rereading a lot of Geary Rummler lately, and it's either astounding or depressing how little some things have changed.

Asked last year by ASTD what currently frustrated him about the training and development profession, he said:

"The same thing that frustrated me 45 years ago—the fact that it’s a solution in search of a problem. People have developed all this wonderful stuff around learning and development, and it’s become a thing in and of itself rather than something that exists to help people be more effective in their jobs...

"In fact, training has become in many ways the enabler for bad management because now the default solution is to fix the people. You’ve got vendors inventing things, business publications promoting them, managers reading them and thinking they should be doing this, and the training department going along with it all too eagerly. It is a whole business."