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Some businesses just don’t get the message. Training is the difference between success and failure. If your staff aren’t trained as well as your competitors, you’re in trouble. More to the point, your business simply can’t perform at its best, which means that lack of training is directly costing you money. Particularly important is customer service training, which is your primary interface with your market. Get that wrong, and there is no business.

Evaluating your training program

Getting training is only part of the story. To be sure you’ve got a good training program, you need to set standards:

• The training must be effective.

• It must deliver measurable results.

• There should be obvious benefits to the business shown in operational terms, like sales and efficiencies.

• Operational capabilities should also show clear improvements in productivity and technical capacities.

Training is like education for your business. The better your skills base, the more business you can do. This is particularly important in businesses with a technical service base, like service desk training where your business is often literally defined by your skills and knowledge bases.

If your training program isn’t delivering, you’ll be able to spot the problems easily:

• Staff retention will be lousy. Training is an incentive to staff, and if training isn’t valuable in career terms, it’s not going to retain staff or staff interest. Worse, it may mean that the training program isn’t offering anything of career value, which is a true sign of a program that’s past its use-by date.

• Productivity can either be stagnant or minimally improved. This may be a result of a slowdown in business or economic conditions, but it can also mean that the customer base is static, and no new business is being generated.

• Efficiencies aren’t affected. Training produces measurable efficiency improvements. Reports should show clear improvements in processing times and volumes.

• Operational reports don’t show a noticeable benefit. This is actually quite unusual with modern training techniques. It means that the training hasn’t affected the business operational areas. Again, this may be a result of other factors, but if you’re doing a combination sales and customer service training program, the business is facing a clear need for improvements.

Making a decision about your training needs

he big issues boil down to some simple choices-

• Upgrade your training or not?

• Redefine your training needs?

• Reevaluate your technical capacity?

If you’re also looking at business development and expanding your business, training can help directly. Growing a business also means growing your in-house skills. Professional trainers can provide good working options for developing your skills base to match your business requirements, literally step by step from development to implementation.

The future of your business devolves on the abilities of your staff. Training is the best way to systematically grow your business and enhance your business capabilities in the market. The choice is yours, but it’s not a difficult one.

Liberty Media Corp. Chairman Gregory B. Maffei crowned as this year’s highest-paid executive in the Wall Street Journal’s latest survey which was released some time ago. Maffei, reportedly received total direct compensation before tax amounting to USD87, 1 million during 2009. The amount is four times higher than its earnings in 2008.

After Maffei, in second place there is the Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison of Oracle’s total compensation this year reached USD68, 6 million. Ellison main income comes from ownership of shares valued at USD61, 9 million. Another executive who signed the list of highest-paid CEO Ray Irani, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp.. His position was shifted to third with a total salary amount of USD52, 2 million. The amount of income considered adequate Irani Occidental reflect performance in the last year which was considered improved compared to previous years. And last October the oil company’s shareholders have agreed to cut executive compensation for a maximum of three quarters of the previous salary.

In fourth place, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to earn income USD44, 61 million and the fifth CEO of CBS Laslie Ray with compensation valued at $ 38, 93 million. In the next sequence, CEO Philippe P Dauman Viacom Inc. posted a total income USD33, 7 million, including annual bonuses and compensation for the performance of media companies. Other business leaders who signed the highest-paid list is Marc N Casper, CEO of Thermo Scientific Inc. The man who was appointed as CEO of Thermo in October last year USD33 million it pocketed the revenue which is mainly derived from stock ownership, restricted shares and performance bonuses.

Malaysia has a rich man by Forbes Magazine Malaysia 2010, Robert Kuok. The magazine noted, Robert wealth reached U.S. $ 14.5 billion this year. Malaysian tycoon was a business in various fields, ranging from enterprise rice, sugar, shipping services, real estate and media. In 2007, he also went into palm oil companies resulting from the merger of Indonesia and Singapore, Wilmar International which carried his nephew.

Robert who is now aged 86 has a fascinating story how he pioneered the business from the bottom. Robert Kuok began life by working at Mitsubishi for 3 years in the shipping division of rice. After his father died in 1948, three brothers founded the company with the name of the Kuok Bros Sdn Bhd. The company specialized in selling agricultural products, and success in 1961 when he bought a cheap sugar from India, where the price is then inflated.

He then founded the Malaysia Sugar Manufacturing, the company’s first sugar refinery in Malaysia. It made Robert has many relationships with big players and refined sugar. In the same year, he built the first hotel in Singapore, Shangri-La Hotel, and after that he built Shanri-La Kowloon in Hong Kong. Not stopping there, Robert also acquired 30 percent stake Sucden Kerry International, a French company that controls much of the world sugar trade.

Then get into the business of oil trading, by buying 67 percent shares of oil trading company of Hamburg. Not only that money was also invested into the media business, by buying 18 percent shares of TVB, which publishes the South China Morning Star.

Mark Zuckerberg was selected as Person of the Year 2010 version of Time magazine. Men face up social networking inventor was featured as the cover of Time magazine latest edition. Zuckerberg, 26, is a young leader who in recent years has been able to influence the world community via Facebook.  Time in his press conference was to say, good or bad up, the inventor as well as its founder Mark Zuckerberg has contributed greatly to the advancement of information technology.

”This year alone there were 500 million users of Facebook. A large-scale transfers have our lives to the virtual world,” says Time editor Richard Stengel in announcing the winner of Person of the Year on the Today show, which aired on NBC some days ago.

Stengel added that Facebook is not just a new technology. ”This is a social technology that changed our relationship with others. I really think Facebook is really affecting people’s lives, never before seen.” Zuckerberg when he graduated from Harvard University in 2004 has made a site called Thefacebook.com. The effort was already started when he was 19 years old.  This year, led Zuckerberg corporate profits reached U.S. $ 2 billion or about RP18.1 trillion more. Although wealthy, Zuckerberg has donated U.S. $ 100 million or about 9 billion more for a school in Newark, New Jersey. He also had been appointed to the big screen with the title The Social Network.