San Diego, CA - Howard Putnam, author and former CEO of Southwest Airlines when it was a struggling start-up, says the information highway is more customer "crash and burn" dangerous than air space, because of information overload and lost productivity. He highlights a plan to avoid that and seize a knowledge and communications-based competitive advantage, through a new rapid knowledge delivery eBroadcast system called "Corporate Internet Radio".

Corporate Internet Radio uses a live online radio interview and interactive show format to conduct "private internal or external" company meetings, presentations, and collaborative sessions. When combined with a rapid multimedia self- authoring tool, and an online communications center with many eLearning-type tracking and management features, the resulting "turnkey toolset" creates a powerful Rapid Knowledge Delivery solution.

The goal of a Rapid Knowledge Delivery toolset and process is to "simply" and "rapidly" connect key experts to a company's stakeholders, by delivering the right piece of highly targeted and concise knowledge when THEY need it.

Said Putnam, "In an environment of increasing demands on our people, exacerbated by information overload, complex technology, and the layers of internal and external clutter, making any solution to a problem more targeted, concise, easy and time efficient is not so simple. At Southwest it was always about moving people from a cost effective transportation point of view versus being in the airline business. The Corporate Internet Radio toolset and process is about moving knowledge from a communications point of view versus an information, eLearning or technology perspective."

"Making it an experience that has more impact with the customer and saves both the provider and the receiver of the experience more time are the common factors of both ventures. Less is worth more, was a guiding factor we used in creating many new operational processes at Southwest."

9/20/2004

Visionary Ex-CEO Reveals Business Best Practices That Allowed Startup Southwest Airlines to Thrive When Established Airlines Were Going Broke

San Diego, CA � Howard Putnam, author and former CEO of Southwest Airlines when it was a struggling start-up, will be offering his management expertise to small and medium size company CEOs and executives worldwide through The Business Best Practice Radio Show, a weekly Internet talk radio show that premieres on Friday, September 24 at 8:00 am Pacific, 11:00 am Eastern Time at http://www.bbpradio.com.

Every week, guest business experts will present their business best practices. Once a month, Mr. Putnam will summarize those business best practices and offer his unique insight on how companies can best apply them. Listeners can get more information from both Mr. Putnam and the show�s guests at http://www.businessbestpractices.com/bbpradio , a Web site that hosts The Business Best Practice Pipeline.

The Business Best Practice Pipeline dramatically lowers training costs for companies and associations with online technology. It packages the knowledge and expertise of a company�s experts, trainers and leaders into secure, learning modules that can be easily, rapidly and economically produced and distributed company-wide throughout the world without any investment in new software or hardware.

Because of the pipeline�s simplicity and in spite of his busy consulting and speaking schedule, Mr. Putnam was able to personally author, produce and publish his multi-media learning modules on the learning Web site.

Along with a group of 40 other business experts, Mr. Putnam has been field-testing the Internet as a knowledge delivery system since 1999 at http://www.MentorU.com . Over the last three years, MentorU.com has built hosted learning centers for companies and associations to transmit knowledge to all key job functions.

Putnam went on to say, �The ease of production to construct concise best practices and time scarcity are problems shared by me, the team members of most of my customers and equally by most of their customers --- that�s what makes my involvement in creating a Best Practice Delivery Pipeline so exciting, even for an old school guy like me. After minimal training, the current process is almost as easy as a telephone with considerable advantages over that medium in cost and comprehension while also insuring that the recipient is viewing it at a good time for them�.

�September 11 changed more than just the way companies looked at the number of people they send to conventions. We quickly recognized customers needed knowledge to be transferred from external, industry and internal experts to the intended recipient and the ease of doing that quickly and delivering it on a just-in-time basis were real barriers to producing results. Complex and costly technologies often defeat rapid knowledge delivery, especially in supporting communication between most non-technical customer touch point experts and personnel � that�s why we co-developed our own simple authoring tool.� said Jesse Wacht, co-founder of MentorU.com.