To see training as a means to maintain a high degree proficiency, means to train regularly, often, and indefinitely. This of course requires discipline, focus, and honest. These important principles and values are not typically part of the business school curricula, which tends to treat character and value as separate and unrelated to business profitability. Nothing could be further from the truth. Proficiency and competence are the basis for profitability, productivity, and effectiveness. Proficiency and competence are achieved not in one short round of training, but over time. Once they are achieved, they must be maintained. That is accomplished through training. Sports provide an instructive example. Professional athletes cannot maintain their “winning” performance (i.e. proficiency and competence) without regular, constant training. It is unreasonable to expect otherwise. The same applies to business, leadership, management, and life for that matter. It is unfortunate that the trend in the business schools in America are way from values and principles, and toward an impractical manipulation of data.
Trends reveal a great deal about perspective and attitude. Perspective and attitude define culture. This is the key point. Communicating values and ideas such as profitability, efficiency, effectiveness, and competence is a culture or it becomes a culture. Attitude creates a culture; but it is also a result of culture. Creating a culture is not simply a matter of willing it into existence. A business culture—or a social culture for that matter—do not just happen. A culture is a result of the actions and interactions of the people in that culture. Certain actions that tend to happen with more frequency then become the dominant trend such as covering up rather than resolving errors. In this case, the trend facilitates a negative and demoralizing environment. The more people avoid self-cultivating practices such as ongoing and effective training like the kind of mental training that is a result of struggling with, thinking about, and evaluating problems, they the valuable skill (and the competence) to solve problems. Therefore, it is important to be aware of trends. Trends are often not in the best interests of profit, profitability, effectiveness, efficiency, competence, or any of the other values important to growth and development. Training is after all a matter of growth and development. This is one of the points to highlight. Training is ongoing, and one of the most important goals of training is to improve or develop. Clearly this approach creates a positive environment. To take it a step further, the practice of problem solving that the cultural trends in the media and in school tend to suppress, is a form of training. Training can be negative as well as positive, and the long term effects of that training ultimately determine the accumulative results. Low test scores in school are one of example of this kind of training that is not usually thought of as training. Training is not just the specific activity that is done to train, training is also in the underlying attitudes and values that motivate what people do. People can be trained in failure just as easily—if not more so—as they can be trained in success. When the implicit training is not considered—as it usually is not—individuals are often trained in subtle but much more lasting ways. In other words, people are programmed to be one way or another depending on the dominant trends in a particular culture. If nothing is done to directly counteract those deleterious trends, many of the gains from the positive training will be lost. For example, the process of finding practical solutions, trains the mind in an attitude of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. The process of looking for tricks, gimmicks, or trivia to avoid finding practical solutions trains the mind in minutia, which tends to encourage a culture and a mentality of avoidance, evasion, and blame. In the latter case, the constructive and implicit training that goes along with seeking to find practical solutions is lost. This highlights why training is crucial, and the type of training is more important still. This is one reason that the Shinsei Method™ emphasizes an approach to training that recognizes it as an ongoing process of improvement rather than a fixed period of mechanical practice.