Appearance

If Business English is a service, what kind of service is it?

One of the more ubiquitous introductions to Service Design suggests that 'in Educational Services, [service] has the form of a promise to produce a new capacity for the customer to make new promises.'

When we sign a contract with someone, then, we are promising that we will enable them to make promises to others.

It almost sounds like a pyramid scheme.

And precisely because it does, it highlights the importance of something that receives commendably little attention: appearance.

Participle clauses: little objects of desire

Is there a connection between what a learner pays and what a learner does?

A group of learners pays considerably less than someone receiving individual tuition, but is the concomitant to that a lower level of effort and, consequently, achievement?

I was set wondering about this after reading Seth Godin's post 'Do it tomorrow'.

In it, he argues that people often confuse the value of advice with what they pay for it, even though there is often little correlation.

More intriguingly for BE, he proposes that, 'One of the most effective ways to get your ideas implemented is to charge a lot for them.'

This certainly sounds appealing on several different levels.

BESIG World Blog

This week's blog post has gone to a better place.

I speak, of course, of the mighty BESIG World Blog.

The post is on the new BESIG website which has been given a fabulous purple makeover by the BOT.

Congratulations to them and the BESIG committee for doing a great job.

Functional obsolescence

One of the great advantages of selling food is that it has built-in functional obsolescence.

Once the customer has bought their Extra-Large Tesco-Value Eight-Pack of Meringue Nests, they eat them, and then they need to buy some more.

It's a quite brilliant ruse.

Most technology companies do something similar, compelling tardy users to substitute their old kit for the next model.

This upgrade treadmill is a quite wonderful idea for businesses, but I wonder if the business of English language teaching doesn't operate in the reverse direction.

Is it possible, in other words, that BE has built-in functional permanence?