Do seminars make good software?

You’ve taken the seminar. Now buy the software.

At least that’s the pitch to travelers for two new products, Franklin Covey’s Franklin Planner and Kiplinger’s Taming the Paper Tiger.

Both programs are aimed at the minority of frequent flyers who still idealistically cling to the notion that computers can make their lives less complicated. They ought to know better, but that’s beside the point.

Do the applications complement their real-life counterparts? And are they something you should consider taking on the road with you?

The Franklin Planner That all depends on what you expect from them. The Franklin Planner, which is based on Covey’s popular “What Matters Most” seminar, integrates into Microsoft Outlook as a separate menu bar. The guiding philosophy behind the enhanced planning software is pretty simple: determine what your priorities are and then structure your life in such a way that the important things get done first.

As an add-on to Outlook, I found that the software integrated itself without any trouble. The CD-ROM introduction to the Franklin Planner explained clearly what the program could do. But when I started actually using the enhanced Outlook, my instincts took over. I wanted to use the Microsoft-supplied calendar, and the new menu item just got in the way after a while.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Covey’s approach is laudable. Most travelers’ priorities tend to get so confused that they forsake the important things in life – their families and other relationships – while obsessing over little things like collecting frequent flyer miles.

There really should be a way of using Outlook to prioritize your goals in the way the Franklin Planner has done. But I think this $99.95 plug-in would have been more useful to me if I’d also attended one of Covey’s eight-hour, $229, “What Matter Most” workshops. Even after perusing the tutorial, I still had a difficult time understanding how to use the planner, and I couldn’t understand all of the terms that were being thrown around. I’m determined to keep trying, not just because I’m stubborn, but because I think my goals need to be refocused the way “What Matters Most” intends to. I suspect that the learning curve for the Franklin Planner is steep but rewarding. I’m not about to uninstall it.

The Paper Tiger The Paper Tiger’s premise is equally simple – organize your paperwork around your computer – but the execution isn’t the same as Covey’s. A half-hour multimedia presentation guides you through what exactly needs to get done in your office before the program will work. After it ended, there was never a question about what to do next.

What, you might ask, is the point of re-organizing your filing cabinet around The Pager Tiger? I wondered myself. I mean, why not work on something more 21st century, like digitizing paper information. But organizational expert Barbara Hemphill, who authored Taming the Paper Tiger at Work and Taming the Paper Tiger at Home believes dead wood is here to stay. (As an online journalist, I wish she was wrong, but so far there’s little evidence that she is.) As Hemphill narrates the CD-ROM introduction to The Paper Tiger software, you can see the potential of using this kind of a program when you travel. Imagine that you need a copy of an invoice, but aren¹t sure exactly where you filed it? With Paper Tiger’s indexing system, you can call a colleague and tell him or her exactly which file it’s in. The program promises that you’ll “find anything in five seconds or less – guaranteed,” which just might work if you’re a fast typist.

I can’t think of any traveler or small business owner who wouldn’t benefit from this elegantly simple $79.95 database program for the PC. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t benefit from the Franklin Planner, although I’d like to see a user-friendlier interface before I wholeheartedly endorse it.

What intrigues me about these two products is the way in which they were adapted from workshops. Hemphill is a popular speaker and author, and who hasn’t heard of Stephen Covey, whose perennial bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People seems to find itself into every executive’s library? Were these software products developed just to make money or to genuinely address what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton refer to as the “knowing-doing” gap?

Seminars only translate into good software when there’s a need to turn knowledge into action. In these two cases, there is a compelling reason for a response. But as other speakers try to hop on this bandwagon, I’m inclined to believe these two products are the exception rather than the rule.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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