Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 29)

might fail 80 percent of the time because of unavoidable environmental factors. To help combat those, Wolfe said responsibilities, roles and employee expectations throughout an organization must be aligned. Learning should be proactive, not reactive, and the right kinds of processes and tools must be in place. Essentially, one can’t just turn on a switch and make things happen, especially in a large company. “The more competitive or developed an industry, the more likely you’ll fail if you don’t leverage knowledge within your company to become a differentiator,” Wolfe said. “If you’re a new start-up company in a new industry, and it’s fresh and alive, and there are all kinds of growth possibilities, it may be questionable how much knowledge would become a competitive advantage. “But as your industry becomes much more competitive and much more mature, you need to find these fine-line differentiators to make your company stand out among your competitors, or your competitors will survive — and you won’t.” Wolfe said he and his team at Steelcase University will not let up in their journey to help leaders understand the value of learning for the company. “That’s a journey that will go on forever,” he explained. “It’s important to us that we don’t miss a beat there. Our top priorities going forward are on two fronts. One, we’re taking change-management solutions extremely seriously within our corporate university. I referenced Gilbert’s Performance Grid earlier and to help the execution of any new program, it requires attention to a change-management solution. We’re getting our performance consultants more knowledgeable on how to work with their customer groups on change-management solutions so that there are project plans being created on how to align cross-functional organizations against a new implementation. “Second, we’re focusing on how we can join at the hip with our IT counterparts and other cross-functional groups throughout our company to come up with a way to share knowledge — content management it’s sometimes called. How can you break away from this data content-dump mentality and identify the critical nuggets that need to be shared with the right people at the right time within your company? A lot of companies spend billions dollars trying to figure it out, and I don’t think anyone is doing a really outstanding job yet. Whoever cracks the nut on this one is definitely going to have a competitive advantage.” – Kellye Whitney, kwhitney@clomedia.com http://www.learnkey.com/clomag http://www.learnkey.com/clomag

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Chief Learning Officer - August 2007

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