Chief Learning Officer - October 2007 - (Page 52)

SPECIAL 5th ANNIVERSARY SECTION A Conversation with Steve Kerr: CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER Magazine Catches up with the First CLO As the story goes, Steve Kerr approached his boss at General Electric, former CEO Jack Welch, with the recommendation to establish a chief education officer position in the organization. Welch didn’t go for the new title because that would mean there would be two CEOs, Kerr told Chief Learning Officer magazine in 2004. Instead, Welch proposed to call Kerr the chief learning officer. “It’s not a trivial difference,” Kerr said in the interview three years ago. “If you think of yourself as an education officer or a knowledge officer, the important stuff becomes the knowledge itself, whereas if you think of yourself as a learning officer, then your client is the person doing the learning.” While at GE, Kerr headed the company’s Crotonville executive development center. After Welch retired, Kerr joined investment firm Goldman Sachs in 2001 and expanded Pine Street, the firm’s learning arm. Additionally, Kerr has been a faculty member at the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California, where he was dean of the business school. We recently caught up with Kerr, who is now working as director of leadership solutions for LRN, a company that works with businesses to develop ethical corporate cultures, to share his thoughts about the development of the CLO role and what the future holds for learning executives. CLO: The CLO title, of which you were officially the first, was famously established by Jack Welch. How important was his vision in getting the concept of a chief learning officer established? SK: It evolved a lot. He had a concept of it, but really, the fleshing out occurred and a lot of changes got made by us as we learned and also by the role as it changed. Things got much more transparent. CLO: The interplay between the two of you was important in establishing the role. Do you think it was an inevitable conclusion that the role would have come into play? SK: I think it renamed and reaffirmed a lot of things and didn’t really birth too many. I remember when it got fashionable to copy what GE was doing, so everybody had to have a CLO. Some people really did think about it and benchmarked me and Crotonville. Other people just kind of took what they had and stuck a new name on it — some training managers were now chief learning officers with no change in anything. Some people had the game and not the name, and some had the name and not the game. I remember Bill Wiggenhorn calling me. He was running Motorola University, and I was running Crotonville. (Good October 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 52 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

Editor's Letter Table of Contents Letters to the Editor Taking the Lead Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Elements of Social Media Arrive on the Learning Scene Trend Micro: Making Learning More Modular CLO Profile Learning’s Role in Talent Management INTTRA: Using Global Learning to Better Enable Talent Management Operationalizing Communities of Practice U.S. Army: Sharing Lessons from the Field Looking Back, Moving Forward Leveraging Business Data to Develop Strategic Learning Solutions Chrysler LLC: Metrics, Score Cards and Automobiles Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources Connecting the Dots: Recognizing Talent Development Differences at Nonprofits Nonprofits in Health Care: Learning at ENH Case Study Business Intelligence Case Study In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

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