Chief Learning Officer - October 2007 - (Page 53)

friend, good guy.) He basically said, “You got me into trouble with my boss.” So I said, “What did I do?” He said, “He came in, waving a copy of the New York Times article, saying, ‘Why don’t we have a chief learning officer?’” I said, “You’ve got one. You do everything I do. You just didn’t think to label it.” To the extent that it wasn’t all in stone in 1994, it was inevitable. Things happen that good organizations have to anticipate or at least quickly react to. And that would have happened irrespective of whether this name got chosen. relative hurry). As you become more global and couple that with a so-called dense culture, this isn’t going to happen by itself. Even if somebody gets a new idea, you need channels to move that stuff around. That’s why these things are especially important at GE and now Goldman Sachs. CLO: It sounds like when the learning function is really working the way it should, that it’s aligned itself with the business and has a real strong grasp on what the needs of that business are going forward. SK: You couldn’t be effective without it because one role is to bring in ideas from the outside. You can do that without knowing much about the business model. But then the second part of the job is to adapt it and make it useful to the host organization. We use as an example: The human body needs an organ like a liver or a kidney transplant to survive, but sometimes, the immune system fraudulently kicks in and rejects it. And that can happen with ideas that the organization really needs to survive and grow, and yet, there’s all this resistance. That’s where, if you don’t know the business model, you don’t know what they’re doing and can’t speak their language. In academia, you go in and say, “Wow, I’ve got this exciting new thing called managing by analytics or mass customization. Let’s talk about it.” And you make it relevant by saying it’s going to be tested on the midterm, and all the sudden, there’s a high interest level. But you can’t do that in the corporate world — they’re not interested in a new approach. They’re interested in good people leaving, cost reduction, top-line growth, more innovation. So, you really have to do a lot of framing and make this thing popular so that the host organization doesn’t reject it. The final part is, once it’s in, you have to be the catalyst to move it around to different parts of the organization. Again, in a big, global organization, it doesn’t happen easily by itself. CLO: How did learning and development contribute to the success of both GE and Goldman Sachs and, in general, to the broader corporate culture? SK: There are a number of aspects to the question. When you have a strong bench culture, it’s mostly a good thing. You aspire to have that. It does a lot of good things. And both GE and Goldman have those. But some of the costs are that you do become more insular — you become more protected from outside views. And these things are pretty important. You do need to work especially hard to bring in outside views, different ways of thinking about how you make decisions or motivate people or organize yourselves. And that can be an important role that a CLO will play. Then, you add other factors. Both organizations, GE and Goldman, are global, so it isn’t the old “management by walking around” — you don’t walk across time zones. In fact, when they first came to see me (the top people at Goldman who recruited me), they basically said, “We’re not apologizing for leadership development. We’re proud of what we’ve done.” They named [John] Corzine, who was then a senator and is now the governor of New Jersey, and they named Robert Rubin, who was Clinton’s Treasury secretary. And they named other people, but they said, “It doesn’t scale very well. We have an old-fashioned apprentice model, and it’s labor-intensive. We’ve got to be able to do it more rapidly.” Goldman, and GE before it, became bigger (in Goldman’s case, they went from something like 8,000 to 24,000 people in a 53 October 2007 CLO: Looking now from a forward-leaning perspective, you were given the title of chief learning officer more than 10 years ago. How do you think the role has evolved? I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 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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