Chief Learning Officer - October 2007 - (Page 54)

SPECIAL 5th ANNIVERSARY SECTION SK: It’s evolved differently in different places. In GE, Welch was really a hands-on kind of person, and he liked to get key leaders around and press the flesh and communicate one on one. The online stuff, e-learning and all that, wasn’t really the main part of what we did. We did some. We weren’t ignorant, but it was never the centerpiece — high-touch as opposed to high-tech, if you will. The way the thing took off in GE, it was much more personally based. The technological changes mattered to everybody, including me and GE and Goldman, but it mattered less to me than to others who were quicker to seize upon it. One direction some people have gone is to really embed the chief learning officer in much more online, distributed learning. Others have been more responsive than me about tailoring it to different global presences. We had some skills courses translated in different languages, and we translated some stuff so, again, it’s not zero. Some people have really used the CLO platform to really be a battering ram for globalization for the firm, and others have taken it down a technological route. So, in my world, it’s evolved plenty. But it’s been less of a revolution than you’d find in other companies along the lines that I’ve described. we have to intervene in what ought to be a natural lifelong learning kind of curiosity?” That became the conceptual underpinning of my job and, of course, that’s remained. And if you look at your job that way, then globalization makes it a little harder, technology makes it a little easier, but the point is, it doesn’t change the basic nature of what the job is. CLO: Changing people’s behavior is critical to that and critical to the CLO role, but how has the audience for training changed in the last 14 years? Are there special considerations CLOs have to think about now that they didn’t necessarily need to at the beginning of the role? SK: One of the many consequences of what’s happened technologically is that the ability of the top to direct and control and limit and explain the information has really been sharply reduced. You go into a Web site, and most companies now have alumni or critics who think of snide names, and they put their views out there. By the time you get out there to try to explain that you’ve had some questions about the way you did stock options, to take one example, it’s on 25 Web sites, and people have discussed it. It’s all out there. It’s not a revolution in favor of greater accuracy. In fact, it might have gone down. But the point is, it’s the greater speed and the greater transparency. So, the audience over the years has become everyone. At GE, I think we had 5,000 or 6,000 people who had come through my shop out of one-third of a million. At Goldman, I had the managing director population and some small percentage of vice presidents. My point is, the way the thing is evolving, every employee becomes the focus. And as we say, maybe everybody can’t make you lots of money, but anybody can ruin your reputation. That goes back to the point I made about transparency and speed and the rest. I think there really is more of a reach-out, broadly determined. The other thing is this notion of “boundaryless-ness” that I helped popularize when Welch was making that the raison d’etre for GE, to be the boundaryless company. So, not only is your audience expanded as a chief learning officer from some elite group at the top to everyone, it’s also expanded well beyond the walls of the organization. And Jack always challenged us. He said, “If you do your job right in terms of being boundaryless, you will not be able to say where you stop, and the environment begins or the outside world begins.” If you aren’t into the paradigm, you think that’s crazy — what an odd, impossible thing! But once you have customers participating in your 360s and outsiders sitting on your boards, and your customers are sending ship signals to your factories without even letting you know that they’re low in inventory, and training where the executives from our clients are participating simultaneously with us in the same session, that’s really different in terms of reaching audiences you never thought of. I think those are some ways the job has morphed beyond what it used to be. CLO: You mentioned technology, and that’s something that’s become more prevalent in a lot of CLOs’ minds. But what are some of the things that were important to you back when you first starting doing this role that are still important now, and what are the issues that are still top of mind for learning leaders? SK: I think these changes are more of “the how” than “the what.” Again, it goes back to the way Welch first conceived it. There were two parts to the definition. I think those haven’t changed. One, if you remember, I had gone, and I had said, “I’m going to be a chief education officer,” because that was the suggested title for the bundle of stuff I had got out of that first Crotonville meeting. And Jack basically said, “Education is a noun, information is a noun, knowledge is a noun. If you think of your job that way, then your client becomes ‘the stuff,’ the knowledge itself or the information itself, and your job becomes storing and protecting it and moving it and transporting it.” He said, “If you use (learning), then you won’t get mixed up. You’ll remember that your client is the people doing the learning, not the stuff itself.” That hasn’t changed as the one of the fundamental ways of thinking about my job from the beginning. And the other thing was the old equation of “ability x motivation = performance.” You’ve got to make them able, you’ve got to make them want to. And Welch contrasted me with Gary Reiner, who is a very good, very competent chief information officer, but he said Gary’s job is really involved in people’s ability to share and benefit from information. Welch said, “In my experience, the most important reason people don’t share information is because they don’t want to. If that’s the problem, you can get the fanciest hardware going, but no one is going to change that attitude just by that.” He said, “Let Gary worry about people’s ability to communicate and share information. You look at what’s in the rewards systems, what’s in the norms, what’s in the way we structure the silos, what’s in the air, what’s in the politics that makes people reluctant. Why is it that October 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 54 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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