Learnerprise – Beyond Neologism to Collective Understanding

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New Research Shows Corporate Training Budgets Are Misaligned
Although 64% of Learning Executives Believe Informal Learning Approaches Have Higher Impact, More Than Two-Thirds of Corporate Training Budgets Are Spent on Traditional Formal Training
– Bersin & Associates

Props to Dan Pontefract who pretty much inspired this whole post about the mashup of Andy McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 notion and Learning 2.0. This is to contribute to Dan’s argument to help bring this word, “Learnerprise” from lonely neologism into the general vernacular.

The first steps of the emergent Learnerprise organization must include federating the LMS and integrating learning opportunities ubiquitously throughout the organization in rich social media environments.  But to ensure success, the savvy Learnerprise architect has to understand that whatever opportunities are provided, formal or informal, they are competing against not just their own learning offerings, but also the wild social web.

Let’s unpack this.  Any learning opportunity initiative – let’s say the corporate university just released a presentation coaching two-day classroom workshop, coupled with a communications e-learning certificate package, and supplemented with an informal use-as-you-choose books/video library on effective presence, and promoted in a push campaign alerting associates of that availability – must understand that it is competing with a compendium of other resources that the now-socially empowered free agent of the organization can reasonably garner from any number of outside resources.

And so, to build a compelling webscape of learning, we need to create mechanisms for the collective wisdom of our colleagues to enhance the intrinsic drive of those we hope to inspire and change.  Remember it’s the intrinsic personal interest that we need to be enabling in eventual service of the organization, not what we think people need to be learning.  That is, the learning organization (the new Learnerprise) shall provide the environments and opportunities in which people can satisfy their own emergent drives and interests to learn.

Recognizing intrinsic drive suggests that ideas and skill-development resonate not when the royal we of organizational learning thinks it needs to happen, but rather when people are ready, willing and eager to absorb and integrate new ideas into their behaviors – which is why a group of people can participate in the same learning campaign, and yet only a portion of that audience find stickiness and ah-ha!  Which again, explains why despite the best efforts of the learning organization assigning prescriptive learning, only a portion emerge effectively engaged in the “intended” outcomes.

Clearly now in the conceptual age, following the readily available knowledge age, to remain relevant, learning initiatives need to engineer in all varieties of disparate possibilities for the individual to parse what matters to them, and to apply to their work.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. – Winston Churchill

Step Up Change Agents

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Dream well. You may find yourself there. -Neal Bushoven

“Companies are people” is a popular expression to celebrate that the engine of a company is the people who work there, and it’s success or failure is built on the collaborative, innovative and actionable power of those people.  But remember, a Company is a kind of legalized fiction – a set of codified relationships between shareholders, employees and customers, bound together by contracts – the value of which is predominantly wrapped up in future deliverables – yet to be fulfilled.  Sure enough there is brand, reputation, and pent-up expectation, but the future employee contribution or innovation, the equity value yet to be delivered to the shareholder, and the product or service value to be delivered to the customer, all make up the promise of a Company.

These are much more manageable deliverables than managing the fickleness of people.  People, on the other hand, are people – and susceptible to having babies, or heart-attacks, or mid-life crises, or jumping to the competition, or opening yoga studios, or whatever else strikes their fancy.  A Company’s ability to first: attract and retain the best and brightest, and then: allow them to collaborate in innovative and actionable activities together, is what comprises all those promises codified in the contracts upon which the Company is based.

So let’s look at the people.  The people are “consumed by more fear-based motivation than I’ve seen in my lifetime” said Robert Reich in a presentation today.  There are 77 million baby-boomers working today who were born between 1946 and 1964 and they are:

  • retiring later because their 401K has evaporated (exaggeration – but diminished indeed)
  • more worried about losing their jobs than any time in extant memory
  • unable to borrow yet more from their home equity against diminished home values
  • trying to escape from existing debt load

The result of all is that fear has become a primary motivating force and change agents are becoming more scarce, and yet more valuable than ever, because bold idea makers are shackled by fear.  The biggest barrier to change is past success.  That’s right, when things are good and products and services are moving along at a nice clip, companies encourage more of the same – more of the past successes to fuel growth.  But what if what worked, doesn’t work any longer?  This is when idiosyncratic change agents are most needed. Now more than ever, change agents can be more effective in innovating and bringing new opportunities and actionable ideas because companies are hungry for emergent successes.

The ability to envision how to do new things effectively is now more valuable than ever.

Conceptual Learning is Beautiful, Unique and Meaningful

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Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, recognized the role of conceptual output as early as 1997 in a speech at the University of Connecticut when he said “The growth of the conceptual component of output has brought with it accelerating demands for workers who are equipped not simply with technical know-how, but with the ability to create, analyze, and transform information and to interact effectively with others.” By 2004, he had developed his views on the topic, referring to reductions in manufacturing in the United States, outsourcing to India and China, excess of supply and the global marketplace, all leading to the increasing conceptualization of economic output.

Taking a page straight from Dan Pink and Gary Hamel, knowledge and even expertise are common, expected, cheap (sometimes free) to source, and no longer represent lasting competitive advantage. We have moved from the knowledge age to the conceptual age where creative, symphonic thinking – the ability to harness sometimes seemingly disparate pieces of information and ideas and mash them into wholly new iterations that can be applied effectively to solutions and results – are in fact the individual and organization’s competitive advantage.

Whatever field you work in, your expertise is expected, but your initiative and creativity to bring unique and signature solutions to solve unexpected problems is your brand, and increasingly also your company’s brand and identity. If this is true (and you better believe it), the future of learning is to provide more conceptual and powerful learning opportunities in which the expected learning outcomes are by nature, unexpected. Sometimes called chaotic or unstable by design, this construct suggests building learning opportunities which offer insight, ideas and parables intended for inference and application by the learner.

This calls for balancing the spoon-fed, outcome-anticipated, specific-competence results-oriented learning environments with more conceptual learning environments which treat learners as ready and able to distill ideas presented into their own signature integrated solutions applicable for their line of work and customers, whether they be internal or external.

Tom Kelley, CEO of IDEO, a premier product and services innovation company, has been a long advocate of this approach. In his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, he describes a particular persona called the “Cross-Pollinator.” Cross-Pollinators are those types who are inquisitive beyond their particular domain expertise and explore ideas from industries outside their immediate purview, come to understand the technology, device or methods employed elsewhere and figure out how to incorporate these ideas into their own work.

How might this look like in learning environments?  To compete with the wild web, these learning environments will provide media and socially rich environments which aid learners to deduct applications from disparate sources.  The conceptual age learning environment will offer a deep portfolio of ideas and solutions garnered from varieties of domains. For example, a sales learning environment will not only offer presentation tips and niche industry knowledge but perhaps also ways in which organizations well outside their own have leveraged technology to gain their customer attention. For example, Sugarloaf Ski resort has been admired for their ability to use social media to update the faithful.

Foremost, emerging learning environments will understand that people have their own intrinsic motivators, often contrary to what their company or manager thinks is their primary motivator (drop the carrots and sticks paradigm).  When really what motivates the learner is passion, purpose and curiosity.  Learning opportunities will only resonate when they intersect with someone’s current passion, fulfills their sense of purpose and giving, and piques their curiosity.

Learning opportunities are plentiful and the expectations are rising, and to be compelling whatever you are offering must be beautiful, unique and meaningful.

Replace Fear with Curiosity

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We recently had the cool opportunity to interview Professor Yves Doz from INSEAD University in Paris and he had three bits of advice for those looking to make a difference: expose yourself to new environments, get curious, and challenge yourself.

He has a great story about a big company CEO who travels alone and incognito when visiting his store locations around the world, and would always use the opportunity to visit local architecture and culture.  Without the entourage and fanfare he claims he gets much closer to the people who interact with customers and operate the business every day. Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy, would famously disappear for weeks at a time and drive around, surprise visit Best Buy stores, and ask tons of curious questions to the associates to learn what they think is going to work best for the business.

And finally Professor Doz emphasizes the importance of getting outside your comfort zone and constantly creating new challenges for yourself.  Often fear motivates stagnation.  The fear of failing can drive people to not try new or challenging things outside their competence, and thus finally arrive at their own level of incompetence.  A critical part of challenging oneself involves fostering environments that are unstable by design.  He advises reconfiguring resources, roles and business architectures regularly to intentionally create a moderate amount of creative tension.  This intentional disruption can aid strategic agility – a phrase he uses to describe the importance of being constantly strategically inventive, not seasonally.  Often companies enter a periodic mode of brief strategy sessions followed by longer-term implementation and execution.

So get out, get curious, and challenge yourself!

There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit

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Hal and Bev Hunter won “Citizens of the Year” in Rappahannock County for 2009. Hal’s motto is, “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit” and it’s an apt saying for those aspiring to accomplish remarkable things. The excerpt below is straight from the Rappahannock News and you can read the full article here.

There are many who volunteer their time, energy and more in Rappahannock County – and then there are Hal and Beverly Hunter. County residents since 1968, the Hunters have, particularly in the past decade and most visibly over the past couple of years, put in countless hours looking after the continued health of Rappahannock’s watersheds, its farms and viewsheds, its hungry people and its educational and arts communities. They have done so quietly, relentlessly – and cheerfully.

For their work with the Rappahannock Friends and Lovers of Our Watershed (RappFLOW), the
Rappahannock Food Pantry and Plant-a-Row program, historic districts and conservation in general, Beverly and Hal Hunter are being recognized jointly as Rappahannock News’ 2009 Citizens of the Year.

“The choice of Hal and Bev as Citizens of the Year is in some ways an inspired one, but in some ways a no-brainer,” said County Administrator John W. McCarthy, who has worked with them on many projects over the years. “It’s a no-brainer because it’s hard to imagine any couple that have given more of their time, efforts and energies to the community at large. And it’s inspired because . . . it’s nice to see the deserving rewarded.”

Take this to heart: If you can identify a need, have a will to make positive change, and don’t care who gets the credit, you can change the world.  I’m very proud of my parents.

Nothing is more precious than to be able to decide

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“When I set out to take Vienna, I take Vienna.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” – Napoleon

I posted about an interview we did recently with Dan Glaser, CEO of Marsh, but it’s not enough.  I’ve been reviewing the tapes and it’s so rich with cool ideas to share.  Dan Glaser has restored performance discipline at Marsh and enjoyed seven quarters of increased performance, but look behind the curtain.  Yes, he restored focus but here’s another clue to how he got to financial excellence – “let your leaders run.”  That’s the expression he used when building expansion and opportunity at Marsh.  You might think a 5B insurance giant might be laden with bureaucracies.  And there is some of that, but Glaser started only two years ago with a few, but focused, ideas, and he doesn’t miss a trick.

First, he looked to the ground floor – he spent time interviewing and lunching with the people who do the work at Marsh.  He would walk the halls and ask associates, “What are you working on?” and “How does that fit in our greater mission and values?”  In many cases he ran into people who reported to four different people, which created conflict in their behaviors and actions.  The first step was to streamline the reporting process and get people aligned with the projects and ideas that provide value to customers.

Then he asked his managers – he appropriately calls them leaders – to pursue possibilities, not probabilities.  Probabilities suggest what might happen to you, to the organization – what you might have to react to.  It’s a limiting and reactive mindset.  Glaser asked Marsh leaders to look toward possibilities, not probabilities.  Possibilities leave the future open to be created, the landscape to be defined by wide-open opportunity.  The sky is the limit mentality.

But to be sure, while leaders at Marsh are offered the open leash to explore, they are indeed held to specific business initiatives which will create value for the customer, build growth for associates, and create shareholder value.  Glaser famously (at least internally since he is a fairly private person) held his key leader retreat in a windowless conference room in their NY offices, not in a swanky resort, and built the culture that they intend to be a lean, highly performing, multi-national focused on delivering results and customer value.

Here is an interview excerpt in which he is talking about allowing white space in the organization to allow people to create. Enjoy!

The more you give, the happier you are

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A remarkable event occurred just a couple weeks ago at USC Marshall School of Business.  Three titans of leadership – Warren Bennis, Bill George, and John Hope Bryant gathered to share their insights on emerging leadership practices and what it’s really going to take to reset the economy and re-establish trust in the financial sector, and it’s not rocket science.  According to the panel we need to restore collaboration, trust, humility, passion, and purpose – and no, it wasn’t Robert Fulghum on stage, but the message remains the same.

John Hope Bryant is the author of Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear Based World, and Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE Inc., a non-profit social investment banking organization self-help provider of economic empowerment tools and services for the underserved.  He has a powerful message that ultimately you must ask yourself, “Does my work matter?  Am I making a difference?”  John encourages people everywhere to abandon the pervasive selfish attitudes that dominate contemporary thinking – the ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitudes, and instead focus on what you can contribute.

Bryant urges us all to shift our thinking to how we can contribute, how we can give, how we can ease suffering, enlighten others, and offer our time, interactions and energy to giving.  In his work, he sees time and again that those who give without concern or interest for WIIFM, always wind up healthier, happier and spiritually (and economically too) richer.

Not convinced?  Consider this research paper on happiness by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton published in Science Magazine.  The basis for the study was the supposition that people’s happiness is more affected by their behavior, than by their income level.  Most people are familiar with the consistent research that once basic food and security needs are met, money does not equal happiness.  Their proposal was that what we do with the money and resources we do have, has a greater affect on how we feel than the amount of resources we have available.  In one section of the study they followed people who were receiving bonuses of various amounts, and tracked what they did with it.  Some paid bills or the mortgage, or treated themselves to something special, while others gave to charity or bought gifts for others.  This kind of charitable or gifting behavior they called “prosocial.”  Take the results to heart, “Employees who devoted more of their bonus to prosocial spending experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself.”

You can see the entire panel discussion here.  Enjoy!

What Matters Now

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I suspect (hope) by the time you read this, you may have already checked out What Matters Now – assembled by the editorial talents of Seth Godin, a compendium of thought-leadership from all reaches weighing in on, well… What Matters Now.

Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin, urges that there is no such thing as boring information – the sublime can be found everywhere – but only boring presentations and boring attempts at transferring knowledge.

On ignoring the skeptics, Aimee Johnson, VP of Strategy Starbucks, echoes Paul Hawken who recently said, ” Don’t be put off by off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are finished.”

Even Tom Peters! makes a guest appearance offering the 19 Es! of Excellence! and although his emphatic punctuation is an easy target to poke at, he is right after all. If not excellence, then what? Reminds me of a great quote from an interview we did with Gareth Jones, “When it’s your turn to clean the grill, do it with excellence.” Because on the road to significance, everyone has a turn to dig ditches.

Dan Pink also drops by with notes on his emerging ideas about what drives us to give that discretionary 20% effort to our work, and it’s not about better ‘management.’ It’s about encouraging autonomy around what we do, with what tools and ideas, and with whom we collaborate. And it’s certainly not driven by an edict from Management.

But dear friends, it’s Elizabeth Gilbert (page 11) yet again who had me laughing out loud. Gilbert entreats us all to give ourselves to ease. To pause, exhale, and just for one lonely moment in this always-on go-go twitterific maelstrom, to check out and gaze at a blue sky. Or admire your children play, or even take a nap.

If you irresistibly respond to your email alerts – those insistent lower right apparitions right? – it might be time to exhale. ‘Tis the season after all for reflection, sharing, connecting, and rejoicing. The world will still need saving tomorrow and if you take an interval for renewal, you might be all the wiser for it. And if you haven’t seen her TED Talk yet on what it means to be called a genius, you must check it out.

The Purpose Driven Leader – Rick Warren on Peter Drucker

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“Every social and global problem is a business opportunity in disguise.” – Peter Drucker

Last week we attended the Peter Drucker Centennial conference in Vienna, Austria and had the incredible opportunity to interview and film world thinkers and leaders who were there celebrating and discussing Peter Drucker’s legacy and the future of management and business in the world.  Peter Drucker called himself a ‘social ecologist’ – which is to say he focused on understanding and improving human interaction, our constructs in business, government and communities, and that impact on our lives and environment. Another favored definition is: ‘the study and practice of personal, social and environmental sustainability and change based on the critical application and integration of ecological, humanistic, community and spiritual values’

The key words there are ‘integration’ and ‘application.’ Rick Warren, author of A Purpose Driven Life, attended and gave the opening address at the conference and spoke of the three primary characteristics that defined Drucker’s life and work: Integrity, Humility, and Generosity.

These three traits are the antidotes to the three traps of today’s leaders.  The first trap is to segment and partition our lives into work life, home life, sporting life, community-service life, etc., and instead our greatest strength comes from integrating all the disparate interactions, ideas and energies into a unified and integrated whole.  The etymology of integrity is from the Latin integer, meaning wholeness, or the unit of one.  Rick pointed out that the second trap is to focus and try to remediate what we think are our faults.  Often humility is misunderstood to mean acceptance of weakness or inadequacy, when instead humility is freedom from arrogance and pride.  And that intellectual freedom gives way to the ability to recognize the marvelous and to embrace wonder and curiosity.  And then, importantly, to be inquisitive and open to learning.  Rick had a powerful story about how each time he went to visit Peter Drucker and learn from him, he wound up trying to answer and wrestle with Drucker’s own persistent questions.

And finally Rick echoed Drucker’s advice that management and leadership was a liberal art yet a practical calling, and we all need to focus on what we can give and contribute in generosity.  The third trap is to hoard.  It’s no accident that to be miserly with time, energy, resources, talent, etc., is to be miserable.  From Peter Drucker to Rick Warren to you, pause to keep Integrity, Humility, and Generosity ever present.

You can see Rick Warren’s address here.  Doris Drucker’s address starts at about minute 35 and Rick Warren’s presentation at about minute 52.  Enjoy!

Lessons from Dan Glaser, CEO of Marsh

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The Results-Only-Work-Environment is certainly on the rise but it doesn’t appear to be a new phenomenon.  Yesterday afternoon we had an interview with DirecTV President Bruce Churchill who was describing how years ago as a McKinsey partner, they had fairly specific vacation requirements of executives and thus, people dutifully filled out their paperwork and took allotted vacation.  Then McKinsey leadership communicated that any executive could take whatever vacation they wanted – they were grown-ups and could manage their own time against obligations.  The result?  They worked more, were more productive, and took less vacation.  That’s right – once treated as accountable governors of their businesses, they chose to take less ‘official’ vacation and created more integrated balance in their professional lives on a self-regulated agenda.

Earlier that same day, we were interviewing Marsh CEO Dan Glaser who described a current experiment Marsh has constructed in Rotterdam.  They renovated a warehouse and set up an open, non-tiered based environment where associates can collaborate as appropriate depending on what projects they happen to be working on.  No schedules, no punch-cards, and no mandatory office time.  However, he visited their group and stated clearly that the office was accountable for results – they would need to demonstrate margins exceeding their peers elsewhere, and if they could, Marsh was committed to replicating the model.

Glaser went on to say, in his mind the three keys to effecting a successful turn-around at Marsh once he took office in 2007 were – and remain – Clients, Colleagues, and Performance.

Clients: He walked the corridors of Marsh and asked associates, “Do you understand what the mission and values of this company are?”  Quite often, he couldn’t get a clear answer and would reinforce the importance of focusing on the customer, and solving what the customer was trying to accomplish.  According to Glaser, if you do this, customer retention, and revenue, and shareholder value will follow.

Colleagues: He gathered his top team in a closed session in the building – not at an expensive resort junket – and emphasized they needed to focus less on what people do, and more on managing the quality of the relationship.  He described how new managers can get stuck wanting to be the go-to person to achieve as specific result, but ultimately only by giving trust can you allow everyone working with you to shine.  Marsh had also been a highly matrixed environment, where associates often reported to up to four different directors, and as such had differing focus and possibly competing objectives.  He was adamant in simplifying and cleaning the reporting environment so people developed clear focus.

Financial Performance:  Focusing on customers is great, but not at the expense of sacrificing your business model.  An overly eager fulfillment group can wag the company and distract from the core operating model.   And giving open entitlement to colleagues to execute on their own terms will empower for sure, but toward what end?  Above all, by communicating a shared vision of what success looks like, performance will follow.