MONDAY*
EXECUTIVE
Most of us recognize that what we absorbed in the college classroom was at best a foundation for absorbing more, and a fragile foundation at that. “For knowledge, by its very definition, makes itself obsolete every few years,” Peter Drucker asserted. “In the knowledge society,” he added, “learning is lifelong and does not end with graduation.” And yet, when it comes to refreshing our knowledge, many of us do it inadequately. The key question is: How are leaders supposed to ensure that they and their organizations are learning what needs to be learned? To help answer, we offer up six tips from corporate, nonprofit and government executives: Dial for ideas. Adjust the conference table. Make ignorance an asset. Solicit knowledge, not just money. Keep it short. And don’t waste time.
INSTILLING A CULTURE OF LIFELONG LEARNING
Given that we are now well into an era “in which knowledge workers dominate,” in the words of Peter Drucker, few things could be more obvious than the need to keep learning throughout our lives.
We know that what we absorbed in the college classroom was at best a foundation for absorbing more, and a fragile foundation at that.
“For knowledge, by its very definition, makes itself obsolete every few years, and then knowledge workers have to go back to school,” Drucker asserted. “They may be store managers … or physicians or engineers, but every few years they have to refresh and renew their knowledge. Otherwise they risk becoming obsolescent. … It will force us to accept that, in the knowledge society, learning is lifelong and does not end with graduation.”
Not surprisingly, given its import, lifelong learning has been the subject of hundreds and hundreds of books. It is the term slapped on classes for senior citizens. It was even the name given to a six-year initiative by the European Union to offer its residents “a range of exchanges, study visits and networking activities.” (Surely, the good folks in the UK must have missed this last month when they voted to bolt from the EU.)
And yet, for all of this, when it comes to refreshing our knowledge, many of us do it inadequately. The necessity of truly updating and renewing what we know often collides with a deep-seated preference for tinkering around the margins of our existing skills and insights. And even if we’re willing to go deeper, we still might veer in the wrong direction.
FRAME WORK
The Drucker Institute’s Phalana Tiller visits with John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte Consulting’s Center for the Edge, to talk about the nine things organizations can do to foster scalable learning.
Indeed, if you lead an organization, odds are that new ideas relevant to your work are being generated faster than any single person can possibly absorb them. How do you make sure you take in the most significant ones?
At the same time, how do you put your people in position to learn what’s truly valuable to them? After that, how do you put their knowledge to work? How do you use it to change things for the better—that is, to innovate?
In short, how are leaders supposed to ensure that they and their organizations are learning what needs to be learned?
We cannot offer a comprehensive answer because no one really can. What we can provide, however, are half a dozen examples of executives from all sectors—corporate, nonprofit and government—who have come to some notable answers of their own. They, in turn, may help you with yours.
Assuming, that is, you’re ready to learn.
STEVE KERR: DIAL FOR IDEAS
Steve Kerr has been involved with education for his entire career, including a stint as dean of the faculty of the business school at the University of Southern California in the late 1980s. But it was at General Electric that he became the first person whose business card read “Chief Learning Officer.”
Jack Welch, GE’s chief executive at the time, felt that the title conveyed more dynamism than would “chief education officer.” (Plus, the abbreviation CLO would cause less confusion than having two “CEO”s.) This was in 1994, and the central challenge facing Kerr was how to create more sharing of knowledge across company lines.
Even the best companies have trouble moving information across boundaries, and GE, like most, experienced difficulties trying to do it. Complicating things was the company’s far-flung range of activities: running a TV network, building jet engines, providing financial services, supplying medical equipment.
People and information—those are the things that conglomerates tend not to share.
STEVE KERR
Former Chief Learning Officer, General Electric
Former Chief Learning Officer, General Electric
VOX BOX
WHAT’S THE BIGGEST THING ORGANIZATIONS CAN DO TO FOSTER LIFELONG LEARNING?
—Interviews by T.A. Frank
A major thing that both owners and top managers can do is recognize what’s right under their noses: a vibrant culture of informal learning in most workplaces. We have documented this in Canada through a series of national surveys and case studies that we have conducted and published since the late 1990s, all of which confirm the same basic point: In most workplaces, there is a large array of informal learning being done by workers—on their own collectively, individually and with mentors, and it often leads to upgraded work techniques and procedures. This valuable sort of learning has been largely ignored, even over the past decade-plus, when we’ve seen a rhetorical emphasis on lifelong learning. Also, while we have a vibrant developing knowledge society, with more and more people getting a postsecondary education, we do not yet have an effective knowledge economy. There is a big gap between the knowledge many people are bringing to their workplaces and the knowledge they’re able to use in their workplaces. So job design is often more important than instilling lifelong learning per se. There are too many examples of workers who lack an opportunity to use the knowledge they already have.
Most nonprofit organizations are driven by a social mission. Underlining any social mission is the necessity of getting buy-in from stakeholders. You get that by creating awareness, and learning and training are inherent to that effort. You’re transforming the knowledge base of everyone, from worker to donor. The source of revenue is also changing constantly, so nonprofit organizations have to adapt to that continuously. As a result, for the organization to be effective, you have no option but to embrace lifelong learning. In the nonprofit sector, most of the learning is informal. Let’s say you’re the manager of accounting at a nonprofit. You know accounting and have your certification. However, beyond that knowledge, you need the knowledge to interact with funders. You acquire that in an informal process, learning what you need to know by working with them. No one is formally trained to become a lobbyist, but the world has plenty of lobbyists. Nonprofits engage in advocacy, and there is no formal template for learning that.
In teaching people how to learn, we have to think about the motive for them to learn. People in the public sector are not there for the big salaries. They are there to make a difference. They have the ability to affect citizens every single day, and that’s a hugely motivating factor. An organization can play to that motivation by asking the right questions, of which the most important is this: How do we add value and meaning to work? When employees think about how their work adds value to the community and provides meaning for the individual, then lifelong learning follows. Specifically, employees should be encouraged to think about questions like these: How do I best contribute? How can I individually make a difference? What do I need to know in order to serve the public and add value to a community? How are things now, and how would I like them to be instead? Employees in effective government organizations are inspired to learn by thinking about how they make a difference and connect to the big picture.
A major thing that both owners and top managers can do is recognize what’s right under their noses: a vibrant culture of informal learning in most workplaces. We have documented this in Canada through a series of national surveys and case studies that we have conducted and published since the late 1990s, all of which confirm the same basic point: In most workplaces, there is a large array of informal learning being done by workers—on their own collectively, individually and with mentors, and it often leads to upgraded work techniques and procedures. This valuable sort of learning has been largely ignored, even over the past decade-plus, when we’ve seen a rhetorical emphasis on lifelong learning. Also, while we have a vibrant developing knowledge society, with more and more people getting a postsecondary education, we do not yet have an effective knowledge economy. There is a big gap between the knowledge many people are bringing to their workplaces and the knowledge they’re able to use in their workplaces. So job design is often more important than instilling lifelong learning per se. There are too many examples of workers who lack an opportunity to use the knowledge they already have.
Most nonprofit organizations are driven by a social mission. Underlining any social mission is the necessity of getting buy-in from stakeholders. You get that by creating awareness, and learning and training are inherent to that effort. You’re transforming the knowledge base of everyone, from worker to donor. The source of revenue is also changing constantly, so nonprofit organizations have to adapt to that continuously. As a result, for the organization to be effective, you have no option but to embrace lifelong learning. In the nonprofit sector, most of the learning is informal. Let’s say you’re the manager of accounting at a nonprofit. You know accounting and have your certification. However, beyond that knowledge, you need the knowledge to interact with funders. You acquire that in an informal process, learning what you need to know by working with them. No one is formally trained to become a lobbyist, but the world has plenty of lobbyists. Nonprofits engage in advocacy, and there is no formal template for learning that.
In teaching people how to learn, we have to think about the motive for them to learn. People in the public sector are not there for the big salaries. They are there to make a difference. They have the ability to affect citizens every single day, and that’s a hugely motivating factor. An organization can play to that motivation by asking the right questions, of which the most important is this: How do we add value and meaning to work? When employees think about how their work adds value to the community and provides meaning for the individual, then lifelong learning follows. Specifically, employees should be encouraged to think about questions like these: How do I best contribute? How can I individually make a difference? What do I need to know in order to serve the public and add value to a community? How are things now, and how would I like them to be instead? Employees in effective government organizations are inspired to learn by thinking about how they make a difference and connect to the big picture.
LEIF EDVINSSON: ADJUST THE CONFERENCE TABLE
Leif Edvinsson, a Swede often described as the “godfather of intellectual capital,” credits a U.S. institution, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, with teaching him how to learn.
“They trained me to not just respond to the question but look for what’s behind the question and to see the deeper pattern and to challenge the pattern,” says Edvinsson, who attended Haas in the 1970s.
Edvinsson took this habit of mind to Swedish financial services giant Skandia, where some credit him with becoming the world’s first corporate “knowledge manager” in the early 1990s.
It was in that position that Edvinsson discovered just how hard it is to manage knowledge—especially as employees approach middle age.
Creativity and curiosity typically come in a U shape, according to Edvinsson: They peak in a person’s youth and in older age but tend to hit a trough when someone reaches their early 40s. That, of course, is precisely the time that many executives are entering C-suite positions.
Edvinsson believes that the stress of these jobs causes the brain to close up, inhibiting learning.
So what can you do? Edvinsson says that small steps toward reducing anxiety can make a big difference. Among them: Lower the height of the conference table, where senior executives routinely meet, to make it more comfortable and inviting. “Spice your environment with signals of being at home,” advises Edvinsson, who is now an emeritus professor at Lund University.
“Where do you think knowledge sharing happens more naturally?” he asks. “In the kitchen or the boardroom?”
PROVIDING A LIFT
Thomas Tighe, the president of the nonprofit Direct Relief, makes a point of asking corporations such as FedEx for their knowledge, not just their money.
WATER
COOLER
CHATTER
Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th century German psychologist, was the first to describe the shape of the “learning curve”—the course of progress made in learning something.
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In the past year, 73% of employed adults with at least a college degree have engaged in some sort of job-related training.
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Bill Gates reads about 50 books annually.
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In 1972, psychologist Samuel Dubin estimated the half-life of knowledge for a doctoral degree in psychology—the length of time by which half of what you’ve learned has become obsolete or wrong—to be about 10 years.
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A hat-tip to: Robert H. Wozniak; Pew Research Center; Quartz; and Introduction to Clinical Psychology by Jeffrey Hecker and Geoffrey Thorpe, respectively.
KYMBER WALTMUNSON: MAKE IGNORANCE AN ASSET
By definition, the auditor of King County, Wash., needs a staff of great learners.
After all, the knowledge they require to do their job changes constantly. One month they might be charged with assessing the effectiveness of a jail diversion program in Seattle, only to then take on a full-blown review of the entire county transportation system.
“We’re absolutely not experts in the fields we’re auditing until we audit them,” explains Kymber Waltmunson, who has worked at the auditor’s office for eight years and has led it for the past three. “Part of our job is to be generalists, learn quickly, and to know where to go and who to consult.”
One of the reasons for her staff’s success—they recently won a major award from the Association of Local Government Auditors—is that they don’t hide the fact that they don’t know much heading into an assignment. Rather than be sheepish about their ignorance, they embrace it, asking the most basic question to begin: What should we even be looking for?
They then go out and seek the answer from a wide variety of experts. They even read other audits covering similar situations in other jurisdictions—the way a wedding band might listen to endless versions of “We’ve Only Just Begun” so as to pick up a few fine points.
One notable effort in recent years involved an audit of the county’s Office of Law Enforcement Oversight, which is responsible for ensuring the integrity and transparency of misconduct investigations in the Sheriff’s Office. Over the better part of a year, Waltmunson’s auditors spoke to scores and scores of people with deep knowledge of the field: police officers around the country, the American Civil Liberties Union, authorities on civilian oversight, university scholars and officials at all levels of the department itself.
What resulted was an 83-page report, which found, among other concerns, that the Sheriff’s Office personnel being overseen were the ones defining their own oversight. Fixing this required a ballot initiative, which passed in 2014.
Spotting a problem like this is invariably made easier, Waltmunson suggests, when one’s mind is truly wide open going in. “We have a lot of flexible thinkers,” she says.
THOMAS TIGHE: SOLICIT KNOWLEDGE, NOT JUST MONEY
Nonprofits usually ask corporations for one thing: money from their foundations. Thomas Tighe, the president of Direct Relief, has long asked them for something else: to teach him and his colleagues how to be better at what they do.
“The exposure to people who have a different orientation can be very powerful,” says Tighe, whose Santa Barbara, Calif.-based humanitarian organization provides medicines, supplies and equipment to improve the health of people affected by poverty, disaster and civil unrest. (Direct Relief won the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation, now called The Drucker Prize, in 2011.)
To keep an eye out for such opportunities, Tighe says, it’s crucial to separate purpose from function. For example, Costco doesn’t exist to improve the health of impoverished communities, but it sure knows something about distribution—a function that’s central to what Direct Relief does. Google’s primary purpose isn’t to raise philanthropic contributions online, but it definitely has a lot to impart to an organization like Direct Relief about how to connect efficiently and effectively with potential supporters.
And FedEx wasn’t founded to get medical supplies into crisis areas, but it knows an awful lot about optimizing logistics and handling bottlenecks or surges. “Given our logistics challenges, it would make no sense to seek from FedEx only financial support so we could then try to use that money to buy logistics services,” says Tighe. “The thought was, ‘How would FedEx do this?’ and then, ‘Maybe we should ask them.’”
In fact, Direct Relief has approached FedEx and Google and many other corporations with a simple proposition: We’re eager to learn from you if you’re willing to help us. And in all three cases—as well as many more—corporate executives have turned out to be very, very generous with what they know.
When a nonprofit asks for ideas instead of just dollars, says Tighe, “it changes the nature of the conversation.”
DEEPER DIVES
CLASS ACT
Rather than lay off his employees during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, K.H. Moon, who was then the CEO of Yuhan-Kimberly, paid for them to take courses on a range of subjects.
ALEX KHURGIN: KEEP IT SHORT—144 SECONDS OR LESS, TO BE EXACT
For anyone with romantic ideas of learning—perhaps a stack of books to be read, a tweed jacket to be donned, a leather wing chair in which to settle—Grovo is there to help bring you back to earth.
The New York-based company offers an online learning platform that is designed to train people in the way in which learning actually sticks: in very small bursts, with plenty of practice and an immediate chance to apply what’s been learned.
“We’re actually trying to transform people in how they think and in what they do,” says Alex Khurgin, Grovo’s director of learning.
Grovo’s learning platform is shaped by a handful of underlying principles: Attention is a limited resource. Mastery comes only with doing something again and again. Cramming does not work. Sleep is crucial.
There’s also this: Motivation waxes and wanes. People are going to be most receptive to learning right when they’ve been hired or moved into a new role.
For Grovo, what all of this adds up to is “microlearning”—specifically, courses consisting primarily of super-short videos (like this one.) The longest video that Grovo offers is 144 seconds; many are under a minute. The approach, Khurgin says, has proven to work whether someone is being taught hard skills or soft ones.
The microlearning begins by communicating what Khurgin calls the “aha moment”: the essential insight someone is supposed to grasp. On day two (with a good night’s rest in between), tips are provided for how that insight can actually be applied on the job. In the following days, the learner is guided to try out the idea over and over. Real learning “only comes with repetition,” Khurgin says.
To that end, every lesson concludes with a cue card that helps someone take what they’ve just learned and use it in the real world. For instance, if the lesson is to make a habit of recognizing your employees in order to help motivate them, then the platform might prompt you to send an email to a person on your team recognizing him or her for something recently done well.
“We really believe in practice,” Khurgin says. “Practice not just until you get something right but until you can’t get something wrong. That’s usually what’s missing from our self-directed attempts at learning. We don’t do enough practice.”
K.H. MOON: DON’T WASTE TIME
In 1997, when the Asian financial crisis hit, lots of executives in that part of the world ran for cover. K.H. Moon saw it as a tremendous opportunity for his employees to pause and learn.
“Even though we’ve graduated from high school or university, we haven’t studied in a long time,” says Moon, who was then the CEO of the Korean consumer products giant Yuhan-Kimberly. “Why don’t we fill up our holes of capability?”
At the time, many Korean companies were reducing their workforces by 30%. Moon felt this was the wrong thing to cut.
Yuhan-Kimberly had lots of machines, warehouses and slow-moving products, and not all were worth keeping during the downturn. “Instead of dismissing people, why not dismiss underutilized assets first?” Moon asks.
This type of ownership is critical, if people are going to sustain their lifelong learning habits. If we had asked them to learn this or learn that, we might have discouraged them.
K.H. MOON
Former CEO, Yuhan-Kimberly
Former CEO, Yuhan-Kimberly
Meanwhile, the work that remained was spread out, as the company moved from a three-crew, three-shift arrangement to a four-crew, two-shift schedule. This allowed Yuhan-Kimberly to avoid slashing its payroll, while giving employees more free time.
But Moon was determined that these extra hours not be squandered. And so Yuhan-Kimberly paid for workers to attend classes, with a full menu of options offered. “Some decided to study Chinese or English,” Moon recalls. “Some learned Microsoft Office. Some learned about time management. All kinds of topics were allowed, based on their own priorities.
“This type of ownership is critical,” Moon adds, “if people are going to sustain their lifelong learning habits. If we had asked them to learn this or learn that, we might have discouraged them.”
The payoff: Yuhan-Kimberly saw worker engagement and productivity go up so much, Moon says, it more than paid for the cost of the program.
Today, Moon is CEO of another company, Hansoll Textile (and serves as a member of the Drucker Institute’s Board of Advisors). There, he continues to encourage lifelong learning by supporting study groups and workshops where peers meet and share knowledge. Hansoll also has developed “innovation circles” that enable workers to learn across different departments. And there are monthly video conferences in which the exchange of ideas is encouraged.
And while no one is wishing for another financial crisis, one thing is certain: If and when it ever happens, K.H. Moon will not allow it to go to waste. *
Monday Mandate*
What will you do on Monday that’s different?
TRACK YOUR RESULTS
Whenever you take on a major task, write down your expectations—and then see if the results live up to them. The gaps will help show you what you need to learn.
TEACH SOMEBODY ELSE
Volunteer to coach or mentor a colleague, with the firm understanding that the best way to truly learn something yourself is to teach it to others.
DEVOUR SOME DICKENS
Remember Peter Drucker’s notion that management is a liberal art, and should draw heavily on all of the humanities. So read a novel with a new eye, asking, “What can I learn here that I might apply to my work?”
