Ultimate_Writer

Sherrie Eoff June 26, 2009

Willis, V. J., & May, G. L. (2000). Strategy and the chief learning officer. In Bonner, D. (Ed.), Leading knowledge management and learning (pp. 55-70). Alexandria, VA: American Society for Training & Development.

I recently completed a three-day seminar produced by Miller Heiman on Strategic Selling and their strategic Large Account Management Program at work. With it fresh in my mind, this article raised a number of really interesting points that tied into our training. My company sounds very similar to Millbrook- made up of recent acquisitions that have never been successfully cultural integrated as well as divided into silos that often prohibit us from achieving our vision of providing “integrated supply chain solutions” to our customers. The conversations that occurred amongst the two dozen of us attending the seminar would have benefitted from the ideas of this article.

Jacobson is currently in the midst of planning a reorganization of the company; I am unsure where we are headed right now, but we would greatly benefit from a CLO. In the past we have been good at giving lip service to facilitating learning and change. It was readily apparent, however, at the recent seminar that even our top level full-time sales and leading operations management team members are not given the support and resources they need to implement the change that is talked about within the company. Both Miller Heiman courses are focused on true strategic partnerships and the capacity to find win-win solutions. During the hands-on discussion it was painfully clear that Jacobson lacks knowledge sharing practices. The seminar was sponsored by our Chief Development Officer, the person in our organization who most closely resembles the defined CLO.

We have ways to conduct needs analysis and design and evaluation studies, but only at the initial pre-closing stages of doing business with the customer; business process redesign teams are also missing. Our CDO oversees formal communications and graphic design, but has been prevented by lack of allocated resources from implementing many of the strategic initiatives mentioned in the article. Attempts to refine our vision and address cultural maintenance issues have been rebuffed; the sales teams are expected to conduct training in their silos, but sell solutions that involve all business units.

A comment was made by an SVP of sales during our debriefing that boiled down to this: “our corporate culture talks strategy but pushes tactics; we are missing the forest for the trees”. A small brainstorming session took place afterwards one night and several of the suggestions made are essentially paraphrases of the threefold mission of the CLO. The group was stumped as to where these duties would be instituted. It was never considered that they could all fall under the same title, and we never considered that the person to run it would be a c-level executive, but we repeatedly said that executive buy-in and championship would be necessary in order for it to be successful. The group determined to continue to think about the best way to reinforce our company’s strategic vision and provide us with the most appropriate tools available to work cross-functionally. I will be distributing copies of this article, perhaps with a few key highlights to everyone in our de facto group.