S7 E10: Shift from a "Know It All" Company to a "Learn It All" Company

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My guest this week is Chris Pirie, who until recently, was General Manager in Microsoft’s SMGSR organization. Chris led the training and readiness for all Microsoft’s sales, marketing, and technical field employees worldwide.

Chris joined Microsoft in September 2004 as Senior Director of Learning Product Development, and subsequently he held global sales and marketing responsibility for Microsoft Learning, the organization’s customer training business. Chris has launched The Learning Futures Group which helps organizations rethink their Learning and Development strategy in the face of historic disruption and change in the workplace.

What You Will Learn from this Interview:

• The most agile companies win: How does learning support this strategy?
• Bold experiments in learning: How do organizations, companies and networks create the right environment to foster individual agility and fitness to become a better learner?
• Companies relaxing with learning: It’s not micromanaging the process, but creating an environment that encourages a learning culture and putting some scaffolding around it.
• Old frameworks and top-down modules of learning are dying: Today the expertise isn’t always at the top of the network or the organization. Things are moving too quickly for old structured processes.
• The power of the metaphor with learning: Giving companies the ability to take on new ideas and develop new intellectual property, like patents, by their ability to ingest new ideas from outside their four walls.
• Advanced research in learning using neuroscience: Offering better ways to understand how to move information into long-term memory. Discovering which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process.

With this, I want to welcome you to my interview with Chris Pirie.

Major Take-Aways from this Episode are:

• There are about 170 documented cognitive biases, which are a fundamental part of how the brain operates. Research coded into workable models will help learning experience designers to leverage brain chemistry and biases.
• Collapse expertise’s from Edge to Core of the business.
• How to use hackathons to build learning cultures. Organizations are creating open opportunities for learning where people teach each other and learn together – using all the resources of the company to do things that they’re passionate about.
• Scaffolding learning strategies. Organizations not just voicing the importance of a learning culture, but showing their commitment by creating the “scaffolding” to support building one.
• People organizing their own learning vs. being told what, when, and how to learn. New models are proving that it’s much more useful to give people the skills to organize their own world rather than structuring everything for them.
• Leaders viewing learning as a source of growth and a source of competitive advantage. Organizations make space for people to bring their natural ability to learn, to be curious and teach each other.

Read the Full Transcript Here

About Chris Pirie

Chris brings a passion for driving disruptive change and innovation, a proven business and people leader of large functional teams in very dynamic enterprise environments. Skilled in strategic Partnerships with leading business schools such as INSEAD, and learning related technology and service providers.

Chris has launched The Learning Futures Group to help organizations rethink their Learning and Development strategy in the face of historic disruption and change in the workplace. He was formerly a Partner-Level General Manager at Microsoft and VP of eLearning at Oracle.

He built deep expertise in, the digital transformation of workplace learning and technology; including B2C product management, product marketing, enterprise software sales, channel partnerships, sales and technical field enablement, digital transformation, marketing and award winning large scale global talent development programs such as PitchPerfect, Microsoft Business School, Oracle Learning Network, and Microsoft Certifications.

Ways to Connect with Chris Pirie

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram 

Resources + Links

• The Learning Future’s Group: Chris recently left Microsoft and started The Learning Future’s Group which helps organizations rethink their Learning and Development strategy in the face of historic disruption and change in the workplace.
• Why Everything You Know About How Companies Learn Is About to Change, Interview with Lisa Kay Solomon for SingularityHub
• The Digital Disruption of Corporate Learning – Bertelsmann CLO Summit recoup about digital disruption and transformation discussions from the summit in Berlin
• Flat White or the Start of a Valuable Learning Journey?

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard, a powerful tool that helps you communicate the status of your IT Security program visually in just a few minutes.

Credits:
* Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound

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About Bill Murphy
Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter.