Re-position your L&D like R&D
It is nice to get a connect with you. Let me introduce myself and tell you why I do what I do to set the ball rolling for our professional friendship.
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I am a curious student of business management for last 20 years. That is my passion.
I would like to share one important insight about corporates with you.
The interesting thing about it is, we see it but don't see it. Just like cows here in India, we see them but we don't see them. Just like the potholes on the road, we see them but we don't see them. We are all living with them, it is so ingrained in us that it has become part of our culture.
The thing I am going to tell, has also become a part of corporate cultures for a long time now.
Well I first noticed it when I was an official student of management. It was the year of 2010 and I was a student at IIM Indore. At IIMs we always get the smartest of the lot. There were 1000s of clubs. I felt like I know nothing. The feeling of BEING A ZERO. In one of the classes, our Prof taught us about the Basic branches of Mgmt - Marketing, Ops, Fin and HR. Strategy sits on top of it. Everyone wanted to ace in strategy. It was cool. Few wanted to do something in Sales, few in mktg, few were the real finance/economics nerds.
But No one wanted to take HR. It was not fashionable.
And if I borrow Peter Thiel's words about Stanford, I can say the same thing about IIMs. "Everyone who was outside, was eager to get inside and everyone who was inside eager to get outside". Honestly, I was not that eager for placements because of my entrepreneurship madness but still, I was with the flow. I was out and joined corporate world. Although I had a really diverse and good experience in Auto Industry before MBA, life after MBA was changed a lot. I got to view the End to End IT industry (Order to cash) from the top. I had seen Auto industry from part to port from almost the bottom with the blue collar workers. Now, I was now seeing the IT industry from the top with the CXOs.
My 2000 people IT company was stuck in the middle. Just like the mid life crisis. it was neither too big nor too small. To add to the woes it was a publically listed company. So we had to transform the company, do NEW things without affecting our revenues and profits. A really tough job, its like doing an operation of a patient without anaesthesia. We hired Mckinsey to do the same. The plan was the complete transformation of the organization with multiple strategic initiatives. I was part of almost all of them. (ALSO) We implemented ERP across the global offices for Order to Cash. We implemented LEAN in software, We created an Offering Dev Process and we also built a Talent creation engine, on the lines of TAS, to create TechnoManages and promote internal youngsters on accelerated growth.
While I was involved in these major initiatives, I realized one thing :
Whatever initiative we ran, nothing was successful without we bringing everyone affected on the same page. It was ALL ABOUT communication, change management, learning and more importantly, teaching, "Making them learn happily".
Although learning was so critical to everything,
I still saw that L&D still was not as fashionable as it should have been. Just like it was when I was at IIM. It was lacking pride.
There is a need to give learning (& teaching) its due importance and that became my IKIGAI, the Purpose of Life. I Relinquished that 'so called' successful career to start up. Give Back to society, through entrepreneurship related to Learning became by IKIGAI. And we launched GetAConnect in 2017.
The first thing I decided was being 100% ethical with ZERO compromise for customers. No cheating business. Even if we fail, we would be ok with that, rather happy that we gave it a fair try. I followed a bootstrapped way and no external funding actually helped us stay on track to what we believed in, rather than running behind revenue and targets.
As we studied deeper on how to make learning better for last 5 years, we realized that Digital Disruption is going to kill businesses without notice. The only way to survive is not OutLearn. Not just LEARN but OutLearn.
OutLearn, because it is not just about “acquiring some skills”, but about “reinventing how business is done". It demands re-positioning of your L&D like R&D.
L&D should be made fashionable. Re-position your L&D like R&D, that's what you can do with GetAConnect, using technology, our domain knowledge of BEST Practices, at no 'data risks' to your organization.
It is HIGH TIME now, that we SEE what we really SEE. We can't take things for granted because this tsunami of change is really going to flood everything. We need to change our culture and the way we look at things. We need to give learning its due. We need to Reposition our L&D like R&D.
It requires new eyes. It requires your own Corporate OutLearning Practice sponsored by your CXOs, your business, not just HR function.
How about you? Are you giving learning its due?
Are you using learning to make you real money, bring in customers, attract top class talent, develop new products jointly with your existing as well as potential customers? Are you using learning as your secret weapon? Are you using it as your competitive advantage?
Ping me if you have any issues/problems/challenges related to use of learning for your business. I will be happy to help.
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