1. March 2016 | CLOmedia.com
➤ The Problem With
Executive Education
➤ Leadership Lessons
From the EMBA
➤ Roadmap to Effective
Executive Education
➤ Hot List of Executive
Education Providers
LinkedIn’s
KELLY PALMER
SPECIAL
E DI T I O N
2. 8 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2016
Features
XX
18
28
32
38
CLO as Brand Ambassador
Wendy Webb
Branding is more than logos, snazzy commercials and
targeted hiring practices. Those are important, but in the end
it’s all about learning.
Special Edition: Executive Education
Kellye Whitney
Online learning is having a big effect on executive education.
Fortunately, providers are adapting to ensure leaders have
the skills they need to succeed in business.
The Problem With Executive Education
Bravetta Hassell
For executive education to survive and thrive, it needs to pay
close attention to the business community’s leadership
needs and pick up the pace of curriculum change.
Leadership Lessons From the EMBA
Randall P. White
Leadership development is part and parcel of executive
MBA programs. It’s also a hefty investment, but many
organizations find the ROI worthwhile.
Hot List of Executive Education Providers
Compiled by Bravetta Hassell
Executive education programs with a global presence.
ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY JAY WATSON
ON THE WEB
Join the CLO LinkedIn Group
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when implementing social learning
tools? How do you establish a
learning objective when someone
does not self-identify a skills gap?
Discuss these topics and more in
Chief Learning Officer’s LinkedIn
group. Plus, we’ve been featuring reader comments in
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questions at CLOmedia.com/LinkedIn.
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Sp e c i a l Ed i t i o n
43
3. Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com 9
4 Editor’s Letter
The Quest for Executive Education
49 Advertisers’ Index
TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2016
Departments Experts
Resources
22
22
44
46
Profile
Case Study
Business Intelligence
Dreaming Big to Make Learning Happen
Kellye Whitney
For Kelly Palmer, LinkedIn’s chief learning officer, the
future of learning is now, and it’s all about technology,
personalized, curated content and social learning.
BBVA Bancomer Plays the Change Game
Sarah Fister Gale
BBVA Bancomer used gamification, social media and live
actors to transform a traditional banking culture into a
collaborative, environmentally focused digital organization.
How Are You Handling the Internet of Things?
Evan Sinar
Employees need to know why, how and when data about
them will be used — and it pays to promote a developmen-
tal rather than a punitive slant on data collection.
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10 IMPERATIVES
Elliott Masie
Stop Calling It ‘New’
12 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN
Bob Mosher
What’s in a Number?
14 LEADERSHIP
Ken Blanchard
4 Dialogues for First-time Managers
16 MAKING THE GRADE
Lee Maxey
A Reason to Identify and Connect Talent
50 IN CONCLUSION
Erika Andersen
Be Willing to Be Bad
18 44
4. 22 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
PROFILE Kelly Palmer
K
elly Palmer is a builder. Not the bricks-and-
mortar, feet-on-the-ground, put-X-tab-into-
Y-slot-type builder one might expect from a
leader with an engineering background. In-
stead, the Issaquah, Washington, native is a
kind of dream builder, one who was recruited away from
Yahoo Inc. almost four years ago to build a learning func-
tion from the ground up at LinkedIn Corp.
With more than 400 million members in more than 200
countries and territories and counting, the professional net-
work’s vision is a grand one: create economic opportunity for
every person in the world. It makes a similarly big promise to
its employees — to help them transform themselves, the
company and the world — and learning is a key enabler of
that value proposition.
That vision aligns neatly with Palmer’s personal and pro-
fessional goals. As the company’s chief learning officer —
with some responsibility for talent management as well as
diversity and inclusion — she is in the perfect position to
transform careers and lives.
“When you join LinkedIn, the promise from LinkedIn
and from the learning and development organization is
we’re going to enable you to transform the trajectory of
your career,” she said. “You’re going to be able to build the
skills and the knowledge to get better at the job you have
today, but also get those knowledge and skills so you can
get your dream job of the future.”
It’s an unusual idea. Organizations don’t, as a rule, con-
cern themselves with an employee’s future prospects, even
when learning and development is a priority. But this tactic,
while a bit counterintuitive, is one way to secure the best
talent; and talent is the bellwether with which LinkedIn will
achieve its lofty, global vision.
Richard Socarides, head of public affairs at Gerson Leh-
rman Group Inc., a membership network for one-on-one
professional learning, said he has watched LinkedIn’s trans-
formation with interest, in part because GLG is a large
consumer of the company’s products.
“To attract the best talent, which I think they’ve done,
you have to approach the whole professional learning par-
adigm in a new way,” he said. “No matter how great your
current place of employment, in three, five or seven years
you’re going to be working somewhere else.That’s the new
normal. LinkedIn is fully embracing that idea. It’s quite
bold and something that’s really hard for people to do.”
The Engineer Brain on Learning
Technology is a key enabler for a value proposition
around learning as a transformation tool. Palmer has
worked in some facet of technology almost her entire ca-
reer, including time at Sun Microsystems Inc. in the
1990s and 2000s. She began in product development and
user-experience design and expanded into roles including
director of Java tools engineering and director of product
engineering. When Sun began acquiring companies, she
was asked to expand her role of managing a 250-person
organization in 2002 to help integrate some of the new
acquisitions into the engineering business unit.
“I came to the point in my career where I was very
successful, and I was doing a lot of interesting things, but
I really didn’t feel like I was having an impact on the world
Dreaming Big to Make
Learning Happen
BY KELLYE WHITNEY
For Kelly Palmer, LinkedIn’s chief learning officer,
the future of learning is now, and it’s all about technology,
personalized, curated content and social learning.
ON THE WEB
Executive Education at LinkedIn
Is an Internal Affair
clomedia.com/LinkedInEducation
6. 24 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
PROFILE Kelly Palmer
the way I wanted to,” Palmer said. “So I stepped back. I
did a little soul searching, and ended up going back to my
roots in education.”
She applied for and got a job as the senior director of
Sun’s learning organization in 2006 and simultaneously
earned a master’s degree in instructional and performance
technology — with an emphasis on learning technology —
from Boise State University. Palmer said she had always
loved education and learning for the effect it can have on
people’s lives. She even earned a bachelor’s degree in En-
glish and communications from San Jose State University
with the intention of teaching at the university level, be-
fore an aptitude for technology lured her away.
Some years later, while firmly entrenched in the world
of work, she said she thought about quitting high tech
and going into education in the nonprofit sector so she
could use technology to effect change. She ultimately
didn’t; instead she satisfied her philanthropic leanings in
2014 by joining the board for the Taproot Foundation,
an organization that seeks to drive social change through
pro bono work.
After four years at Sun in an executive learning posi-
tion, Oracle Corp. bought the company in 2010, and
Palmer took a role at Yahoo, leading a large learning orga-
nization as vice president of learning. She spent two years
there before Linkedin recruited her in 2012. “It was an
amazing opportunity. I haven’t seen many start a learning
organization from scratch. It was exciting to think about
learning as a blank canvas, to think about all the things we
could do, how we could think about learning differently.”
Palmer said the learning community has been talking
about the need to do things differently for decades, yet
traditional learning hasn’t changed much beyond using
newer, technology-enabled delivery systems. That’s the
thing about having big, lofty goals. They can be tough to
realize. But in her current role, Palmer has been able to
shift the learning paradigm and put things in place that
employees actually use.
“She’s definitely a big-picture-idea person,” said Patri-
cia Wadors, senior vice president of global talent and chief
human resources officer at LinkedIn. “So she surrounds
herself with people who can execute and implement her
ideas, which is great. Being self-aware is a good thing.”
Wadors said when there is a problem to solve, Palmer is
loath to look at what has been done before, even if it was
successful. Instead the CLO considers, “What will work
right now?” Sometimes that means pushing back and look-
ing long term vs. adopting a short-term solution, “which I
appreciate,” Wadors said.
In addition to thinking like “an engineer” to solve prob-
lems, Wadors described Palmer as a thought leader when it
comes to business development and company strategy. She
was active in multiple facets of the company’s acquisition of
Lynda.com in 2015. “It’s been fun watching her play in
that space and evaluate the larger market significance and
LinkedIn’s potential role in it.
“She’s not afraid to try new things,” the CHRO said.
“It’s part of being a big thinker. She will look at what sticks
in our culture and employee base and can we modify it.
And, she’s an active learner herself.”
Intersection of Technology and Culture
Every learning program at LinkedIn reinforces its cul-
ture and values. Its products, vision and mission are part of
the same conversation beginning on new hires’ first day.
Onboarding involves a New Hire Roadmap, which out-
lines week by week a list of things they need to do to be-
come successful and productive in their first 30 days. Fur-
ther, the roadmap is gamified, with a progress bar across
the top to show the employee exactly how they’re doing
during the experience.
Next employees can access a tool called The Trans-
formation Plan, which aids their efforts to get better at
their current job and think about their career in the fu-
ture. “We serve up skills in this program so you can pick
what you want to focus on,” Palmer said. “Then you
can drag and drop curated learning assets into this trans-
formation plan, and track your progress over time
against those career goals.”
The platform upon which all of this happens is called
Learn[In], and it’s a far cry from traditional learning man-
agement systems, which Palmer said often don’t do what
learning leaders want them to do. “One of the first things I
did was hire a couple of developers and said, ‘Let’s build
this learning platform that will allow us to do curated con-
LinkedIn recruited Kelly Palmer in 2012 to build its learning organization from scratch,
which was “an amazing opportunity,” she said.
7. Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com 25
tent, to build a new hire roadmap and this transformation
plan so that we can do with learning what we always imag-
ined we could do.’ ”
After the transformation plan, learning strategy diverg-
es even more from traditional approaches. For instance,
instead of the popular 70-20-10 model, Palmer uses a 70-
30 model.Traditional learning is a bit antiquated, she said.
Worse, the lecture model — where people get in front of
people, then learners memorize facts and take tests — has
found its way into the corporate world.
At LinkedIn, she said 70 percent of the way people
learn is to get information when they need it, learning in
context of how they
do their job, or
learning in the con-
text of how they
want to move their
career rather than
use prescribed learn-
ing competencies or
learning paths. That
translates to a heavy
use of readily available online content. Some of that con-
tent is LinkedIn specific, and the company’s offerings were
greatly enhanced by the Lynda.com course repository.
The other 30 percent includes classroom training, and
that’s not all. “A few years ago people were under the im-
pression that if you did a lot of stuff online, you were say-
ing that you didn’t want to do anything in person any-
more; I couldn’t be saying anything further from that,”
Palmer said. “But the fact is people don’t have time to sit in
in-person activities a lot.”
Instead, when people do step away from their busy jobs
to spend time together, it should be done in intact work
groups where they’re solving real problems and practicing
activities they can immediately apply on the job. For in-
stance, last year Palmer and her team developed a four-
week program called Conscious Business to help employ-
ees put LinkedIn’s culture and values into practice on a
day-to-day basis.
Collaborating effectively, improving relationships, how
to communicate with co-workers, how to solve problems,
how to act with integrity — the program covers all of
these ideas in a variety of ways. Participants learn in cohort
groups and through videos, knowledge checks and prac-
tice activities with co-workers in real business scenarios.
They can share via a discussion board, and meet weekly
with a facilitator to synthesize learning. “It’s minimal time
in person, but very powerful. That’s an example of the fu-
ture of learning: It’s blended, pedagogically sound. It takes
it to a whole new level,” she said.
It’s All About the Data
Analytics, learning insights and dashboards are in con-
stant use at LinkedIn. The company uses data to mitigate
the challenges associated with information overload,
something all learners suffer given the amount of informa-
tion coming at them on a daily basis. Managing that over-
load is also why Learn[In] actively curates content for em-
ployees rather than just making it available.
An employee’s Google search to learn more about so-
cial media might produce thousands of hits. A Learn[In]
search, on the other hand, serves up the eight or 10 best,
most relevant pieces of learning content to help employ-
ees find what they need when they need it. Today, the
company handles content by topic area, but Palmer said
it plans to individualize curated content based on an
employee’s existing
skills and those the
employee hopes to
acquire.
Wadors said
Palmer often bases
learning strategy on
data, which the typ-
ical learning leader
doesn’t. For exam-
ple, “If people look a lot at how to code in mobile applica-
tions, she’ll see the trend and validate the need for the skill
to business leaders: Should we develop learning? Are you
trying to hire for it? Should we develop a solution?”
GLG’s Socarides said that kind of evaluative, learn-
ing-based approach to solving business problems is neces-
sary for today’s professionals to be successful and stay in-
novative. “The pace of innovation today requires all top
professionals to be lifelong learners,” he said. “And at the
center of that is taking a big-picture approach to what
learning means.”
Big-picture thinking is what LinkedIn, and Kelly Palm-
er, are all about. It’s likely a match made in heaven, given
both want to have a hand in changing the world.
“We have this notion of dream big, get shit done, and
know how to have fun,” Palmer said. “That’s a bit crass
because of that one word, but the idea is that dreaming
big is part of who we are as a company. If I’m leading
learning at LinkedIn, I have to dream big and make
things happen.”
She said CLOs in general have to think differently
about learning because the future will be more about
inspiring people rather than controlling them, help-
ing overwhelmed learners find what they need when
they need it and using talent analytics differently to
measure learning impact. There should be no more
butts-in-seats-type data. “It’s about using technology
to mirror back what people are doing with learning
and how that can help them with their jobs or to nav-
igate their careers.” CLO
Kellye Whitney is Chief Learning Officer’s associate editorial
director. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
‘If I’m leading learning at
LinkedIn, I have to dream big
and make things happen.’
—Kelly Palmer, chief learning officer, LinkedIn Corp.
