Was there acknowledgement of how some sales leaders thrive on the ‘rush’ of putting out the fires of questions/issues from their sales staff? As with many leaders in any function, sometimes developing very independent (sales) staff can be taken as a threat by managers. This can make it challenging for building the alignment/relationship with learning leaders. How did the discussion/ how does the report approach this issue of assisting managers to manage differently?

Cathy Carmody

Other forces are at play also including globalization and distributed enterprises that force more collaboration. As Tapscott discusses in Wikinomics, economic forces that drive cost out of production are forcing collaborative development and joint ventures as ways to increase output at a lower cost. But how can you control all the informal learning and collaboration? In much of corporate America, the answer is SharePoint and a lot of custom development. Is SharePoint robust enough out of the box? Is there something better that doesn’t require all this expensive custom development? How many rogue wikis and blogs are running at my firm and how many of these sites are violating my SAS70 controls. These are questions myslef and a lot of my clleagues wrestle with by day.

Considering today’s complex business ecosystems, the speed of change, ubiquitous technology, and the increasing millenial percentage of the worforce — e-learning 2.0 will happen as a “pull” because that will just be the way that work must be done. It won’t look like it does in the non-commercial world. It will be adopted and adapted just like other learning approaches have that were originated outside of the corporate landscape -to include the important point Dirk makes above.

The challenge for the learning field will be tracking to this — and being open and ready to obsolete some things in order to create the new paradigm. This is really just how innovation happens.