Clever Geek Handbook
29 October 2025

Flipped

Recommendation

Marketing expert John Winsor offers hope to companies that are disconnected from their customers. They must turn the way they do business on its head – employing a “bottom-up” instead of “top-down” approach. Rather than dictating to others from on high, companies should seek closer relationships with their customers and their communities. This book walks business owners through seven important steps to bottom-up business success. It explains the internal strategies organizations should use to get employees thinking in bottom-up terms. And it makes an excellent case for the efficacy of each company developing its own narrative or “story.” While generally applicable, the book suffers from occasional repetition. The bottom line on this bottom-up primer: Although you may not “flip” over it, BooksInShort believes this book’s easy-to-follow steps could help you develop a closer, more effective dialogue with your customers, which could lead to lead to new and sustained sales.

Take-Aways

  • Businesses need to know their customers on a close, firsthand basis.
  • However, many companies operate “top-down,” dictating to their customers.
  • Relying solely on market research data to know and reach your consumers doesn’t work.
  • A better business model means involving purchasers in a “bottom-up” approach.
  • You should connect with your customers “in the context of their lives.”
  • Working bottom-up appears to be a ceding of short-term control but offers gains in the long term.
  • Engage in dialogue and listen to your customers.
  • Ask your employees for “crazy” ideas and be willing to make mistakes.
  • Go and see your products being utilized in the real world.
  • In a complex working environment, you have to trust your intuition.

Summary

Why “Flip”?

Business has changed dramatically since the heyday of traditional American companies such as General Motors. Thanks to the Internet and the modern media explosion, customers can now find out more than ever before about products and services. Paradoxically, though, despite having a plethora of information at their fingertips, consumers have less time to really dig through the details and choose their preferred brands. Therefore, they need the companies they buy from “to engage them in dialogue.” Customers need their purveyors to reach out to them.

“To survive today, every CEO and CMO has to allow their customers to participate in their brands.”

Businesspeople must know their customers intimately and sustain those relationships so their patrons remain loyal to their goods and services. Unfortunately, most companies don’t nurture these relationships. As difficult as change can be, “companies must place their brand within a deeper context of their customers’ lives.” And to learn about your customers’ lives, you must listen to them.

“The companies who will be successful will know their customers as they know their friends.”

You will not find answers explaining the role your products and services play in your customers’ lives from traditional sources such as focus groups – despite the fact that advertising agencies and their clients continue to use and rely on them for data. Professional research firms provide focus group services across industries, often supplying identical results that tend to reinforce existing assumptions. Innovative companies should engage in a “bottom-up” approach to creativity and customer service. This means finding your own way to reach your consumers’ desires and understand their intentions.

“Brands must continually strive to act like a local merchant, like a citizen of the community.”

Bottom-up strategies require companies to relinquish some of the control they have over their processes. Many businesspeople aren’t comfortable with less control. They aren’t prepared to admit that they cannot control their markets. They try to keep up with the fast-moving world while still using a traditional, “top-down” approach. They rely on quantitative data rather than intuition. The traditional approach acts against creativity and innovation. Instead, firms should pursue a bottom-up approach to building relationships with their customers, using these seven tools:

“Step One: Focus on Key Voices”

Today’s markets move quickly and can leave businesses and their products behind. In such circumstances, new offerings can seize the lead. When educated, passionate consumers (“opinion leaders”) discover a new product, its brand can grow rapidly without much marketing effort on its part. (Digital photography is one such example.) If affected industries want to keep up – to stay ahead of rapid developments in the marketplace – they must tap into their “key voices.”

“When companies start to truly listen and have a dialogue around the inspiration that they’ve discovered in their conversations with customers, there is an opportunity for real innovation.”

Businesses must attempt to “connect” with their respective industries’ “trend translators” – people who take their products and services seriously and blend them into their lives. Other consumers turn to trend translators, who “adopt new ideas early but carefully,” for product and service information and recommendations. They can be your pivotal voices. But how do you find them?

“For good or bad, networks exist. What’s important is to understand them and be able to leverage their use to help inform your bottom-up strategy.”

Focus groups are not the way to reach trend translators. In fact, they prevent you from having serious conversations “about your brand in the context of your customers’ lives.” Focus groups are held in sterile, impersonal settings that inhibit frank, honest opinions. Group members may not be familiar with or care about your product; they may be participating only for the money, and the group’s moderator or its other consumers can unduly influence them. Instead, spend time with your real customers in their own milieus. Listen intently to them. Ask their opinions. Provide them with opportunities to meet one another. Keep inviting new voices. Be willing to pay for their time. But don’t wear out your welcome – listen closely and then leave.

“Step Two: Get the Story”

Learning what is important to your customers is not a matter of casually talking to them on the street. You need to have enough depth of information that you “understand the underlying assumptions of [their] lives, behaviors and actions.” The most meaningful conversations often happen at the “fringes” of an organization, not in its executive suite, but in the company’s “center of gravity.” To locate the arena where your products and customers really mesh, practice “anthrojournalism” – gathering information about your customers in a “comparative, holistic and culturally sensitive manner” – to “get the story” of what your product or service means to them.

“In today’s brutally competitive business environment, it is essential to find a group of passionate customers that are willing to spread the word about your product or service.”

To use an anthrojournalistic approach: learn about your customers’ lives, spend time with them, see in a “big picture” way how your product fits into their lives, let their voices into your corporate culture, be aware of your own prejudices and presumptions, and help your customers feel comfortable enough to form their own opinions. Understand that their relationship with your product is ever changing. Engaging in anthrojournalism means entering a “radar funnel” in which you can have conversations with your customers that eventually lead to information and, ultimately, meaning. Do not try to rush your understanding of your customers’ cultures. Learn instead “what they value.” Find out what triggers their buying decisions. Watch them actually using your product.

“Step Three: Listen”

To connect with each other, you and your customers must trust one another. The best way to establish and maintain that trust is to listen. This sounds simple, but in reality it’s difficult. You need to “concentrate,” relax and not be anxious, engage your imagination, “empathize” with your customers and care deeply about them. View the marketplace as a “dialogue” – not as a place to converse with your customers, but as the dialogue itself. Instead of trusting third-party experts like advertising agencies and market research consultants, “eliminate the middlemen and do your own listening.” Strive for “synchronicity” with your customers – be as committed to your product or service as they are. Your customers will sense your authenticity and be motivated by it.

“Step Four: Find Inspiration”

Now that you have located and listened to your primary voices, “the next step is to find inspiration.” Networking is the best way to seek it. The social media’s channels make networking easier than ever. Unfortunately, as companies grow, many businesspeople find themselves too short of time to network effectively. And when it comes to innovation, some become estranged from the form and design of their products and are captivated only by function.

“You can’t take the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the world and reduce them to black and white numbers and hope to gain any real understanding.”

You can avoid pitfalls and find inspiration if you are willing to accept more than one outcome when creating new offerings, think creatively and unconventionally, and establish trust between yourself and those with whom you network. Stay active within your network so you may call upon the members for help. Be willing to take your time and explore possibilities out of the office. You want to see your products being utilized in the real world.

“Step Five: Hone Your Intuition”

Companies tend to rely on quantitative research and data that grounds them. Gut checks are not usually touted as reliable sources for making big, important or costly decisions. However, businesspeople should use their intuition more than they do, although it should be “intuition rooted in reality.” While going with your instincts can be risky and result in mistakes – which is why business schools tend to downplay it – it also can result in valuable learning experiences. Rely on your intuition if you lack enough satisfactory information to make a decision or if you face a tight deadline. Also trust your intuition in a “chaotic,” “complicated” or “complex” working environment where you cannot perceive but must seek patterns.

“The reality is that if you don’t connect with the trendsetters and translators, the rest of the market won’t take you seriously.”

You can become more comfortable using your intuition by following some simple steps. Whenever you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself, “What if...?” Put the data you know into the context of personal, human stories. Urge your team members to do the same and to think creatively. Listen to your instincts instead of ignoring them. Get out from behind your desk so you can justify what your gut is saying. Let your intuition live alongside your established organizational processes.

“Step Six: Find the Center of Gravity”

All the information you’re receiving won’t help you if you can’t find out what it means. Your bottom-up approach will work only if you’re operating in your company’s center of gravity, where meaning is clear and from where you can “move smoothly through the marketplace.” Your center can be a constantly moving, evolving target. Several major elements contribute to its formation, including dialogue. But dialogue is not just talking, it also involves concentrated listening. The process of engaging in dialogue can require high-ranking businesspeople to become more humble. After all, figuring the marketplace out is more important than proving the correctness of your preconceived notions about your market. Through listening, assemble your customers’ stories and share them with your team. This will help foster innovation.

“You must seek to understand a living, evolving process – not a static snapshot.”

Companies seeking their center of gravity should examine their respective cultures. Are they self-centered? Are they focused on impersonal research data, or do they care about people’s stories? Do they use intuition to make important decisions? Understanding “the internal world of your company” will help you locate its center. Locating your center of gravity also requires unleashing creativity. To foster creativity in your organization, encourage the sharing of opposing opinions, ask for “crazy” ideas, tell your team to perform tasks done by consultants in the past, record and share information and let mistakes happen. Also, to boost creativity, ask for guidance and advice from experienced people, trust your instincts rather than your data, hold dialogues, make your leaders available to your team members, and change your meeting and working venues.

“Look around you, Isn’t the world dynamic rather than static? Yet many business process, as taught by business schools, are static.”

Shake things up by changing your vocabulary. The words you use will be more authentic if you seek your center of gravity in the marketplace rather than holding strategy meetings “holed up in a four-star hotel.” Foster an atmosphere of “collaboration” in which people feel free to share their ideas and goals. Recognize that your “corporate philosophy” must be fluid, responsive and constantly changing “so that it captures the center of gravity in the marketplace.”

“Step Seven: Tell the Story”

While the idea of storytelling conjures up evenings around the campfire rather than the world of business, telling stories is crucial to a bottom-up approach. Have you ever sat through a crushingly boring presentation in a conference or meeting? If so, chances are the speaker merely recited dry facts that didn’t connect to people. Yet business schools encourage this kind of sterile, data-based approach while discouraging storytelling, which actually is where companies should focus. Storytelling helps businesses avoid treating their customers as automatons, which inhibits a trusting customer-company relationship.

“[I]t is only through dialogue – in the context of a bottom-up strategy – that you will gain the ability to allow many different points of view to survive and instigate learning.”

Your company’s story resides in its center of gravity. Tell it as basically as possible, in one voice. It should “energize and inspire action.” A really effective story engages your listeners, encourages them to picture themselves within the tale and to fill in any blanks. “Such a story can help them reframe their worldview in a profound way and become a common rallying cry around the center of gravity of the marketplace.”

“Analytical presentations rarely succeed in persuading companies to change in a profound enough way to find the market’s center of gravity.”

To tell your story effectively, help your listeners envision themselves in it, tell it without embellishment, make it relevant to your audience’s experience and perform it in a way that will inspire your listeners to share it. Presenting your story well is the pivotal step toward a successful bottom-up strategy, because when your customers hear it and become involved, they will help bring inspiration “into the core of the company.”

About the Author

John Winsor is chief executive officer of the advertising agency Victors & Spoils in Boulder, Colorado. He cowrote Spark and Baked In with Alex Bogusky.

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Flipped

Book Flipped

How Bottom-Up Co-Creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation

AGATE Publishing,
 


29 October 2025

The Shallows

Recommendation

Business author Nicholas Carr enters Malcolm Gladwell territory with an insightful, far-reaching book of essays on how your brain works, how the Internet alters your perceptions and habits, and what the consequences of those alterations might be. Stretching from Aristotle to Google, Carr seeks to understand the magnitude of the change the Internet presents, and to gauge whether that change is for good or ill. He does not offer answers to his more provocative philosophical questions, preferring that the reader sort those out. But he frames these fascinating queries in detailed disquisitions on futurism, the creation of computing, the history of the written word and the evolution of science’s notions of the brain and how it functions. His relaxed writing style provides a companionable read, as if you were having a great conversation with a brilliant stranger. BooksInShort recommends this enjoyable, nourishing book to everyone who’s ever wondered how working on a computer might be affecting their lives and their brains.

Take-Aways

  • The Internet alters the ways in which you think and how you take in knowledge.
  • The human brain’s “plasticity” means it adapts, responds to repetition and adjusts to new tools, like reading, writing and web surfing.
  • Reading books demands focused linear thinking, but reading Internet articles fragments how you process information.
  • Your brain is hardwired for distraction; the more you’re distracted, the more distraction your mind craves.
  • Reading printed text stimulates different neural zones than reading Internet material.
  • Like the Internet, maps and clocks changed how people perceived space and time.
  • The Internet enables superficial thinking, perfunctory reading and shallow learning.
  • Studies show that Web viewers retain less information than readers of printed text.
  • Memory no longer is necessary because technology makes information readily available.
  • As the Internet takes over basic memory functions, the brain stops making connections on its own.

Summary

“The Dissolution of the Linear Mind”

Media prophet Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1964, detailed how “electric media” – radio, TV, telephones and movies – were breaking up people’s “linear minds,” ending forever the dominance of printed information. The human brain uses patterns and work habits based on that dominance. When shifts in media occur, users tend to focus on “content,” the information those media provide. Few pay attention to a particular medium itself, or how using that medium changes habits and perception. Yet the medium always is more significant than the information it conveys.

“In the long run, a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.”

The Internet provides an infinity of information. As you absorb that data, the Web alters the ways in which you think and take in knowledge. Some believe that the haphazard nature of the Internet renders books a thing of the past. Books offer a slower sense of time, deeper concentration and a more personalized experience. Such experiences produced the linear mind, the kind of thinking that moves consecutively from one idea to the next. Because of the Internet, that thought structure now seems dated.

“For the last five centuries...the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science and society.”

When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was going blind and could not see to write, he acquired one of the first typewriters. Using the machine led to a change in his writing style: He wrote in shorter bursts and simpler language. He noted, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Brain “Plasticity”

In 1950, J.Z. Young, a British biologist, offered a revolutionary idea: that the brain might be constantly changing. Prior to this, science had held that the brain formed patterns that did not adapt. The Industrial Age viewed the brain as a machine – it worked in a specific way over and over. But modern research proves that the brain is quite malleable; it creates patterns of usage depending on circumstances. For example, if someone goes blind, the neural zones that handled sight shut down sight-related activities to offer more space to tasks that complement sight, such as taste, touch and smell. The brain restructures itself constantly.

“The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.”

Further experiments determined that focus and practice – traits displayed in playing a musical instrument, for example – create changes in neural activity. When you employ a tool, be it a hammer, violin or computer, your brain comes to regard that tool not as something you hold in your hand, but as part of your hand and part of you.

“What the map did for space – translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon – another technology, the mechanical clock, did for time.”

An infinite number of synapses link “neurons together in a dense mesh of circuits” inside the human brain. Every time you do or think something, a neuron cluster “activates.” Neurons like repetition; they light up when faced with familiar tasks. Thus, activities can become habit. With repetition, connections between neurons increase in strength and density. Habit creates links – “cells that fire together wire together.”

“The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate.”

“Tools of the Mind” Your brain functions mimic the tools that interpret your reality. For example, before maps, humans lived with deep connections to the natural world. As maps became more accurate and accessible, the brain paid less attention to topography, and the logical grid of a map became part of human thinking. Before clocks, people were more attuned to natural cycles as indicators of time’s passage. As clocks became ubiquitous, they created a new logical grid, which came to dominate human mental processes. Each new invention offers a new “intellectual ethic,” that is, “a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.” That ethic usually is the least noticed but most important aspect of any new tool. New technology helps you do what you need to do, but it also always changes the thinking that accompanies the doing.

Evolution of the Written Word

Reading and writing changed human neural functioning. Appearing around 4,000 BC, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics – each consisting of recognizable, metaphorical shapes that bore complex, abstract meanings – led to the formation of “crisscrossed” brain circuits that facilitated analytical thinking. In 750 BC, the Greeks created “the first complete phonetic alphabet,” and it changed the world: Its efficiency and economy of symbols made writing easy. A culture rooted in oral tradition thus shifted to one based on the written word. In an oral culture, memory is everything, because knowledge transmits only through speech. In a literary culture, the part of the brain used for memory can surrender its task of holding all cultural history, thus freeing neural space for practical short-term uses or abstract thought, art and invention.

“The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation.”

The earliest books essentially were bound scrolls. Reading and writing followed the form of the scroll – an unwinding sheet with no space between words and no punctuation. Only by reading this “scriptura continua” aloud did the continuous stream of unbroken written words, which mimicked speech patterns, make sense to the eye and ear. This reading method engaged the brain in different ways, but as literacy spread, private reading became necessary. To read to oneself meant long periods of focused concentration. Such activity may seem like a natural state, but it is not. The brain is wired to be constantly aware of its environment. Connecting to the written word meant training the brain to tune out the rest of the world.

“The natural state of the human brain...is one of distractedness.”

The world changed again when Johannes Gutenberg manufactured the first printing press in 1445. Being able to print quickly meant that books became cheaper and more widely available. More books meant increased literacy, and increased literacy meant that writings beyond the classics or the Bible found a greater readership. That mass audience learned to spend time in focused concentration, which for the next five centuries dominated the intellectual ethic. People found and shared information through books – linear, portable objects containing transferable knowledge.

“Disruption”

By 2009, adults in North America were spending twice the amount of time online – 12 hours a week – than they were in 2005; children were online 11 hours a week, up 60%. Yet for both groups, web surfing did not take time away from watching television. So some activity had to cede its place to the Web. For many, that activity was reading print material – books, newspapers and magazines. One proof of this decline is that libraries have become places where computers and Internet access matter more than books. Most newly designed libraries reflect this change, with computers positioned in the middle of the space and books located off to the side.

“To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to ‘lose oneself’ in the pages of a book.”

As attention shifts from the singularity of books to the blur of digitized material, the differences among media matter less and less. All become conveyances of visual information, whether words, still images or moving pictures.

Putting hyperlinks into documents breaks up their linearity. Reading and clicking on a hyperlinked article is an entirely different activity than immersing yourself in the unbroken form of a book. As you leap from link to link, the context of the information you take in matters less. All this fracturing means disruption. The solace for disruption often can be more disruption. Your brain likes distraction, and it likes feeling connected. The more you search the Web and the more you seek a connection between one bit of information and another, the more disrupted and the happier your brain becomes, even as your powers of concentration become more disjointed. A printed book works against this seductive fragmentation. A book is a single, limited object with but one purpose. It offers scant competition against the infinity of the Internet.

“What does seem to be decreasing as Net use grows is the time we spend reading print publications.”

“The Juggler’s Brain” The Internet takes its place among the history of “tools that have helped mold the human mind.” The Web engages sight, touch and sound, often all at once. It provides an instant loop of “responses and rewards.” Once connected, the brain wants more connection and, in fact, it succumbs to anxiety if it feels disengaged. The Internet demands and grabs your concentration, only to fragment it. The brain contentedly leaps from one distraction to the next.

“Most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less.”

Research indicates that the Internet, like books, profoundly alters human mental patterning. Areas of the prefrontal cortex that are dormant in non-Web users show massive activity among experienced Internet surfers. Web searching produces brain patterns quite unlike those caused by reading printed text. Studies show that readers of printed material have superior comprehension and retention; they “learn more” than those who read hyperlinked text.

“The offloading of memory to external data banks doesn’t just threaten the depth and distinctiveness of the self. It threatens the depth and distinctiveness of the culture we all share.”

Internet activity is, on one level, healthy for the brain. All that connecting, dealing with fragmentation, navigating and quickly scooping out particles of information may wreck your ability to concentrate for any length of time, but reading online keeps your brain active and keen. However, web activity upsets certain paradigms of memory. Short-term memory becomes filled with all the minutiae of the web experience, making it more difficult to move necessary working knowledge into long-term memory, which is the transfer that creates “depth of...intelligence.” More stuff pouring into your brain does not make you smarter – it just overloads you. Parsing out what matters and what does not occupies neural space that you could direct to retention and interpretation. For example, in an experiment, subjects who watched newscasts with text crawls on the bottom of the screen retained far less about the news reported than participants who watched screens without text feeds. The latter group could focus on and retain what they saw.

“An Interruption System”

The Internet breaks up focus, making it impossible to pay meaningful attention. It creates an addiction to the constant flow of the new, even when the new offers little of value. The desire for the latest is so strong that few people actually read online. Research shows that Internet users whip their eyes around segments of a web page, scanning and moving on, seeking fragments out of fragments, but seldom attempting to absorb the whole. “Skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading.”

“Outsource memory, and culture withers.”

Multitasking makes solving problems more difficult. The distraction inherent in multitasking forces the brain back to its most familiar pathways, and those often are the least creative modes of thinking. The brain devolves to its most accessible ideas, hindering innovation.

“The Art of Remembering”

Socrates maintained that the more people wrote, the less they would need their memories. Anything they couldn’t remember, they knew they could find in something someone else had written. The Gutenberg press and its democratization of the written word reduced memory capability even more.

“The brain – and the mind to which it gives rise – is forever a work in progress.”

New media, that vast index of pretty much everything, accelerated the process of memory reduction. Prior to cell phones, everyone carried several phone numbers in their heads. Now, with all numbers a touch away, few people use the mental energy required to recall them. Philosopher William James believed that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.” But the Internet has permanently altered how memory, and thus thinking, works. Memory depends on a deep consolidation of information. A perfunctory review – the only kind the Web allows – almost ensures that information will be forgotten. With the Internet as the go-to cultural repository, memory becomes “outsourced.” Culture cannot flourish when its participants don’t remember its history or traditions.

Limitations and Possibilities

“Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.” The brain becomes one with a tool; as the tool of the Internet takes over many basic brain functions, the brain stops making connections on its own. And as distraction increases, the capacity for empathy and intimacy decreases. The Internet injects “frenziedness” into thinking, and the brain likes it. The great threat is that Internet intelligence will flatten human intelligence. But nobody’s turning away from the Web just yet; nobody’s turning back the clock.

About the Author

Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, wrote The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

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The Shallows

Book The Shallows

How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember

Atlantic Books,
 


29 October 2025

The Trainer's Balanced Scorecard

Recommendation

Forward-thinking companies want to be learning organizations now that specialized work skills are the new currency and knowledge workers rule. Workplace learning experts Ajay Pangarkar and Teresa Kirkwood teach corporate trainers how to use the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach to develop and measure learning programs that support their companies’ strategic objectives and, thus, win executive support. Despite the book’s occasionally faulty editing, BooksInShort recommends this practical manual to learning and HR professionals. It will help them apply BSC metrics to training programs that will help their companies compete.

Take-Aways

  • For companies to compete effectively, their learning programs must align with their overall strategy.
  • The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a “measurement and management system.”
  • It reports on an organization from “four perspectives: financial, learning and growth, customer, and internal business processes.”
  • Learning officers can use BSC to manage goals and measure tangible results.
  • The BSC helps learning programs quantify their work with customized metrics.
  • These metrics can prove a learning program’s worth to top corporate executives who may not understand its value.
  • Some executives even think, wrongly, that staffers should handle their own development.
  • Learning organizations’ leaders know the value of having knowledgeable employees.
  • Learning leaders can use BSC to show top executives that learning is an investment in better performance.
  • Learning professionals should see internal units as clients and should interview their leaders to tailor programs to each department’s work in meeting organizational goals.

Summary

The Value of Intellectual Capital

In most organizations, senior managers and learning professionals speak different languages. Many senior executives don’t understand learning. Others merely pay lip service to the importance of workplace learning but seldom support it. Fewer still credit workplace learning for making a genuine substantial contribution to organizational success. Some executives even believe, incorrectly, that employees should be responsible for their own professional development. Such retrograde thinking persists even in today’s knowledge economy.

“The balanced scorecard...clearly demonstrates how intangible efforts such as organizational learning contribute to the organization’s goals.”

However, this is a curable situation. To demonstrate the value of your learning programs in meeting corporate goals, including profitability, implement a balanced scorecard tracking and evaluation system. The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a good tool for gathering, assessing and presenting information that proves how quality staff development programming leads to better products, sales, service and profits.

“Workplace learning is a way to ensure that every employee is capable of working with the organization to achieve its strategic objectives.”

The same executives who don’t understand what your learning program is accomplishing probably revere famous corporate learning organizations, such as General Electric, Google and Apple. The leaders of those prominent corporations understand that employee knowledge is a pivotal organizational asset, in fact, a major chunk of their intellectual capital. High-tech companies aren’t the only firms that value information. Throughout history, many famous organizations have profitably leveraged their employees’ knowledge. For example, Henry Ford drew on his workers’ knowledge to develop popular innovations, including Ford Motor Company’s famous assembly line. Today, a company’s competitive edge and its value often rest on its workforce’s skills and knowledge, the modern economy’s most essential components.

“One of the most challenging aspects of organizational learning is attempting to measure and value its contribution to the organization.”

Because workplace learning enables outstanding performance, many corporate educators now call their field “workplace learning and performance,” or WLP, and they call themselves WLP professionals.

An Uphill Climb

To earn recognition and validation from the highest levels of their companies, WLP professionals must discover, think through and act on their top executives’ goal- and profit-oriented perspectives. This means tying your learning initiatives directly to your firm’s strategic objectives, and informing managers about the benefits of this aligned programming. To strengthen upper-management support and middle-management participation, demonstrate the value that learning creates in the following business functions:

  • “Research and development” – Learning programs foster innovation and teach the latest skills.
  • “Design, production and marketing” – Training ensures that workers get the knowledge they need to produce high-quality goods and high-quality services and to sell them effectively.
  • “Distribution” – WLP professionals understand that their company’s internal departments are their customers.
  • “Service” and “support” – Customer service and support employees need to participate in learning initiatives so they have the up-to-date information their customers want.

Proving How Learning Programs Meet “Performance Objectives”

Learning professionals must correlate their programs and demonstrate results according to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to their firm’s senior executives. The managers of learning programs must provide evidence that addresses questions about the value of corporate training and must communicate their successes in ways that are relevant to top executives.

“Most senior managers are unaware of how to actually incorporate learning into their strategic plans.”

The balanced scorecard (BSC) provides an efficient and effective mechanism for compiling, evaluating and sharing this information. A balanced scorecard is both a “management system” and a “measurement system,” and it begins with metrics. Organizations use the BSC to track “four perspectives: financial, learning and growth, customer and internal business processes.” Managers of learning programs can apply the BSC step by step to set goals that are supported with aligned measurement, track those metrics by collecting the right data and use the resulting information to prove the efficacy of learning in meeting corporate objectives.

“The BSC is a strategic business tool helping management to effectively translate their mission into tactical and tangible performance measures and processes.”

To prove that learning is a strategic contributor to organizational goals, set specific objectives and use quantifiable, scorecard metrics to track their outcome. You can use the balanced scorecard to prove the tangible, defined, mathematical results of workplace learning by showing its measurable impact on employee development and corporate outcomes. BSC provides the hard data you need to show top executives that workplace learning is an investment in better productivity and to prove that it supports four performance goals all organizations share:

  1. “Increase organizational value” – Learning professionals must help senior managers understand that this value depends on both tangible assets, like cash and accounts receivables, and on intangible assets, such as intellectual capital. Learning initiatives are intangible investments with tangible benefits.
  2. “Increase organizational profitability” – To gain full appreciation from senior executives, learning professionals must show their program’s bottom-line impact.
  3. “Increase organizational liquidity” – Firms need cash to cover their short-term obligations. The way executives estimate future cash needs will determine how much they will allocate for specific budget items – including learning based on prioritization. Use the scorecard to show how your work has earned a high priority for funding.
  4. “Aligning investment with strategic objectives” – The BSC helps learning leaders prove that they are accomplishing this goal by creating a statistical record of achievement. Only workers with the right “skills, information, experience and knowledge” can achieve organizational goals, and those are the assets that learning programs deliver. With BSC, you can prove this concrete contribution.
“The balanced scorecard environment is driven by strategic linkages and performance outcomes.”

Learning program officers should regard their corporations’ various departments as their principal customers. They must help these units achieve their goals by enhancing their workers’ capabilities. Learning must be proactive, not reactive. Use the BSC to measure actual employee achievements. When staff members can see in measured terms exactly how far they’ve come and how much they’ve learned, they’ll have a new attitude about who they are, why their work matters and where they fit within the organization.

The Importance of Strategy

In decades past, the prevailing notion was that a Fortune 500 company could prosper by producing the same products and services that had proved popular over the years. Today, even the most successful companies cannot maintain their marketplace position unless they constantly reinvent their work. Modern companies must create strategies to meet ever-new innovation and expansion objectives. Corporate learning can help a company achieve its strategic goals only when WLP professionals understand those strategies and make sure that their learning initiatives directly support and advance them.

Establishing a Strategic Framework

Corporate planners often use a “strategy map,” a graphic display of the “linkages and connections among primary business drivers.” This map translates strategy into specific organizational goals. The BSC extends the map by targeting the steps managers must take to attain these objectives. Envision a process depicted by a layered pyramid – starting from the top – with each of the following elements in its own layer:

  • “Mission” – The reason the organization exists.
  • “Vision” – What the organization hopes to become.
  • “Strategy” – The plan for the future.
  • “Strategy map” – A depiction or visual presentation of the strategy.
  • “Balanced scorecard” – Steps the organization will take to execute its strategy and measure its performance.
  • “Targets and initiatives” – Specific corporate goals.
  • “Personal goals” – Individual employees’ objectives.
  • “Strategic results” – The organization’s goals form the base of the pyramid: “satisfied stakeholders, satisfied customers, efficient processes” and “motivated employees.”
“People are essentially the primary resource of knowledge.”

To carry out their strategies effectively, companies must track their progress. BSC functions as a performance measurement tool that enables managers to clarify strategy, communicate strategic goals, plan and create targets, and enhance learning. To this end, the balanced scorecard tracks performance in four areas – objectives, measurements, results and programming – to derive useful information about organizational achievement.

“Four Perspectives”

The Harvard Business Review rates the BSC as “one of the most influential management ideas of the past 75 years.” Many global corporations use the scorecard as a construct for setting goals and tracking accomplishments as they execute their strategy. It works differently from conventional management techniques, such as financial reporting, which tend to measure past performance. Such short-term approaches evaluate performance based only on the balance sheet. In contrast, the BSC looks ahead to defined performance and strategic milestones. With BSC, learning professionals can incorporates four crucial facets of a company’s operations:

  1. “Financial” – What do stakeholders think?
  2. “Internal process” – What must the organization do well?
  3. “Customer” – What do consumers want?
  4. “Learning and growth” – How does the organization build more value?

Six Key Steps

Learning professionals must establish balanced scorecard objectives that align their programs and metrics with each department’s specific goals. Interview senior executives and other stakeholders to develop BSCs based on those unit’s “strategic learning requirements.” Setting learning goals that support each unit’s plans and that help the company requires WLP professionals to know all they can about how each unit’s work fulfills the company’s overall mission. Learning leaders must work hand in hand with these “internal clients” to tailor fully aligned educational options based on each audience’s important needs. Once they establish the right performance metrics for each learning activity, they can execute their firm’s particular learning strategies in six steps:

  1. “Assess and analyze the strategy map” – The strategy map depicts the organization’s prime strategic objective and the key linkages to attain it.
  2. “Determine the objectives” – Targeting objectives points to which learning activities are most useful to attaining them.
  3. “Determine the performance measurement tools utilized” – These metrics demonstrate performance; for example, monthly customer satisfaction reports.
  4. “Determine the performance targets” – A performance target could be “a 50% increase in prospective sales leads.”
  5. “Determine the initiatives affecting learning” – For example, such an initiative could be to “increase resources to R&D.”
  6. “Determine the learning initiatives” – Now, determine exactly what type of learning programming fulfills the established targets.
“Managers will never give learning professionals full credit for resolving a business concern, so stop trying to convince them.”

Learning initiatives matter to senior executives who are trying to align their units with organizational strategic objectives. Learning professionals who can help employees meet corporate performance goals gain credibility and provide senior management with the evidence to view their departments as valuable long-term investments.

About the Authors

Ajay M. Pangarkar is president of CentralKnowledge Inc., an employee performance firm he co-founded with firm vice president Teresa Kirkwood.

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