Former West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer once said, “We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”
One of the most influential and shrewd statesmen of the 20th century, Der Alte — the old one, as he was nicknamed — was what we today would call a big-picture thinker. As chancellor from 1949 to 1963, he was the political architect of West Germany’s rebuilding out of the ruins of World War II. By looking beyond his own borders, Adenauer integrated the country’s economy and foreign policy with the rest of Europe and the U.S., enabling West Germany to restore stability, prosperity and its position on the world stage.
Translated into the terms of organizational theory, what Adenauer did was apply systems thinking to an extreme and extremely challenging political situation. Systems thinking encourages people to step back and see the whole picture, rather than focusing on just its parts. It means seeing the forest as well as the trees.
Quite simply, Adenauer saw West Germany not as a separate nation but as an interconnected and interdependent part of a larger entity. Rather than an isolated “us versus them” mentality, he embraced the new “we” reality of the post-war era. This big-picture perspective was critical to opening up new horizons and seizing new opportunities for the country.
Today, systems thinking is essential for every enterprise, business or political, that hopes to do the same. To be successful, organizational leaders at every level must fully understand and appreciate the dynamic interactions taking place internally and externally and integrate this expanded perspective with the achievement of strategic goals. In short, they have to be able to see how everything works together.
Our 2012 CLO of the Year, Pat Crull, group vice president and chief learning officer of Time Warner Cable (TWC), certainly exemplifies this kind of visionary, holistic leadership. Selected by a blue-ribbon panel of her peers — the eight previous winners of this prestigious award — and singled out from a competitive field of phenomenal learning professionals, Crull was chosen primarily for bringing big-picture thinking to the delivery of workforce development for her entire organization and all its stakeholders.
When Crull joined Time Warner Cable in 2006, the company had never had a corporate learning and development function. As the company’s first CLO, she built it from scratch, taking ownership of TWC’s organizational-effectiveness efforts and diversity and inclusion practices along with learning and development. Recognizing the powerful potential synergy, she saw it as an opportunity to integrate and align the functions, as well as systematically target high-potential individuals for focused leadership development.
In the six years since, TWC has more than doubled in size and become a publicly traded company completely independent from the parent organization. By implementing a systematic, planned, strategic approach to providing learning, inclusion and leadership solutions for all of TWC’s 51,000 employees and 15,000 vendor/partners, Crull and her team have enabled the needed culture change. They have helped create an interdependent and collaborative enterprise capable of simultaneously supporting both “steady state” and emerging businesses. Today, this nimbleness is becoming a sustainable competitive advantage for TWC, allowing the organization to deftly manage the rapid pace of technical change in the industry and seize new opportunities on the horizon.
To me, Crull is one of the superstars of the industry. This award recognizes her achievements at Time Warner, what she has accomplished throughout her career and how much she has given back to the industry. From the beginning, she has always given generously to the profession, whether serving as chairman of the ASTD board of directors or as a valued member of the Chief Learning Officer magazine editorial advisory board. While I have no vote in the CLO of the Year selection, I am thrilled to see someone I admire so deeply receive the recognition.
I also am pleased to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of the more than 60 outstanding learning and development leaders honored with 2012 Learning In Practice Awards at the Fall Symposium in September. The special supplement that accompanies this issue features profiles of this year’s winners, all of whom have expanded the horizons of their organizations by thinking big and demonstrating excellence in the design and delivery of employee development programs.
