Is Learning and Development approaching an Uber moment?
The head of emerging leader development for one of the oldest, largest and most reputable companies on the planet made a really interesting comment to me earlier this week. I was interviewing her at one of our roundtable breakfast events in London and had asked how an organisation like hers, steeped in a long history of innovation, approaches L&D. “We've got to use a 'start-up' mentality for L&D” she replied. “Otherwise things move too slowly. We test a minimum viable product and then, with buy in and a great product, scale up. We learnt that from the book The Lean Startup…” An interesting response for an organisation that is clearly not a start-up. At 120 years old, 300k staff and revenues of more than USD $100 billion it’s fair to say they’ve hit maturity. “… And to do that, because we’re so big and sometimes slow to change, we’ve had to set lots of teams around the world ‘free’ so they can act like start-ups … we’ve made them smaller, more agile and w