Top Corporate Learning Articles of 2019

The beginning of the year is often a time where people hit the reset button. Resetting personal goals. Resetting professional goals. Saying goodbye to the past year and looking toward the future with anticipation.

While we at Corporate Learning Network are on board with moving onto the next chapter, we believe in order to move forward with 2020 vision (see what I did there?), we need to take a moment to look back at the past year to celebrate the trials, tribulations and accomplishments that got us to where we are today so we can continue learning and growing together into the future.

Check out the top Corporate Learning articles of 2019 from some of our CLO and author peers to help you start 2020 off on the right foot:

1. Drucker's 8 Principles of Successful Leadership

About thirty years ago, celebrated Peter Drucker management guru Dr. William Cohen, Major General, USAF, Ret., initiated a study called the Combat Leadership Study. He was inspired to find the most challenging scenarios and leaders who were successful in those situations. This included management functions in business and other organizations.

Through a blend of study, experience & application, he cut to the core of what effective leadership means using Drucker's timeless principles & practices, & provides essential lessons why great leaders are neither born nor made–they're self-made. Read more here.

2. Drucker’s 10 Principles For Developing a Business Strategy

Columnist Bill Cohen was the first graduate of the Ph.D. program that Peter Drucker co-developed at what is now the Masatoshi Ito and Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management. Graduating and becoming Drucker’s friend, he applied Drucker’s methods and rose to become an Air Force general and the author of more than 50 management books published in 23 languages.

In this article, Cohen shares one of Drucker’s methods regarding the purpose of strategy: to enable an organization to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable environment.

Drucker knew that risk could not be avoided–in fact, he believed that some risk was a requirement for a successful strategy. Little or no risk meant that the corporation was not aiming high enough. The future was always unknown, and unknowns mean risk. Read more here.

3. Learning to Learn: Preparing People for Lifelong Performance & Results - Part I

What will the school of the near-term future look like? The focus is going to be on technology-assisted learning as opposed to teaching. And the teacher's job will be to facilitate, encourage, assist and mentor the learning process.

Long-term growth in the US, on the other hand, is dependent upon dramatically increasing the quality of our educational system. Students must be equipped with something that yesterday’s schools paid little attention to: They need to learn how to learn and to create a habit of continuous learning.

Drucker pinpointed specific practices for enabling young people to discover learning and the joy of learning. People must be prepared to want to learn–to see continuous learning as something they enjoy doing, not something they need to do. Read more here.

4. Drucker's Top Tips to Successful Leadership

Leadership has tremendous power to help you accomplish anything you want the group or organization that you lead to achieve. Yet Peter Drucker wrote that the gateway to this power depends on a single decision: your decision to be a leader.

See how other leaders succeed, how you can be a leader before you’re promoted and five important facts about leadership. Read more here.

5. How Flat Should An Organization Be? Musk Restructures Tesla

Many books and articles have documented the relationship between organizational structure and the ability of a company to produce results and to grow.

Every kind of organization, whether business or social, needs to continuously reevaluate its basic structure if it significantly changes its size or the competitive environment changes.

In this column, Jim Champy–Chairman Emeritus of Consulting Dell Services, former Chairman at Perot systems, & co-author of the 2 million copy bestseller Reengineering the Corporation outlines, from his vast experience, the general principles behind why organizational design is truly the missing link between today's wave of new technologies used to compete on analytics and how your organization can save millions from being bogged down with cross-functional confusion, internal political maneuvering & bureaucratic rules that impede successful assimilation. Read more here.

6. Leadership During Crisis

Every leader is likely to face a crisis of some form. While we cannot fully predict all crises or the way they will unfold, we can identify behaviors that can best support us in coping effectively with what we face and leading our communities to the best possible outcomes. Learning from others in crisis is a starting place.

See the real world examples Champy uses to show how leaders are adapting strategies and aligning resources to help in moments of crisis. Read more here.

7. Beware! Getting the Right Answer to the Wrong Question Misdirects and Misleads

The most serious mistakes for managers are not getting the wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.

If your answer to the right question produces the wrong, unexpected result, you can take corrective action. In other words, a wrong answer to the right question can, as a rule, be repaired and salvaged. But if you ask the wrong question and get the right answer, chances are it will take a lot longer to discover and inevitably lead to even more costly errors.

See how you can increase productivity, spark innovation and reduce costs by asking the right Drucker-inspired questions. Read more here.

8. Running Training Like a Business

How would you respond if your L&D team was tasked with leveling up learning at your organization? Mark Lewis, Training Supervisor, Transportation & Retail at MPLX LP (formerly Andeavor Logistics) asked this of his team one year ago.

We interviewed him to learn how he and his team changed their L&D story from order takers to business partners—jumping into the learning analytics business simultaneously improving their performance and demonstrating the impact of their programs.

See how he and his L&D team increased quality and effectiveness of front-line skills development programs, occupational health and safety, and soft skills training for over 2,100 employees in four operational regions. Read more here.

9. The Difference Between Training and Education

Does practice make perfect? Practicing the wrong things can guarantee permanence, but not necessarily perfection. You've got to make certain you're practicing the right things in the right way. This requires live instruction, drill repetition and constant feedback.

This article illustrates three easily forgotten learning essentials: 1) there is a difference between training and education; 2.) training requires instructor expertise and; 3.) continuous learning and knowledge sharing are an integral part of the training process. See how this contributor discovered first-hand the difference through a game of pocket billiards. Read more here.

10. Data Are Not Information – Raising the Analytics IQ of Managers/Executives

Competing on analytics depends on the right kind of data literacy training. This article explains–in very simple language–the three kinds of analytics managers/executives must be familiar with to better analyze data and work with data scientists in the most productive ways. Read more here.