Bill Murphy's RedZone 10X Podcast - S7 E10: Shift from a "Know It All" Company to a "Learn It All" Company

S7 E10: Shift from a "Know It All" Company to a "Learn It All" Company

12/07/18 • 57 min

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My guest this week is Chris Pirie, who until recently, was General Manager in Microsoft’s SMGSR organization. Chris led the training and readiness for all Microsoft’s sales, marketing, and technical field employees worldwide.

Chris joined Microsoft in September 2004 as Senior Director of Learning Product Development, and subsequently he held global sales and marketing responsibility for Microsoft Learning, the organization’s customer training business. Chris has launched The Learning Futures Group which helps organizations rethink their Learning and Development strategy in the face of historic disruption and change in the workplace.

What You Will Learn from this Interview:

The most agile companies win: How does learning support this strategy?
Bold experiments in learning: How do organizations, companies and networks create the right environment to foster individual agility and fitness to become a better learner?
Companies relaxing with learning: It’s not micromanaging the process, but creating an environment that encourages a learning culture and putting some scaffolding around it.
Old frameworks and top-down modules of learning are dying: Today the expertise isn’t always at the top of the network or the organization. Things are moving too quickly for old structured processes.
The power of the metaphor with learning: Giving companies the ability to take on new ideas and develop new intellectual property, like patents, by their ability to ingest new ideas from outside their four walls.
Advanced research in learning using neuroscience: Offering better ways to understand how to move information into long-term memory. Discovering which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process.

With this, I want to welcome you to my interview with Chris Pirie.

Major Take-Aways from this Episode are:

There are about 170 documented cognitive biases, which are a fundamental part of how the brain operates. Research coded into workable models will help learning experience designers to leverage brain chemistry and biases.
Collapse expertise’s from Edge to Core of the business.
How to use hackathons to build learning cultures. Organizations are creating open opportunities for learning where people teach each other and learn together – using all the resources of the company to do things that they’re passionate about.
Scaffolding learning strategies. Organizations not just voicing the importance of a learning culture, but showing their commitment by creating the “scaffolding” to support building one.
People organizing their own learning vs. being told what, when, and how to learn. New models are proving that it’s much more useful to give people the skills to organize their own world rather than structuring everything for them.
Leaders viewing learning as a source of growth and a source of competitive advantage. Organizations make space for people to bring their natural ability to learn, to be curious and teach each other.

Read the Full Transcript Here

About Chris Pirie

Chris brings a passion for driving disruptive change and innovation, a proven business and people leader of large functional teams in very dynamic enterprise environments. Skilled in strategic Partnerships with leading business schools such as INSEAD, and learning related technology and service providers.

Chris has launched The Learning Futures Group to help organizations rethink their Learning and Development strategy in the face of historic disruption and change in the workplace. He was formerly a Partner-Level General Manager at Microsoft and VP of eLearning at Oracle.

He built deep expertise in, the digital transformation of workplace learning and technology; including B2C product management, product marketing, enterprise software sales, channel partnerships, sales and technical field enablement, digital transformation, marketing and award winning large scale global talent development programs such as PitchPerfect, Microsoft Business School, Oracle Learning Network, and Microsoft Certifications.

Ways to Connect with Chris Pirie

Resources + Links

If you enjoy listening to my podcast, please take a minute to leave a review here!

What You Will Learn from this Interview:

The most agile companies win: How does learning support this strategy?
Bold experiments in learning: How do organizations, companies and networks create the right environment to foster individual agility and fitness to become a better learner?
Companies relaxing with learning: It’s not micromanaging the process, but creating an environment that encourages a learning culture and putting some scaffolding around it.
Old frameworks and top-down modules of learning are dying: Today the expertise isn’t always at the top of the network or the organization. Things are moving too quickly for old structured processes.
The power of the metaphor with learning: Giving companies the ability to take on new ideas and develop new intellectual property, like patents, by their ability to ingest new ideas from outside their four walls.
Advanced research in learning using neuroscience: Offering better ways to understand how to move information into long-term memory. Discovering which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process.

With this, I want to welcome you to my interview with Chris Pirie.

Major Take-Aways from this Episode are:

There are about 170 documented cognitive biases, which are a fundamental part of how the brain operates. Research coded into workable models will help learning experience designers to leverage brain chemistry and biases.
Collapse expertise’s from Edge to Core of the business.
How to use hackathons to build learning cultures. Organizations are creating open opportunities for learning where people teach each other and learn together – using all the resources of the company to do things that they’re passionate about.
Scaffolding learning strategies. Organizations not just voicing the importance of a learning culture, but showing their commitment by creating the “scaffolding” to support building one.
People organizing their own learning vs. being told what, when, and how to learn. New models are proving that it’s much more useful to give people the skills to organize their own world rather than structuring everything for them.
Leaders viewing learning as a source of growth and a source of competitive advantage. Organizations make space for people to bring their natural ability to learn, to be curious and teach each other.

Read the Full Transcript Here

About Chris Pirie

Ways to Connect with Chris Pirie

Resources + Links

Previous Episode

S7 E9: How the Detroit Pistons Appreciate Fans with Data Analytics

My guest today, Chris Pittenturf, is a Senior Vice President of Information Technology and Analytics at the Detroit Pistons organization.

With nearly 20 years of IT experience, the last 12 leading data initiatives at Palace Sports & Entertainment, Chris Pittenturf has accumulated extensive knowledge in applying cutting edge technology to business objectives. In early 2012 he was tapped by new ownership to lead a newly formed department, Data & Analytics, which centralizes PS&E's CRM, Market Research and Business Intelligence efforts.

Since that time Palace Sports & Entertainment has become an industry leader in applying a sophisticated CRM platform to sales and service operations, using market research to drive marketing decisions and assist with partnership sales, and leveraging analytics to make informed business decisions with an emphasis on real time information and mobility. What You Will Learn from this Interview:

Lessons he has learned over 10+ years
How to listen to what customers say they want, in context and what their behaviors tell you they want
Importance of creating custom customer experiences
Decisions around Salesforce CRM, Data warehousing, using MicroStrategy as a BI platform
Data Decisions that support or contradict cognitive biases
Learn from past decisions he wishes he had made sooner

Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

Hear a success story beginning with Chris' love of the game of basketball and a dream career that went from being fizzled to sizzling as they married into a career that's better than he could ever have dreamed.
Expect change. After Chris' company, PAL Sports & Entertainment radically changed its business model he was glad to be able to continue supporting the Pistons as well as the entertainment business from a data and analytics perspective.
How being attentive to everything the customer says directly through survey responses, and indirectly through their behaviors and activities, is essential to understanding what they really want.
Chris talks about being able to differentiate between the B2B and B2C customer, and the importance of understanding how each customer relates to the business through a different lens.
The importance of having the pulse of the customer - understanding what they're thinking and where you may be coming up short or where you're doing well.
The customer relationship is dynamic and today's environment A different customer relationship has that the that the relationship with the fans has become much more complicated than it was in the past - including a maturity curve ranging from 0 100%.
Why choosing Salesforce was a win, after some challenges and time spent working to develop their own CRM.
In a small team environment, staffing with people that understand a lot of the discipline, like with data warehousing the structure, the design and the integration and how to move the information, is more effective than hiring highly-specialized individuals.
Business trusting data. Support from the top down can help gain acceptance and partner with different business verticals.
Business is more accepting of data when it supports someone's bias, when you're providing information to somebody that fits what they know.
Business supports the data quickly when it clearly meets a company goal and objective; we have information that can inform whether our success or failure there would be one area.
Learning how to determine what information derived from the data is most valuable to the business objective.
An interesting fact that machine learning is being used to produce algorithms or data sets that can be used to drive decisions on the basketball side.
There are BI platforms that are being developed that are changing the landscape of how we even structure and use our data.
Being involved in different peer groups, within your industry and outside of it, helps you to be more well-rounded as professional in understanding best practices at the enterprise level right down to the small business level.

Chris Pittenturf is Vice President of Data & Analytics for Palace Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Detroit Pistons, the Palace of Auburn Hills, DTE Energy Music Theatre, Meadowbrook Music Festival, and Freedom Hill Amphitheatre.

Chris and his team in the Data & Analytics department are responsible for Business Intelligence, CRM, and Market Research. The Business Intelligence sub-department has developed many innovative dashboards and mobile applications focused on real-time reporting using Microstrategy for data visualizations that leverage an enterprise customer data warehouse.

Ways to connect with Chris Pittenturf:

Next Episode

S8 E1: Unleash Your Superpower with Communication + Persuasion

If you enjoy listening to my podcast, please take a minute to leave a review here!

My guest today, Jeff Tippett is a Raleigh, North Carolina-based public speaker, and owner of the public affairs firm, Targeted Persuasion.

Known by audiences and fans as Mr. Persuasion, Jeff Tippett is a subject matter expert in persuasive communications. Jeff has impacted thousands of lives through over 500 presentations, including keynotes and seminars. He helps people increase their effectiveness, gives them powerful tools for attaining goals and dreams, and helps them positively impact their organization – all as they learn techniques for communicating persuasively with others.

The heart and soul of Jeff’s presentations is the emotional story he tells of adopting his youngest daughter from Haiti while the country’s government was collapsing. Through this near death experience of navigating civil unrest and institutional bureaucracy in a third world nation, Jeff learned valuable lessons on how to persuade others without ever manipulating. Jeff unpacks these secrets of the superpower of persuasion in every presentation.

What You Will Learn About in this Interview:

Focusing on Your Brand: We personify our brand. What is your brand saying about you? I think all of us have a responsibility to sell what we believe, sell ourselves, or sell our message. Learn how to communicate the right message – one that will get noticed.
Communications in the Workplace: Millennials Are Changing the Game: Unlike previous generations, millennials’ expectations of open communications, deeper connections and authenticity are presenting a communication challenge within the workplace.
The Benefits of Telling the Full Story – in Bite-sized Pieces: Shorter attention spans require short messages – not an explosion of information. You want to capture people’s attention with one word that makes them wonder what the second word is – and makes them ask you for the next level.
Understanding How People Respond and Positioning Your Message: You know that people primarily respond out of emotion and not logic. Find what is emotional in the story you’re trying to tell around the information. Lead with that, work in the logic and you’ll have your best chance of persuading and moving your audience with you.
The Process of Debriefing and Drilling Down to the Simple Message:
- Let the information all spill out – get it out of your head.
- Ask, “What problem am I solving with this that I’m trying to convey?”
- Strike out everything that isn’t crucial – keep only the main words that convey your message.

With this, I want to welcome you to my interview with Jeff Tippett. Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

Jeff Tippett’s Big, Bold Statement: “We all live or die based upon our ability to persuade.” What’s the difference between persuasive communications and manipulating people? How does understanding this difference help you rise to the top?
Jeff’s Audience Take-Aways: As a keynote speaker, presenter and author, Jeff believes that conveying his energy, making an emotional connection, and creating a common ground with his audience is key to their taking away actionable content.
Verbal Imagery: Clear the playing field using the word “imagine”. By freeing any barriers of reality, it sets your audience up to listen and allows them to picture the world, the situation, or the environment the way that you want to describe it to them.
Get Out of Your Own Head: It’s a challenge. What’s the message that you’re trying to convey to the person you’re talking to? What’s in it for them? Do you care? Your willingness to listen and to make a connection with them – on their terms, will define your success.
Communicate with Humor: Humor is one of the best approaches we can use for people to drop down the barriers and walls. We can use things like humor, compassion, empathy, and storytelling as well and authenticity to help us make that connection with our audience.
- This is about being kind to other people and finding ways that we can connect with other people, to whatever degree, and willingness they are willing to connect.

Many of the topics discussed in this interview are also included in Jeff’s second book, slated for an early 2019 release, titled: Unleashing Your Superpower: Why Persuasive Communication Is The Only Force You Will Ever Need.

Read the Full Transcript Here

About Jeff Tippett:

In 2014, Jeff founded Targeted Persuasion, an award-winning public affairs + communications firm. He has worked with reno...