Looking back, I've had a pretty amazing career, one I never would have expected growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. I've driven tractors across the hayfields of Colorado and toiled high in the office towers of Manhattan. I've taught five-year-olds vital skills to survive in water, and adults vital skills to survive in the workplace. Once during an audit I miscalculated the assets of a bank by about a billion dollars, and I've helped a small training department punch far above its weight to earn the ranking 3rd best corporate training organization in America. One common thread throughout my career, no matter what the position, company or industry, has been that I am drawn to help others learn and do what they do better. Twenty years ago, that drove me to take my first formal position in corporate learning and development. Now, I'm preparing to take the next big step in my career journey, I have formed a company that will allow me to pursue my calling with greater effect, efficiency and impact, Strategic Learning Partners, LLC. Do you love what you do, and want to learn to do it better? I want to help you seek mastery of your chosen profession.

As I set out to build a new business, I asked myself: how can I make the greatest impact on my clients? What are the steps necessary to bring entrepreneurial salespersons from OK to good to great? In thinking this through, I identified three essential linkages forming a chain between learning and performance. Then I set about finding a way to explain these that might make sense. As a long time car enthusiast, or as the British say, petrol head, I gravitated toward a metaphor of hydrocarbon chain fuels.

Fuels like kerosene, gasoline and diesel differ basically in the number of hydrocarbon chains they contain. While each is made of the same essential elements, you likely know that putting the wrong fuel in your car will result in unsatisfactory results. The same is true if you use the wrong "fuel" to power your learning and productivity initiatives.

With the launch of my learning consultancy this spring, I want to give a preview of what it is I'm working on delivering to clients. I will start with a simple, but important statement: Learning isn't something we workplace learning professionals DO, it's something we enable. Training is one method we can use to enable learning, and for far too many in the field, it is the only tool in their toolbox. But learning is a complex process, and where I seek to offer to real estate brokers, and others with entrepreneurial sales forces, something different, it is in developing persistent broker-centered learning environments that will establish competence, build confidence and gain commitment.

I have said already that learning is a complex process, allow me to talk a little more about how I believe people learn. Today most workplace learning occurs by solitary individuals reading computer screens in the quiet of their cubicles, with an occasional venture to a classroom for a training class. I believe the greatest problem with this model of "learning" is that human learning is necessarily a social activity. To explain, I'm going to take a long view of human learning. Ten thousand years ago (I said I was taking the LONG view), humans learned by telling stories around the fire.