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Willis and May (2000) describe the CLO role as:
• A strategic, lead player in today ’ s business organization
• Responsible for making sure learning across an entire system is leveraged, not
sacrifi ced
• Accountable to the whole system and must have broad discretionary power
• Operates by using knowledge about how adults learn, how learning affects work,
how value systems operate, and how social and technical systems in an enterprise or
in their environment may either support or counteract each other

CLOs work with the know-how of knowledge — the tacit knowledge that is hard to
codify. They integrate thinking and acting and their work involves lots of errors and
mistakes. CLOs need to create an environment that fosters knowledge sharing infor-
mally so that they can interact with a team in a work context. The CLO ’ s work begins
and ends with the customer. Their work is applicable at each point in the continuous
cycle that becomes spirals of need and need satisfaction. Customers validate and
confi rm the mission of the organization, which in turn drives the business strategy.
Strategy involves inventing and choosing options, determines the culture needed to
accomplish the strategy, and leads to modifi cation of the systems in use to create
competitive advantage. If there is advantage to the customers, they are satisfi ed and
the mission of the company is once again ratifi ed. Some typical CLO initiatives would
include:
Cultural transformation Assisting with the development and communication of a new
vision and strategy for the organization and tending to the cultural transformation to
support the new corporate direction. Watkins and Marsick (1993) noted that training
programs can help deliver skills needed for organizations to change, but do not address
the deep-seated, mental models and attitudes or the organizational structures and
norms which perpetuate them.
Culture maintenance Designed to support the marketplace strategy and address defi -
ciencies in skills essential to maintain the new culture developed.
Contemporary initiatives Related to business development, like developing a new mar-
keting plan, account manager development, or promotional process redesign. These
require in-depth experience in the industry, comfort/ease in working across all func-
tions of the organization, and a whole systems viewpoint/thinking.
Due to the nature of the work, CLOs have a limited number of quantitative perfor-
mance indicators and most are budget related. The CLO ’ s job focuses mainly on
management of projects, preparing plan documents for projects including problem or