Build a learning organisation people want to join.
At a glance
- Challenge
- A reorganisation had centralised corporate learning into one global function without an appointed leader. The structure existed; it needed activating, and the team needed rebuilding.
- Andrew’s role
- Nike’s first Chief Learning Officer, hired to activate the model: the operating model, the curriculum, the platform, the brand and the team.
- Scale / context
- Global: every function, four geographies, a team of seventy-plus, and a workforce that grew past 55,000.
- What changed
- NikeU: a capability-led curriculum, an in-house platform live from 2012, a brand people used by name, and Manager Excellence with Manager90 feedback and learning behind it. IMD wrote the story up as a teaching case.
Nike had centralised corporate learning, and the new function needed activating
Nike had reorganised, and corporate learning came out of it as one global function for the first time, without an appointed leader. Centralising it solved a structural problem: learning had been built function by function and region by region, with no common curriculum, no shared platform and no single owner. The structure was now on the organisation chart. Everything else was still to do.
I was hired as Nike’s first Chief Learning Officer to activate the model. I was given a foundation and I had to work with it: a team assembled from parts of other teams, in a company that had not asked for a corporate university. The function needed rewiring, some of the talent needed switching out, and it had to show the business it was useful. Part of activating it was creating a learning brand.
The temptation in that position is to prove the function with output: publish a curriculum, run the courses, report the completions. I started instead by defining how the function would create value for the business and its people, through what people would learn and through how the experience would fit Nike’s purpose and culture. IMD later wrote the work up as a teaching case on exactly those questions: the priorities of a new Chief Learning Officer, the components of a corporate learning brand and how learning creates value for an organisation.
We designed the curriculum globally by capability and took it to market regionally
The operating model came first, and it was a matrix by design, because the learning function followed Nike’s own organisation. Nike runs a three-dimensional matrix: functions, which drive functional excellence; geographies, which run go-to-market operations and own the profit and loss; and categories, cross-functional virtual teams that each deliver for one consumer, in basketball, running or lifestyle. A learning function organised any other way would have been asking the business to learn our structure. Ours followed theirs.
Global verticals were organised by functional capability: leadership and management development, sales, merchandising and operations. Each one worked with the senior leaders of its function on one question, what capabilities functional excellence required at Nike, and then built the curriculum that developed them. Starting from the capability the business needed, rather than from the training people asked for, gave each curriculum an owner and a point of view.
Go-to-market followed the same logic. The four geographies, North America, Europe, China, and Asia Pacific and Latin America, took the global portfolio to their own populations and made it relevant: language, of course, but also cultural localisation and an assortment of learning that fitted the geography’s distinct needs. The head of learning for a geography had two jobs. One was to take the global portfolio and create local relevance, a go-to-market plan and an assortment that made sense for that geography. The other was to be the voice of the geography as we designed the global operating model and the global portfolio, so that when we called something global it truly was, rather than written from world headquarters in Oregon.
| Designed globally, by functional capability | North America | Europe | China | Asia Pacific and Latin America |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership and management development | North America | Europe | China | Asia Pacific and Latin America |
| Sales | North America | Europe | China | Asia Pacific and Latin America |
| Merchandising | North America | Europe | China | Asia Pacific and Latin America |
| Operations | North America | Europe | China | Asia Pacific and Latin America |
Seven communities of practicethe best way the organisation already did something, made the way everyone did it
Designed by the capability verticalDelivered by the geography
One learning platform, built in-houseon Moodle and Drupal, live from the start of 2012
Two things held the matrix together. Beneath it sat an operations group that owned the technology, and we built the learning platform ourselves, on Moodle and Drupal, rather than buying a suite, so that everything the function produced had one place to be found. It went live at the start of 2012. Across it ran seven communities of practice. Every person in the function belonged to three things at once, a centre of excellence, a geography and a community of practice, and each community was responsible for finding the best way the organisation already did something and making it the way everyone did it. The communities connected global expertise with regional experience.
NikeU gave the function a brand and an aspiration people wanted to belong to
I had a theory of the learning brand before I arrived, from the other side of the table. At IMD I had worked with more than fifty large companies on their programmes, and the ones that got the most from them were the ones whose learning felt like it belonged to them. At BlackRock I had led employee development, the integrated talent processes and performance management. I later wrote the argument up as a chapter in Forward-Focused Learning: learning works through both what people learn and how the experience fits the organisation’s purpose and culture, and three things decide the how: a stated purpose for learning, a learning culture that fits the company’s actual culture, and a learning brand that makes the whole portfolio findable and worth having.
Nike is an exceptionally proficient storytelling company, and the storytelling inside the company has to be as strong for employees as the storytelling outside is for consumers. Strong brands do that well: there is consistency between the brand and the culture, and at the time there certainly was. Work that is not told well does not travel at Nike, however good it is. So the function got a brand and an aspiration, rather than only a name: NikeU.
University sounds academic, and that is not Nike, so we let the U stand for the words the company already used about its athletes and its people: unleash your potential, unlimited potential, and a whole vocabulary of U words that brought the brand to life. People could hear university in the name if they wanted to. The brand said something more like Nike.
What made NikeU something people wanted to join was the combination: one brand for everything the function offered, one place to find it, a tone that sounded like the company, an aspiration people recognised from the brand they worked for, and a curriculum built with their own function’s leaders on what they needed to be good at. It was still the name of Nike’s learning platform a decade later.
In a company that runs on story, the brand was the mechanism that let the work reach people. It was part of the infrastructure, and it was designed with the same care as the curriculum.
Manager Excellence equipped managers to lead the change with their teams
In a large company, transformation moves at the pace of its managers. To move the supertanker you have to empower and equip managers to be part of the change with their teams, and that was the reason for Manager Excellence, the work on what a Nike manager was expected to be. It ended in a manifesto the chief executive signed personally, built around Bill Bowerman, the coach who co-founded the company, and his belief that everyone has potential worth developing. It was written in the company’s own voice, and it asked four things of a Nike manager: lead, coach, drive and inspire.
The standard was the first part of a connected experience for managers. Manager90 was the feedback mechanism: an enterprise-wide, confidential upward feedback tool, so every manager heard from their own team how they were doing against the four expectations. And we created and curated learning in NikeU against each of leading, coaching, driving and inspiring, so a manager who had heard where they fell short had somewhere to go to work on it. Expectations, feedback and development connected to each other, and recognition and accountability worked together.
I have used the same design since. At Sanofi I built Manager90 again on a different framework, the company’s own management framework: a confidential, anonymised upward feedback tool from team members to their manager on how they were doing against it, rolled out to every manager across the organisation and run every year.
The function delivered a curriculum, a platform, a brand and a standard
55,000+
employees worldwide that NikeU served by the time I left the role, in a workforce that had grown from about 37,000 when I took it
70+
people in the global function, across the capability verticals and four geographies
7
communities of practice, each finding the best way the organisation already did something and making it the way everyone did it
Within three years the function had a capability-led global curriculum with an owner for each capability; a learning platform built in-house and live from the start of 2012; seven communities of practice carrying the standards across four geographies; a brand people used by name; and a manager standard with Manager90 feedback and learning built to it. The team was rebuilt at the same time: within a year, six of the eight directors were in new roles, a deliberate mix of people brought in and people grown.
The work has been written up twice. IMD published its case study in July 2012, from field research covering 2009 to 2012, and Development and Learning in Organizations interviewed me that April on the role, the profession and how to develop and retain talent.
Capability, delivery, brand and standard worked together
Guiding principles
Define the capability with the business, then build the curriculum. Each vertical worked with the senior leaders of its function on what excellence required before it built anything. Asking a function for its training requests produces a list; asking what it needs to be good at produces a curriculum with an owner and a point of view.
Design once, take it to market where the people are. Global design by capability gave the curriculum consistency. Each geography took it to market, localised for language, culture and need, and spoke for its people in the global design, so the global offer was truly global rather than written from world headquarters.
In a storytelling company, the brand carries the work. Nike is an exceptionally proficient storytelling company, and the storytelling inside has to be as strong for employees as the storytelling outside is for consumers. NikeU gave the learning agenda one brand and one aspiration, consistent with the culture, which is what let good work reach the people it was built for.
Equip managers to lead the change with their teams. A large company moves at the pace of its managers. Manager Excellence set the expectation, lead, coach, drive and inspire; Manager90 told each manager how their team experienced them against it; and the learning curated to the same four verbs gave them the means to act on what they heard. The same design worked again at Sanofi.
AI gives a learning function capabilities it did not have
The decisions above have not changed. What has changed is what a learning function can do once it has made them, and I have spent the last eighteen months finding out by building an adaptive tutoring platform, which I describe in Learned by building. Three things it does exceptionally well translate directly to a corporate learning function.
The first is insight. The platform produces strong diagnostics for the parent of each child: what changed, why it matters and what to do tonight. In a corporate setting, this could give managers a clearer view of learning needs and where coaching would help.
The second is personalisation. Each learner carries around fifty individual signals, which the platform calls learner DNA, and every lesson adapts to them. That is personalisation of a kind a curriculum built for a population could never offer, and it changes what designing once can mean.
The third is speed. The platform turns a canonical source, a published exam-board curriculum such as Pearson Edexcel’s, into about 150 lessons in about half an hour for a few pounds of AI cost. This compresses the drafting and production stages of the instructional design cycle into hours, with content tied to its source and coverage mapped against the capabilities we want to build.
Rebuilding a learning function for AI starts with the same decisions
Organisations putting AI into the flow of work are deciding again what their people need to be able to do, who will build that capability and where. Those are the decisions that made NikeU useful, and they come before any tool is bought. Define the capability with the leaders who run the function. Design it once and take it to market where people work. Give the whole thing a purpose and a brand people can choose to belong to. Equip managers to lead the change with their teams. AI can then make each of those decisions go further: insight for the managers, personalisation for the learners, and speed for the people building the curriculum.
A leader looking at their own learning function today can ask the three questions I asked at Nike: what is it for, how does it create value, and would people join it if they had the choice.