Senior Enteprise Strategist, Consultant, Analyst
Pistachio Consulting
United States
I work at the intersection of social messaging and workplace learning, focusing on the trends, markets and dynamics shaping a distributed and collaborative business culture. A former Fortune 500 learning chief, coauthor of Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice & Technology, cocreator of Pistachio Consulting's Enterprise Microsharing Comparison, I write the Fast Company expert blog Learn At All Levels. I offer an insider's perspective on the fields of enterprise technology, corporate community building, social networking, HR, human capital development, distributed leadership and cognitive design. As an advisor to public and private sector organizations, I leverage my experience operating high-speed organizations to spur personal and professional growth. Using social media, nimble enterprise tools and my own brand of learning assessments, I establish an organization-wide engine to spur and support growth. I have served FedEx, the Gap, Verizon Wireless, American Express, The United Nations, The Home Depot, NIMH, Mars, Microsoft, Sun, WD-40, CARE, Socialtext and other global employers. As a keynote speaker, I talk with groups throughout the United States and abroad on turning social media and learning into competitive advantage, microsharing for macro results, overcoming organizational learning disabilities, catalyzing the new digital learning style, and aligning education with dynamic business goals. I have been a featured speaker for The Conference Board, Internet World, the Brookings Institution, the US Intelligence Community and ABC World News This Morning. As a thought-leader, my columns reach millions of readers in print and online. In addition to Creating a Learning Culture (Cambridge, 2004), I wrote Learn More Now: 10 Simple Steps to Learning Better, Smarter and Faster (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) and have written for many other publications including Leading Organizational Learning (Jossey-Bass/Leader to Leader Foundation, 2004) and wrote the forward to Engaging Learning: Designing E-Learning Simulation Games by Clark N. Quinn (Pfeiffer, 2005). I have been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, CIO Magazine, PCWeek, Information Week, Business 2.0 and more. When PeopleSoft hired me to integrate technology and learning across the enterprise, I grew the Education function to become the fourth most profitable learning organization in the world. I built programs including PeopleSoft University to support 100% annual sales growth through client, business partners and employee training. These efforts increased revenues by $26 million and customer-sat ratings by 30%. I was also responsible for the design strategy, user experience and learnability for the PeopleSoft Business Network (PSBN) and PeopleSoft's R&D project code-name Disruptive.com, innovating next-generation enterprise software and online service business communities. Learning in the New Economy magazine, which I co-founded and led as editor-in-chief, gained a loyal readership of 250,000 C-level business leaders. The magazine received wide acclaim for making learning a hot topic among executives. At Microsoft, I developed the company's first new employee training program, accelerating employee readiness from 6-months to 6-weeks. My training organization delivered classes to thousands of employees each year. I am a fellow of the Batten Institute at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, a 2009 Fellow of the Society for New Communitions Research, co-founder the Learnativity Alliance, founded Ageless Learner, develop leadership programs for women worldwide and I volunteer time to talk with teachers and parents about creative solutions for children who have learning disabilities. I have lived and worked on three continents, and currently live on a 50-acre homestead in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley with my husband Karl and son Clarke. Learn more at www.marciaconner.com and @marciamarcia.
Always learning, learning all ways.
http://www.fastcompany.com/user/marcia-conner
Managing Director, Ageless Learner
Private, Education / Training industryVice President, PeopleSoft
Public, 5000+ employees, Technology / Computers industryDirector, Wave Technologies
Public, 101-500 employees, Education / Training industrySr. Manager, Worldwide Training, Microsoft
Public, 5000+ employees, Technology / Computers industrySenior Enteprise Strategist, Consultant, Analyst, Pistachio Consulting
Private, Internet / New Media / Ecommerce industryDarden Graduate School of Business Administration (Batten Fellow), Virginia, United States
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Earlham College, Indiana, United States