Our Mission
To be a worldwide influence in establishing teamwork, trust and honest communication as the basis for interaction. We embody and teach respect, courage and closure as the means to enhance peace and productivity within people and organizations. |
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What We
Do
Since 1976 Learning
Center has supplied fully customized team and leadership development solutions
to industry worldwide. We work to a desired outcome list, often objective and
always specific—and absolutely
guarantee our
work.
Through the years,
our client list has included enterprises
of almost every description, from startup company management consulting, to IBM
Worldwide and Elan Pharmaceuticals, from hi-tech through rock-n-roll to health
care delivery and the Federal Reserve Bank.
Learning Center workshops are raising
the performance bar in corporate America and throughout the world. Our client
partners are organizations that require performance improvement, whether a
whole company or a unit of a whole company. We look for leaders committed to
long term competitive advantage through the conscious creation of positive
culture based on teamwork, accountability, closure and earned trust. Learning
Center gives definition to the art of execution in business.
We are experienced with technology,
manufacturing, service and health-care, startups of nearly every description
and business mergers with different cultures.
Our favorite projects involve conversion of an entire
culture from Random to Leadership culture. These projects usually start with
the Lead Team and extend across, down and back up the organization over a
period of 12-18 months. The result is a lasting competitive edge based on
closure, accountability, commitment and the conversion of any them vs. us
dynamics to a culture of earned trust.
Our approach includes methodologies for
1) pre-seminar interviews and audits to establish performance benchmarks, 2) a
one to two day foundation training seminar with the full team, and 3) a wide
variety of follow-up mechanisms to ensure full adoption of the delivered
principles and achievement of client goals.
This approach has proven effective with
large organizations such as IBM Worldwide, Novell and Knight-Ridder, as well as
academic organizations such as The Stanford Graduate School of Business (Sloan
Program). The Learning Center (TLC) has also had significant success with high
growth smaller companies with fewer than 500 employees. Clients in this
category include Macrovision, Consilium, ILC Technology, Mylex, Synergen
Associates, Intellicorp and others. TLC has had significant success with
startups as well, with Interop, Women.com, I-Pass, Greenough Communications and
WorldRes as recent examples.
We also provide proven training courses
with products in the following areas:
- High Performance
Teamwork
- Leadership Development
- Optimizing Change
Strategies
- Facilitation and Meeting
Skills
- Converting Risk-Aversion
- Organizational
Renewal
How We Do
It
We use a combination
of workshop and one-on-one coaching. Though we design and coordinate every
project, all of our courseware is available for train-the-trainer.
We work with current, real
challenges and opportunities within the organization. Our approach to each
participant is customized and strictly self-discovery, never intrusive. Entire
departments can be "assigned" to participate, and despite any initial
skepticism enjoy the session and win in a multitude of performance areas. In
every instance, we help participants bring to closure all major challenges,
ending the foundation sessions with written business plans and proposals. We
then follow each to completion (or train your professional trainers or your
operators to do so). Case Studies.
Our Guiding Principles for
Customized Projects
• We will continuously tackle the toughest "real time" challenges.
• We will bring everything to closure.
• We won't make
extra work. Everything will be aligned/synergized with current goals and
leadership/team initiatives. Participants will learn by doing, observing the
results and leveraging.
• We will take ownership and build both
trust and pride.
• We will facilitate a "we" culture.
• We will facilitate converting complaints into solutions.
•
We will think and act inclusively with our communications and solutions.
• We will support the result until it's stable, then turn it over to
your Team Champions.
The Time It Takes
We do not require a lot of time with
your people. We precede all seminar work with assessment, often including
private interviews. Here we assimilate a cross-section of opinion and
perception and create with you clear desired outcome lists. Based on the
resulting customization, we then provide each participant with brief
pre-session work.
For
the seminars themselves, one and a half to two days is usually plenty for the
senior leadership foundation session. Plan on one full day for each foundation
session for the rest of the workforce. We provide maintenance for all projects.
Follow-up sessions vary from quarter through half-days to full days, spaced
about quarterly (depending on participant initiatives and company growth). In
these sessions, we follow initiatives, help correct and leverage slippage,
include new hires, present new material and expand the foundation through
topics such as Change, Growth, Culture and Leverage.
How It Starts
We often start with the Senior or Lead
Team, consulting with and reviewing your needs. Send us an email at
info@learningcenter.net
and we'll send a proposal. No charge.
25 Years and Counting
Learning Center was founded in 1974 by
Arthur R. (Arky) Ciancutti, M.D., at the time a practicing pediatrician. Early
in his practice, Dr. Ciancutti discovered that he was better trained for the
physical problems in his practice than he was for the relationship problems
common in pediatrics.
Intrigued, he headed for the library to learn about "teamwork,"
whereupon (in 1973) he found nothing at all! This discovery led to a series of
major changes: the first was from pediatrics to emergency medicine. Arky helped
pioneer emergency medicine as a specialty for seven years while simultaneously
studying multi-disciplined, cross-functional approaches to problems in the
Emergency Department, with immediate and very visible results and
consequences.
The
resulting discoveries led to the simultaneous evolution of The Natural Learning
Center (today's Learning Center), originally built around the principles and
skills effective in the Emergency Department and today dedicated to customized
use in the business and healthcare industry consulting worldwide. The Learning
Center was the first to provide teamwork training to these communities.
Through the years, the foundation materials of
Learning Center have acted as a springboard for many projects. For
instance:
- In the early nineties,
IBM hired Learning Center to help
solve what they perceived to be a critical problem. After decades of market
dominance, some IBM employees felt “entitled” to continued success,
and were having difficulty making the changes required to step up to new
competition that was capturing IBM’s market share. The result was a course
for managers—“Ball & Change”—which guided participants
through the emotional mazes of difficult change and emphasized the dangers of
complacency. The course was fun and productive, and won IBM’s award that
year for most innovative course. It led to Learning Center’s engagement to
create “Choice Points,” a course designed to eliminate unnecessary
risk aversion that targeted all IBM managers world-wide.
- Elan
Pharmaceuticals likewise hired Learning Center for an application of TLC
method for closure communication; one that would ensure that their complex
cross-functional compliance team would receive FDA approval for a very high
profile pharmaceutical that is successful in the market today.
- Applied Materials
also needed a refinement: more accurate execution of projects handed off from
senior executive to senior administrator.
- Utilicorp needed
a way to ensure success in a newly decentralized and growing management
system.
- Sun Microsystems
needed a format that would ensure better forecasting coordination between
Finance and Sales.
- The Federal Reserve
Bank San Francisco needed more balance between the investment and the
regulatory sides of the house.
- Novell needed a system to build more
trust in a shifting management structure.
- Stanford Research
Institute (SRI) needed to instill more profit motive in some of the most
effective independent basic research done in the United States.
- Women.com needed strategies for
growth, and their ultimate sale, through mergers and acquisitions.
- Tandem Computers needed to change its
initial marketing strategy from sales to “mom & pop” businesses
to larger, more centralized customers.
- The Stanford Sloan
Program wanted a strong introduction to teamwork and the perils of Us
versus Them activity as part of a kickoff to their yearly program.
- ROLM needed to reconcile its initially
dual product line of field computers and telephone systems.
- The Sharper Image
needed an interactive program for its managers that detailed the relationship
between trust and high performance.
- Spinecare and SOAR (the San
Francisco 49’ers physicians) needed improved business growth
strategies.
- The Tosco/Avon
Refinery needed, by law, to demonstrate better execution between management
and its bargaining unit in order to re-open after a catastrophic
explosion.
- Aquila needed
more successful strategies to hedge risk in natural gas futures transactions
and thus protect its parent company’s value.
- The University of San Francisco Medical
Center needed a way to combine managements and reduce overhead expenses
by $25 million annually after a major merger.
- The American
Conservatory Theater (ACT) needed better coordination between the business
and the artistic sides of the house.
We’ve
mentioned here some company names that we think you may recognize. We have not
included the hundreds of lesser-known company names: the startups, the
“small businesses,” the non-profit organizations and the many other
organizations that range from successful dot-coms to Native American schools:
heroes, in our view, of successful innovation. But the success of every one of
these projects is based on Learning Center methods.
Dr. Arky
Ciancutti still directs The Learning Center and actively teaches.
Dr. Arky Ciancutti now conducts some
leadership workshops at his
award-winning
lodge in Mendocino, California. Contact Learning Center for details.
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For free consultation on your critical team/leader/performance
issues,
or leadership training seminars in California or your own
state/country
email
info@learningcenter.net
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