Jay Cross

CEO & Chief Unlearning Officer

Media highlights

Last 3 Posts

Everything’s Coming Up Networks
Sloan Management Review has a great interview with Andy McAfeeon What Sells CEOs on Social Networking. CEOs excitedly agree with Lew Platt’s old observation about Hewlett-Packard: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.” They understand the power of weak ties in enterprise social networks. They appreciate the incoming generation’s new approach [...]
The Agile Learning Train is Leaving the Station
I’d planned to begin posting my thoughts about how this Unmanagement/Stoos business impacts the administration and operation of corporate training. My friend Dawn Paulos at Xyleme beat me to the punch. Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must [...]
Learning with people, not technology
This morning I revisited the delightful story of how people learn to do their jobs at New Seasons Market, a chain of nine natural food stores in Portland, Oregon. New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning. That New Seasons is a people-oriented business echoes in their approach to learning. New hires receive a brief orientation and are [...]

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Top Articles

Everything's Coming Up Networks (0) Jay Cross Sloan Management Review has a great interview with Andy McAfeeon What Sells CEOs on Social Networking. CEOs excitedly agree with Lew Platt’s old observation about Hewlett-Packard: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive...
The Agile Learning Train is Leaving the Station (0) Jay Cross I’d planned to begin posting my thoughts about how this Unmanagement/Stoos business impacts the administration and operation of corporate training. My friend Dawn Paulos at Xyleme beat me to the punch.
Today, the expectations of learners are muc...
Learning with people, not technology (0) Jay Cross This morning I revisited the delightful story of how people learn to do their jobs at New Seasons Market, a chain of nine natural food stores in Portland, Oregon.
New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning.

...
The Stoos Gathering & Working Smarter (0) Jay Cross Ten days ago I flew to Switzerland for a mountaintop retreat with twenty thought leaders from around the world to ponder better ways to manage organizations.
On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans th...
No more business as usual (0) Jay Cross “This is business.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather
Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring,...
Learning in the 21st Century Means Adapting to Change (0) Jay Cross Businesses talk about adapting to change quickly, but they don’t take advantage of it. When a practice is not producing results, it’s time to unlearn it. Organizations that don’t embrace new ways of operating and radically different approaches to c...
About the Alliance, Video (0) Jay Cross Internet Time Alliance helps organizations work smarter by embedding learning and collaboration into workflow. For recent opinions and pointers, please visit our blog. For trending articles about working smarter, drop by our aggregator. For something m...
Why now? (0) Jay Cross Business is Falling Behind
Business organizations are lagging reality. The 21st century is radically different from what came before and yet most businesses act as if nothing has changed.

Half of the adult population of the United States uses social...
A dozen key behaviors (0) Jay Cross Here’s shorthand for a dozen ways workers and managers in the 21st century can prosper:
Take stock, take charge
Delight customers
Collaborate, team-work
De-stress, make people happy
Inspire performance
Take the pulse
Sprint
Decide wise...
The Long View (0) Jay Cross Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, working smarter, and systems thinking. His calling is to help business people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life. Known as the first person to use the term eLearning on the web, Cro...
Working Smarter in the Enterprise (0) Jay Cross On April 27, 2011, Clark Quinn and I kicked off a meeting of the Chief Learning Officer Executive Network at Symantec in Mountain View. The Executive Networks people took notes; here are the main points from my presentation.
Work Is Changing

Work...
Working Smarter Glossary (0) Jay Cross Grappling with blazing-fast change requires a new vocabulary. Here are a few phrases from a CLO survival guide that you may find useful. This is an excerpt from The Working Smarter Fieldbook 2011 edition by Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles ...
It’s all about working smarter (0) Jay Cross My work helping clients work smarter generally involves informal learning, collaboration, knowledge-sharing, organization development, and nurturing learning ecosystems. I rely on concepts from design, psychology, consumer marketing, network theory, soc...
Mind map, contents, and more from the Working Smarter Fieldbook (0) Jay Cross Working smarter is the key to sustainability and continuous improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn ...
Working Smarter (0) Jay Cross Higher ground
I don’t talk much about training or learning these days.

Just because you train people doesn’t mean they learn.

Learning is higher ground than training, but learning is not enough to make sure the job gets done.

The goal is a...
The Case for Communities of Practice (0) Jay Cross In his 2001 book Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain describes how he became a professional chef and how he continues to support the community of professional chefs. Now, keep in mind that no one issues membership cards to professional chefs — but t...
It’s all relative (0) Jay Cross When you talk to businesspeople, you must speak as they do. Executives only care about training as it relates to execution. Their interest is in moving the corporation forward. You should share that interest. That is what they pay you for.
A sponsor is...
2.0 is a philosophy, not a technology (0) Jay Cross Internet Time Alliance spent a couple of days last week putting the 2.0 into a tedious proposal for a large, forward-facing multinational corporation.
Among our recommendations were:

Informal Live webcasts
Informal �...
Time Is Money (0) Jay Cross Time Matters
The sooner workers are productive, the larger their contribution to the organization. This makes time-to-performance, the amount of time required to begin performing at target levels, a vital metric. Here’s an example.

At the end of the...
Go straight to the finish line (0) Jay Cross Two of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance, Jane Hart and Charles Jennings just returned from speaking at the Learning Technologies conference in London.
The conference program would lead you to assume that the Learning Technologies conferen...
Seminal Documents (0) Jay Cross These are fundamental, inspirational, prescient, important documents and presentations. All free on the web. Amazing! Seminal Video is at the bottom of this page. Please suggest what else should appear here.
Visual History of Corporate Education

...
Informal Learning 2.0 (0) Jay Cross In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their c...
Not Your Father’s ROI (0) Jay Cross
The July issue of Chief Learning Officer is now available online. It features an article in which Jon Husband and I delve into how to measure the impact of learning in the network era.

Productivity in a Networked era: Not Your Father�...
The future is people, not technology (0) Jay Cross More Human Than Human
CLO magazine, June 2009
Column on Effectiveness, by Jay Cross

The future is people, not technology

My last column in CLO called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instr...
Informal Learning Poster (0) Jay Cross Jay Cross and Xplane desined a great infographics poster for informal learning. Click the image to view a zoomable version.
Thanks to the European Commission for translating the poster. When I arrived to speak at Learning Day in Brussels in late 2010, gi...
Informal Learning in a Nutshell (0) Jay Cross Workers learn more in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning - classes and workshops - i...
The income statement isn’t (0) Jay Cross At the Learning Technologies conference in London yesterday, a member of the audience inquired about metrics. The reply was “ROI.” It never ceases to amaze me how many people assess the cost and benefit of projects with accounting approaches developed...
Making the Business Case for Informal Learning (0) Jay Cross This question came up in an online seminar this morning. “How can I demonstrate the value of Informal Learning?”
First of all, understand that you’re not buying informal learning. It’s already going on in your organization. In fact, three-qua...
Not Without Purpose (0) Jay Cross No one has time. Life on earth is faster, faster, faster. We are inundated with information, showered with technological innovation, and pestered by multiple media 24/7. Business is a blur. Life is uncertain. People are stressed. Work is hell. Its time ...
Sight Mammals (0) Jay Cross Humans are sight mammals, proposes e-learning guru Jay Cross. They learn almost twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visuals engage both hemispheres of the human brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age grou...

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Blog

Bio

Jay Cross is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. The Internet Time Alliance, which he chairs, helps corporations and governments use networks to accelerate performance.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to help people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is also co-author of Implementing eLearning and The Working Smarter Fieldbook. His philosophies on the power of informal learning and net-work have fundamentally changed the world of learning in organizations.

He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School. Jay and his wife Uta live with their miniature longhaired dachshund in the hills of Berkeley, California.

Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning and systems thinking. His calling is to help business people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life.

Jay is CEO and Chief Unlearning Officer of the Internet Time Alliance, a brain trust of six thought leaders who help companies boost their collective intelligence and profitability through networks.

Jay is a change agent, futurist, speaker, and author whose insights and stories will expand your perspective and enliven your meetings. He distills lessons from cognitive science, social networking, business strategy, futures research, and psychology to boost sales, improve customer service, and spark innovation.

Jay frequently leads workshops and webinars to help corporate teams work smarter. His speaking style is vibrant, energetic, and compelling. Mixing case studies, stories, and actionable recommendations with humor and easy-to-understand language, Jay inspires action.

A Harvard MBA and Princeton undergrad, he has been improving business processes since developing the first business curriculum for the University of Phoenix three decades ago. He is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning.

Jay covers topics from 50,000 feet to ground level, depending on audience and need. He has spoken with executives, sales managers, entrepreneurs, chief learning officers, sales staff, instructional designers, HR directors, bankers, and academics. He has keynoted conferences the U.S., Canada, Austria, U.K., Germany, Australia, Portugal, Belgium, Monaco, and Abu Dhabi. He travels the world, but increasingly delivers presentations and events virtully over the web.

Jay is the author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance, The Working Smarter Fieldbook, and Implementing eLearning. Thousands of people read his articles and two blogs, Internet Time and Informal Learning. He has helped Cisco, CIGNA, Eaton, IBM, Service College Canada, Sun, National Australia Bank, Intel, Raytheon, Genentech, Novartis, HP, the CIA, Citibank, Chase, and others slash time-to-performance.

Jay and his wife Uta live with their miniature long-haired dachshund in the hills of Berkeley, California.

Quotes

Conversations are the stem cells of learning.

The only metrics that matter are business metrics.

80% of learning is informal; 80% of the money goes to formal.

Work and learning are becoming one and the same.

More happens in the world in one of your minutes than in one of your grandmother’s hours.

Testimonials

Jay talks about unblended learning, emergence, grokking, envisioning, unconferencing, connecting, conversation, community, web2.0 and JDI (just do it). He makes the point that classes are dead, that every learner needs to cultivate an ecology, share via voicing, communicate using stories and build common text by collaborative editing (wikis). ~ Denham Gray

Jay provides an important challenge for us all – to move our focus from the classroom to the workplace, and, in doing so, reframe what we do in ways that much more closely reflect how people actually learn and perform on the job. ~ Marc Rosenberg

Jay is one of the most courageous personalities I’ve ever encountered, especially in a field where self-interested cowardice is pretty much the rule. His clarity of vision on all things relating to learning in the corporate world is only matched by his commitment to helping others make it work. He cuts through nonsense with incredible speed and precision. Is Jay a revolutionary? Only in his long-term vision. For the rest his focus is on the nuts and bolts of human relations, which is what transfer and development of knowledge is all about. ~ Peter Isackson

Jay is an evangelist of the intelligent application of new learning methods and tools, and he helps organizations improve the performance of their people by speeding up their learning. Jay is also an absolutely great presenter, a good writer, and a sharp mind to work with. ~ Robin Good

Take a mega-high IQ, some Berkeley attitude, a dose of e-learning curiosity and you get Jay Cross. For opinion and analysis, nothing is as interesting or fun as Jay’s blog. ~ Kevin Kruse

Jay Cross, among just a few others, gives me the impetus to keep on moving ahead into uncharted territory. ~ Michael Hotrum

You have been a tremendous help shaping our vision for the future of Learning at Intel. I was amazed at the way you engaged with us, brainstormed with us, and then created a presentation within hours, to reflect back our current and future situations. Your individual consultations and idea swap-meets get the creative brainstorming going and have helped us dream big and think beyond the norm. I love that you are able to peel away the layers of “business as usual” to see what’s really been happening all along. Even more than that, you’ve been able to consult with our learning leaders and articulate the true value of our shifting landscape (or learnscape!). As we put a plan in place for next year, it’s been a big help to look back on our time with you and identify some of our critical next steps. ~ Allison Anderson

Hi there Jay, I feel compelled to put fingers to keyboard as I’m up to Chapter 6 of Informal Learning and am absolutely bowled over by your work. I’m heading up a newly formed Learning Solutions team and we are keen to tranform ourselves from the formal to informal ‘space’. You have articulated so beautifully what we are trying to achieve, but have struggled to put into words. I feel totally inspired to make this live and breathe in our organisation and am fortunate enough to work with a group of people who I know can make this work. Thank you so much – your insight arrived at just the right time. ~ SL

The key to the 21st Century will be in learning how to leverage informal learning for us all. Jay provides us an evocative roadmap to how we can do this. ~ John Seely Brown