MARIL MACDONALD:
So Jay this has been really fantastic, thank you so much but I have to ask you one more thing, do you have any words of closing advice for us?

JAY CONGER:
I do. And that would be that it’s very important as a leader to have a very powerful learning capacity and when we were doing a study of high potentials, these are individuals who over their career continued to adapt and learn and went on to very successful leadership roles. One of the characteristics they all shared in common is what we call catalytic learning capacity. In other words, they were keen learners and what’s very important about them is they weren’t just into learning but they were learning to taking the learning and making it into something. So there was a study done at the Center for Creative Leadership in which they looked at people who were good learners and they discovered there was a whole group of them who did nothing with their learning’s. And they didn’t do anything so actually they didn’t have much of an impact.”

MARIL MACDONALD:
What does it mean that they knew something new but didn’t use it?

JAY CONGER:
Whereas our high potentials actually would take the learning as a catalyst to do something. And one of the individuals we studied (he’s a wonderful illustration of this); he ran a fairly significant group in India. [He was a] Young high potential in his thirties for a Swiss company and medical products company. And he was invited to a strategic planning meeting in the US so he came over but he decided to stay a week longer and he spent that week with the US sales force travelling around with the top sales people learning how they did what they did. And during that week he learned all sorts of techniques and more importantly he said, gosh, you know the US sales force has really figured out some things that we have not in India. So when he flew back he created a sales force competency model, which he implemented within about four weeks. As well as he borrowed a lot of the innovations he learned in the US and put them in place literally within a few weeks upon getting home. Now you can think of it about meeting probably had about 40 or 50 young high potential managers attend the meeting. But he was the only one who stayed on to learn and brought the learning’s back to India to take his business to the next level. Catalytic learning capacity. And one of the kind of very important, really enormous stumbling blocks is that your ability as a more senior leader to believe that you’ve figured it all out and there’s nothing to learn. That actually sets you up for one of the biggest falls in your career. And we’re in this amazingly dynamic age and you have to stay a keen learner and you have to be able to use that learning quickly to readapt. And by the way its lots of fun to be a learner. And it’s even more fun to be an entrepreneur. Taking the learning and make something out of it.