Organizational Learning Portfolio - Recently Updated Pages

Shared Resources

MoveMeantUnlimited — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 01:34:51 CDT

Elizabeth's EduBlog for Web 2.0 and Distance Learning

Edublog was ranked the number one blog site for teachers by Wikipedia Education. I used it to explore Web 2.0 technologies in a graduate course. Please click on the image for the link to it. It is a free blog service loaded with great Web 2.0 examples for distance learning.

Professional Associations

ECooperBoleyn — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:58:41 CDT

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

Professional Consulting Portfolio Home

elizajohnson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:31:22 CDT

Professional Marketing Consulting

Organizational Learning Consulting

While working towards completion of her doctorate, Elizabeth works as an Organizational Learning Consultant for GenQuest, Inc.on a project basis. Most recently, she developed evaluation capacity for a governmental entity on behalf of GenQuest, Inc.

Adult Mentoring Program Development by Elizabeth

Elizabeth completed a long term internship for The University of New Mexico conducting a survey of the literature on mentoring best pratices for training and developing mentees and mentors for effective mentoring relationships. She completed the first two University courses based on her research including applying Gagne's instructional design model for instructor and student manuals. Elizabeth is in process of submiting her extensive mentoring best pratices research for publication to a peer-reviewed Journal.

Elizabeth is experienced conducting needs assessments and design customized curriculum, on-line or face to face, teaching mentor and/or mentee training for formal mentor program implementation for corporations and higher education. She also utilizes formative evaluation procedures as capacity building strategy for co-creating improved systems and processes for sustainable knowledge transfer programs.

Courses and Trainings by Elizabeth

Elizabeth is a scholar, researcher, writer, teacher, facilitator and evaluator focused on changing mental models and developing instructional design on-line and in the classroom for higher education and businesses towards creating learning organizations and capacity-building. She is especially interested in creating a measurable, multi-layered thinking matrix for application in business and higher education collaborative and constructivist learning environments to increase the opportunity for transformational learning.

Shared Resources

Elizabeth shares personally-informing resources, articles and links with other lifelong learners. Your thoughts, ideas and insights are welcome, please. Thank you.

. Email Elizabeth for more information.

Professional Marketing Consultant

elizajohnson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:35:01 CDT

Professional Marketing Consulting

"Changing" implies something that will end. Enter static change. Cultivating the talent in your workforce and engaging directly with suppliers and customers as in-group members will inform agile business processes and mindful positioning in today's global, multi-dimensional, intercultural, cross-generational marketplace. Elizabeth understands these linkages. Information gained through global marketing research, formative needs assessments, utilizing scientific research methods and evaluation practices is crucial to co-construct the most important strategic business decisions facing us today.
Do you know what business you are really in? Does it match what your buyers think?
Do you really know who your customers are? Or why they buy from you? What are they saying about you and who is imitating you?
What have you learned from and shared with your customers today?
Do you know 4 or 5 critical organizational factors that most directly impact business profitability - and what their status is now?
Do you know how these factors are linked to addressing static change?
Do you know why business is growing or slipping lately?
What is causing revenue slips, decreasing profitability or contributing to an organizational culture that no longer serves talented employees, important customers, or quality suppliers?
Is your strategic technology marketing plan effective? How many customers/users/buyers have mentioned your business to their networks today?
How are your marketing messages interpreted across cultures, including print, text, e-mail languaging, graphic display arrangements, color selections, icons, logos and product packaging?

Developing and implementing a customer-focused, market-driven business strategy not only improves production and innovation from talented employees, but incites alignment with customers and suppliers. Identifying potentially weak links in internal operating processes and removing structural barriers that prevent agile responsiveness to static change is key. Somewhere between 1982 and 2001, The Millennial Generation (Strauss & Howe, 2001) have grown up to join the workforce. Socio-political historical events and technology have effectively jolted traditional American business enterprise. Static change is here to stay. Traditional, postmodern marketing approaches must be re-engineered to meet the needs of the now largest generation alive today. Globalization through technological advancements beg the close examination of potential unintended consequences of intercultural media utility and messaging.

Elizabeth Alyn Johnson, BA, MBA, Ph.D. student, researcher, writer and business owner, has over a decade of successful business experience with a proven eye for business potential, cultural and cross-generational implications; related marketing and operating strategy. Elizabeth understands business plans and their relationship to market and best practices for managing static change, internal communication practices and intercultural marketing processes. She emphasizes ways to develop workplace talent, co-create strategic viral marketing approaches and leverage strategic business networks. Elizabeth specializes co-creating strategies to cultivate organizational learning cultures to develop lifelong learning organizations/institutions in response to static change.

Marketing Strategy and Implementation

A successful marketing plan, like a business plan, maps out strategy based in external and internal research and analysis.
What is the product? How can it be presented as a learning experience?
What is the optimal promotional strategy and related budget?
What kinds of Web 2.0 technologies will support optimal viral marketing?
And how best to get the product to the customer in PR and the Web World?

Elizabeth brings savvy and extensive experience bringing new products and services to international, domestic and local markets to help create the strategy that is right for the business - regardless of audience or size. Co-constructing strategic marketing plan implementation utilizing proven business approaches incorporating Internet technology including wikis, blogs, listservs, forums, social networks supports viral marketing, where your buyers are on fire to share "something new" with their networks. Elizabeth can support discovery of new ways to represent your company to the market, build targeted public relations support, identify optimal associations, strategic partnerships, target highly salient trade show and industry-relevant learning opportunities. Marketing strategy and implementation across four generations of potential buyers today, begs reconsideration of one-way information sharing towards a multi-layered, user/buyer-centric, easily accessible and identifiable cultural brand. Engaging organizational learning strategies to manage a static state of change includes accelerating talent development and fast-adopter process innovation. Actively seeking, sharing and improving responsiveness to users/customers and suppliers will link your business, regardless of size or product, to the global supply chain marketplace.

Management Training

Do individuals and teams share systematic thinking supporting the company vision? Are teams working together collaboratively, and individual talent being utilized for innovation and growth? Is there comfort in "the way things are done around here"? Elizabeth specializes in facilitating structured strategic planning sessions with business owners and teams to determine focus areas of needed adaptability. Co-constructed on-line or scaffolded series of collaborative learning seminars allow for frank discussion and expose learning opportunities. Process evaluation, appreciative inquiry, problem solving and knowledge capacity building evaluation techniques become a norm in the learning organization. Capacity building evaluation techniques with daily business issues can uncover potential barriers within the internal culture inhibiting collaborative approaches enabling profitable, agile strategic business operations.

These sessions provide critical opportunities to articulate a clear vision, align mental models, pinpoint individual and team potential for innovation and experience multifaceted thinking approaches to co-create a sense ownership with the company vision.

. Email Elizabeth for information about a needs assessment or capacity-building evaluation.

Adult Mentoring Program Development by Elizabeth

elizajohnson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:31:27 CDT

Mentoring and Organizations/Institutions
Mentoring works well in organizations and institutions only when programs are supported structurally and culturally. Mentoring accountability must accompany accessibility to mentoring resources including time commitments required. The climate and culture screams enabling and valuing of mentoring across the organization. Mentoring values are displayed from the pre-screening interviewing applicant process to promotion or graduation, then begins again, anew. Sustainable organizational mentoring strategies never match supervisors with direct reports nor peers with peers in a formal way.

There are several types of informal mentoring techniques that do not require formal organizational support, yet can produce profound, deeply enriching two-way or group-way, learning experiences. These programs work best when self-elected and self-regulated but require clearly supported positionality and enabling structures. Informal programs typically depend more upon the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the dyad or group member communication for success rather than an outside-relationship regulating body to guide and direct process. Human beings are natural learners. Every adult brings a wealth of talent already pre-positioned towards developing human resources within that institution/organization. Weighing individual and organizational needs with potential cultural barriers will illumine potential successful acceptance of mentoring programs. External and internal factors will act as barriers or enables to formal or informal mentoring programs. Structural dynamics, compensation packages, rewards programs, job descriptions, aesthetics, customer satisfaction, inter and intradepartmental relationships and accessibility of knowledge and technology can provide a general measure of cooperation, collaboration and equity among members. Effective mentoring programs can address attrition rates, manage turnover, encourage cross-generational knowledge sharing, develop talent, smooth merger and acquisition events, increase technology or internal process change adoption as well as create a climate of ongoing learning and growth to keep up with the normative static change state of organizations and institutions today.

Needs assessments conducted on-line or otherwise, can illumine what type/s of mentoring programs, match overarching goals of individuals with entities, identify resource demands, define intellectual, talent and intended return, compile best practices for negotiated coordination monitoring efforts and construct collaborative prudent evaluation processes. Customized training, on-line and/or a series of formative training sessions support internal practices towards developing, implementing and assessing mentoring programs.

What is mentoring?
Depending on the context, mentoring is ultimately a purposeful, two-way transformational learning experience whereby external desires are ultimately embraced as internal values within both parties. Transformational learning shows up in new behaviors, choices, attitudes and/or worldviews.

Role modeling is highly salient for adults, even after 30.
This short clip depicts an extreme example of the potential impacts that role-modeling, an basic tenet of effective mentoring, can have on others.

Courses & Trainings Developed by Elizabeth

elizajohnson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:30:23 CDT

Elizabeth developed and conducts Advanced Marketing Courses for higher education (graduate and undergraduates). She provides entrepreneurs who are starting up, expanding, enhancing or selling businesses' training for highly individualized, hands-on development of strategic marketing or succession plans.

Elizabeth adapted and conducts Basic Business Plan Writing Courses, where entrepreneurs and micro-businesses align their trade with contemporary business models and walks through the creation of a complete business plan worth of financial institution presentation at the end of the course.

Elizabeth designed, developed and taught The University of New Mexico's first official Mentor training courses. She constructed instructor manuals, student manuals, multi-media presentations, interactive activities and deep learning episodes for two courses:

UNIV 216: Mentoring and Career Development: a 16-week action learning, practice-oriented course designed for students to experience the best practices of being a mentee. Mentees identify, request, experience and evaluate being mentored through a self-discovery process enhancing psychosocial, academic and career professional development goals.
UNIV 291: Mentoring and Leadership Development: a 10-week action learning, practice-oriented course designed for students to experience the art of being an effective peer mentor. Peer mentors identify a potential tutored mentee and proceed through a formal process, from confidentiality contracts, communication skills, self-awareness activities, storytelling, developing SMART goals, documenting and journaling about weekly meetings with mentees. Learning to guide, to take a Socratic learning approach, practice Nonviolent communication and emotional intelligence moving through the stages of an effective mentoring relationship.

Elizabeth designed, developed and created Mind/Body Holistic Health Courses for adults in higher education and corporate environments. This course is combination of experiential movement, critical thinking development and theoretical application. Participants choose weekly journaling topics, engage in movement for fitness 40 minutes each class, practice relaxation exercises combined with related theoretical eastern, western and homeopathic perspectives for stress relief.

Course Listings By Topic

Terminal Objectives
Enabling Objectives

Organizational Learning Consultant

elizajohnson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:26:02 CDT

Elizabeth works as an organizational learning consultant with GenQuest, Inc. on a project-only basis. GenQuest specializes in:
Mediation
Facilitation
Evaluation Services
Training & Instructional Design
Fact Finding
Executive Coaching

Elizabeth Alyn Johnson, BA, MBA, is near completion of her Ph.D. coursework at The University of New Mexico in Educational Leadership and Organizational Learning. Elizabeth is scheduled for doctoral-level Comprehensive Exams in early August, 2009. After 11 years in private and public corporate environments with a focus on training, sales and marketing, building business and fostering strategic positioning, she brings unique perspective from the various organizational cultures and industries she has engaged with. Creating innovative approaches to motivate fledgling sales and other tenuous organizational systems, she found her niche in needs-based curriculum development to facilitate and stimulate learning at the individual to group levels, which naturally flow into the ability for firms to respond with the agility necessary to thrive in today’s internal and external global and intercultural marketplace. Elizabeth has worked with fortune 100 firms to coaching micro-business owners and entrepreneurs towards enterprise development. She focuses where the need/s are and indicate professional instructional design, exceptional training and evaluation systems for stakeholders and constituents based on transformational adult learning theory. At this time, Elizabeth is involved with project-based assignments to champion and co-facilitate a path to excellence, starting at the individual level.