Unfolding The Inaugural Chief Learning Officer: CLO SUMMIT INDIA 2009

Mumbai, November 20: The much awaited summit on organizational learning and development was held on November 20, 2009 at the TISS Convention Centre and witnessed the presence of eminent speakers and leaders from the field of organizational learning and development.


The CLO Summit which is, founded by Mr. Kumaar Bagrodia, CEO LeapVault commenced by him sharing the vision, idea and how change and learning lead to innovation in organizations. He cited the numerous opportunities that India has as organizations are responsible towards a huge employee potential who need to unlearn and learn in order to positively impact businesses in a fast changing environment.


The address note was delivered by the Chief Guest, Bhasker Chatterjee, Secretary, Dept. of Heavy Ind. & Public Ent., Government of India who said that it is time for the role of a Chief Learning Officer to emerge in organizations as India is moving from industrialization to a knowledge economy. He also gave an insight into the qualities of a CLO who would be able to effectively drive an organization’s workforce. This was followed by the live interactive discussion chaired by Vikram Oza, Bloomberg UTV alongwith panellists being Arun Balakrishnan, CMD HPCL; Thomas Varghese, CEO Aditya Birla Retail; S Parasuraman, Director TISS; Mukund Rajan. MD Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd. and Kumaar Bagrodia. CEO LeapVault. The panel took off by understanding whether there is a need of a separate CLO in an organization today, just like the existence of CFO’s and CMO’s leading to a conclusion that yes, a CLO who is a domain expert in learning and organizational development is a key to drive the organization’s vision and business goals across the workforce.



Susan Bloch, CLO Aditya Birla Group spoke on learning in Multicultural environments, MNC’s and conglomerates followed by a talk by Nilesh Kulkarni, Head HR, Novartis Consumer Healthcare on the role of R&D, Innovation and Learning in today’s dynamic organizations.


Shaheen Mistri, CEO Teach for India, who shared her experiences and insights on the learning model that their organization follows and how it has impacted the education system in India over the last year since their conception of Teach for India. The other panellists at this session were V C Agarwal, Director IOC; S Mohan, Director BPCL and K S Jamestin, Group GM ONGC who spoke about how employee training and development has become a core function in the PSU sector in India given its wide areas of specialization and a large pool of talent.


“Getting a seat at the table – The Chief Learning Officer” was the vibrant session moderated by Yogi Sriram, EVP Larsen & Toubro who began with the understanding of a basic difference between employee training and learning within an organization. Part of this discussion were Gopal Mahapatra, CLO Oracle; J P Mohanlal, Head Learning and Development, SBI Life Insurance and Kalyan Banerjee, Head Learning Mindtree who shared the process and implementation of learning strategies within their respective organizations and success stories of how effectively this has impacted the bottom-line results. Suchitra Rajendra, Director Organization Capability Pepsico had interesting insights on the learning and development opportunities that employees have to enable them to successfully pursue their specific career paths within the company.


Ranajit Mukherjee, GM Advisory Services NIIT shared a brief talk on Learning Simulations: Determining When, Why and At Times, Why Not followed by an interactive discussion about On the Job Learning, coaching and mentoring by S Chandrasekhar, VP HR South Asia, IBM.


The day concluded by an audio visual presentation on Who Moved My Cheese? By Kumaar Bagrodia and P Vijayan, HR Director CHEP India and a vote of thanks by Dr. Sasmita Palo.