About LfP

The Learning for Performance (LfP) project has been initiated as a result of two experiences I had. The first one is when I created the first company in Istanbul and started to recruit people. I was 24 years old and I had to recruit experienced people and explain to them what to do. There was one little problem… I did not know what to do either. Because of lack of means, I had to learn a lot by myself. I did not have money to pay trainers, coaches, or consultants. Thus, I have learned how to learn…from customers, distributors, competitors, other industry leaders, people I recruited, suppliers, friends, family… Meanwhile, I had a business to run and results to deliver. Learning was my only solution! I had to keep learning to perform well. Years later I read an article about intentional learners, and I realized that out of my experience I, indeed, became an intentional learner. Knowing this, I dove into the learning universe through countless research reviews, readings, conferences, training…all about learning.

The second experience is about conventional learning. Years after creating my first company, I moved to France and had the opportunity to build a corporate academy. I discovered the world of learning and development (L&D) and took instructional design courses, participated in numerous conferences, took mentoring from more experienced professionals, and so on. As a salesperson, who is naturally very much result-oriented, I was very much surprised by one thing, the result of the whole learning process. I realized that developers measure the result by the quality of the learning experience, L&D professionals measure the results by verifying the knowledge acquisition, and by the number of people trained, participants measure the result by their contentment of the learning experience. Whenever I questioned what exactly happens to the business, after all, nobody had a clear answer. Because there is nobody (apart from some exceptions) who had the global view from the conception of the learning experience until the business outcome. Some people talked about the ROI (return on investment) but this was not what I was looking for. I was simply looking for the business impact. I saw that the whole learning process was divided into pieces and each group had its understanding and measures of performance. Yet none of them had the real performance, the business outcome.

The objective of the Learning for Performance project is to inspire people to become intentional learners who learn for the performance, not for the sake of learning, per se. And I hope they can inspire others as well.

I have been distilling my own professional experience in sales, my learning experiences, my coaching activity, many research and readings I do and offer you short blogs with concrete examples. My focus fields are sales, leadership, and learning.  While building my methodology I have been inspired a lot by many academics and leaders. Timothy Galwey, Jeffrey Lipsius, Gestalt School, Simon Sinek, Ronald Heifetz, Peter Senge; Daniel Pink, and John Withmore are the ones who influenced my vision more than others.

It is a journey… (I know it sounds like a real cliché) And we all perform in our way. If we choose to learn, it becomes much more enjoyable.

Enjoy!

Emre